Sarah Koenig walks outside to her porch with a friend to find a mysterious figure nonchalantly sitting there. This figure turns out to be another drunken student who runs off to join his friends. Following behind is another student dragging a street sign.
For Koenig this is a typical late night, for a majority of her 1.7 million radio listeners, it is a stark reality of the drinking culture that Penn State harbors.
Koenig is a producer for the wildly popular radio show “This American Life,” which aired its piece on Penn State, entitled “#1 Party School,” on December 18, 2009.
Koenig and her children moved to Sate College last year when her husband acquired a teaching job in the English department.
Her husband also gave her the inspiration for the story.
“We had a big meeting in July of last year to come up with ideas. I didn’t have any ideas at first and my husband was like, ‘Hey, Penn State just got voted the No. 1 party school. You should do that for a story,' and I said, 'Hey, that’s a really good idea,'” said Koenig.
Her colleagues liked the idea as well, and soon Koenig was scavenging the campus to set up interviews and research her story. The crew came to tape the weekend of November 14th, the last home football weekend of the season.
Ira Glass, the popular host of the show, was staying at Koenig’s house for the weekend when they decided to record her interview after Glass had gotten back from taping at parties. It is then that they encountered what became the introduction to the show which described the various students wreaking havoc in the streets.
“What was sad to me,” said Koenig, “was that we ended up leaving my house and walking up Prospect Avenue, and a lot of these people were leaving those parties, and I can’t tell you how many girls I saw leaving just crying, crying, crying or boys getting in fights. How badly the evening had ended for some people. Some girl was on the phone saying, ‘He hit me! He hit me!’”
As the story unfolds, various residents talk of such routine things like finding tampons in their yards and then searching for the inevitable condom which follows. Fraternity brothers are interviewed as well as a drunken student at a tailgate who offer up different reasons for Penn State’s skewed drinking culture.
“Kids here aren’t embarrassed by how much they drink. I don’t think they see drinking here as a problem, so they weren’t going to lie or pretend about it when we interviewed them,” said Koenig.
Koenig also interviewed Penn State President Graham Spanier about the problems the university faces when it tries to counter the rampant drinking.
“I was surprised he didn’t use it (the program) as a platform to kind of get in front of it a little more strongly. He seemed pretty honest, but it seemed a little more defeatist than some people I had spoken to in the administration,” said Koenig.
Koenig also was surprised to note that other members of the administration were honest when they admitted that they had tried many options and that no route had worked for them
Senior Rich Coleman, a columnist for The Daily Collegian, wrote an opinion piece soon after the show aired, encouraging students to listen to it and face the mirror that had been put up to them.
“The truth of the matter is that the drinking problem in this town stems from an attitude that lots of kids immediately adopt when they come to this school,” said Coleman, “that attitude just sees this school as a way to party, drink, watch football and then drink later at the frat house. From there, the attitude just worsens and then you get things like State Patty's Day where the whole town just turns into chaos for a day.”
Coleman acknowledged that since freshman Joe Dado’s untimely death at the start of the fall semester, there has been a better effort to curb drinking, but that they are hardly productive.
Christina Harding (senior-supply chain and information systems), the senior vice president of fraternity Delta Sigma Pi, agreed that the culture surrounding drinking at Penn State is something that needs changed.
“The Greek community as whole definitely suffered a black eye for the radio show, and we’ve been working harder to fix that,” said Harding.
Harding cited increased restrictions on their parties and on those who are allowed in. She also said that, in her opinion, the new habit of "pre-gaming" -taking shots in rapid succession before going out- has made it a challenge to keep drinking to a minimum.
“The police have certainly cracked down on drinking at tailgates and in public," said Harding. "But it’s the general attitude that needs changed at Penn State rather than the rules.”
To listen to This American’s Life segment on Penn State, "#1 Party School," visit http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives
