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		Cultural Solutions for Cultural Problems: Students Affairs and Popular Culture Part II: Counter Cultural Strategies By Christopher Rodgers, Director of Residential Life for Judicial Affairs at Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus Cultural problems, as William Bennett has remarked, require cultural solutions. Cultural problems exterior to campus have direct effects inside it. As the first half of this article tried to show, the popular culture is impelled by the search for profit. As a result, it has developed a tendency to approach its selection of material on purely economic grounds. In turn the cultural supermarket has been taken over by the junk food. Work in Student Affairs, the effort to create responsible cultures on campus, is threatened by this fact. Understandably, institutions of Higher Education can be counted on to be very careful in their response to cultural issues, wrapped as they are, often legitimately, in freedom of speech and expression concerns. Raw censorship, at least the generally understood methods of censorship, is contradictory to the espoused values of American higher education. These methods are also politically infeasible, either on campus or in the larger culture. A bell jar cannot simply be lowered over schools. As, however, conditions in the larger culture become worse, the effect on students may be counted upon to increase. It is also likely that colleges and universities will still be called upon to take their vital place in the moral and social education of students. (Hoekema, 1994) All institutions claim to be seriously concerned with addressing the issues of sexual behavior, violence, and lack of responsibility described previously. Simple legalistic responses are not an effective answer, as rules are not a substitute for a rich culture (Lowery, 1998). This concern must translate into other forms of active resistance that are consonant with the values of education. To be effective, concern must translate into direct efforts that elicit, from within the student population itself, renewed involvement and a strong sense of the responsibility each member has for the community (Hernandez, Hogan, Hathaway, and Lovell, 1999). The path of resistance for Higher Education and Student Affairs, then, consists in being aware of and posing an unapologetic counterpoint to the unhealthy messages of the popular culture. Some simple and preliminary ideas are proposed in this article. Competing Leadership Culture: Establish high conduct standards for student leadership positions and promote such positions as elite, counter-cultural opportunities. The case for peer education through traditional role models such as the Orientation Advisor, Student Organization Officer, or Resident Assistant/Advisor is well-established. (Posner and Rosenberger, 1997) These bodies of students are tremendously useful to the task of the institution in communicating its counter-cultural messages of responsibility, tolerance, and restraint. These leadership positions should have high expectations for conduct matched with real and vital responsibilities that benefit the community, fellow students, and institution. These jobs should not merely be titular or counseling roles. Of those to whom much is given, much will be expected. Resident Assistants, for example, should be employed expressly to become involved themselves in situations where their experience as upperclassmen and their moral authority as consistent ethical role models can have the greatest lasting effect. Such students choose to conduct themselves in ways that are different from their peers and are, as a result, far more influential in these real-life situations than administrators, faculty, and other "adults" on the campus. Relegating them to a narrow counseling or "helper" role is counter-productive as well as insulting to students who often clamor for more responsibility on campus. Relieving these jobs of their more stressful and challenging tasks (such as confronting peers) is an unfortunate trend at some institutions. It places the onus of community once more at the "top" of the institution, where it is bound to be the least persuasive and the most grating. Properly recruited, educated, and led, students in such positions are the carriers of the rarest and strongest counter-cultural messages. The very subtlety of the message they carry is the key to its effectiveness. These students thrive on responsibilities rather than rights and should be afforded the privilege of service to their institutions, not worried over as if they were still children. They construct, through the power of their quiet workaday examples, the institution's first and strongest bulwark against the unhealthy impulses students cull from sources such as the popular culture. They form the core of any competing leadership culture. Competing Participation Culture: More educational structure for college students. It is becoming more and more clear that the offer of the opportunity for participation in governance, student government, policy-making, and activities is not enough. As students without the inclination to participate in these activities arrive at our gates in ever-increasing numbers, it is clear that the out-of-classroom experience so important to our work is something out of which many students simply choose to opt. Currently, level of student engagement is almost wholly the purview of the students themselves. This is the equivalent, in the in-classroom arena, of self-created curriculum. In such an environment, a few of our students will choose for themselves a rich and challenging curriculum. Far too many will instead skip class. It seems clear that the all-voluntary structures upon which we have relied to create the culture on campus are only moderately effective at best. One strategy, that which seems to be pursued by most institutions, is to change the fabric of the hoped-for campus culture and reduce expectations to a dangerous ebb. These measures are familiar, as they mimic the attractions of an unhealthy but enticing popular culture. Cable television as a new right in residence halls, the turning of a blind eye to quiet student alcohol consumption (sometimes in public), and tolerance of crass-but-popular mass entertainment products like Eminem or Marilyn Manson are symptoms of some schools' surrender in the face of what they have declared a lost war for a more healthy campus culture. The proliferation of such expensive and spectacular diversions (how much does a concert cost?) has a strong dual effect. First, these events drain resources from direct efforts to build a richer framework in which students may play out the lessons they learn inside the classroom. Second, these entertainment products often carry with them the very messages and values that corrode the educational community framework we work so hard to assemble. Clearly, it will be up to individual institutions to decide if these contradictions are tolerable to their communities. Censorship doesn't enter into it-- the university has a responsibility to use care in deciding who is and who is not allowed into its home. Most of our students need more work, not less. Most of our students need more class hours, not fewer. Strong, culture-based expectations that students participate in the academic and extracurricular life of the campus, and not merely in a panoply of trivial entertainments, put the weight of institutional sanction behind the responsibilities of life at a residential campus. If "what we do here" is obvious and palpable for newly-arrived students on a campus, participation in the culture will be irresistible. Competing Recruiting Culture: Educate students about the higher expectations of the campus culture beginning with marketing, admissions, and web-based literature. Societal notions of the independence of college-age youth combine with stereotypical images of college life to give graduating seniors startlingly inaccurate impressions of campus. Too many of our students arrive without an iota of realistic information about what college life is about, the skills it will require of them, and the structures that institutions have in place to dampen unhealthy conduct. (Lowery, 1998, Lipset, 1968) Institutions serious about their educational missions should risk losing students (and revenue) by being straightforward about the responsibilities of life on campus, not merely its attractive entitlements. In this way, they attract students who are prepared for such a life and not resentful of intrusion and unfulfilled expectations. The conversion process, as students learn what college is as opposed to what it appeared to be from the outside, is a visible phenomenon among each year's freshman class. We see this each time a heavy partier moves out of our halls in December with a barely registered GPA or when a defiant student offer up the now-familiar "but this is what college is supposed to be" defense in an alcohol-related judicial proceeding. Clearly, the gulf between the institution's understanding of life on campus and the students needs to be narrowed. One important way to do this is to educate students before they arrive on campus. This could affect the bottom line, especially among those institutions whose sports or social reputations precede their academic enticements in the minds of high school seniors. That doesn't make this measure any less necessary. Competing Campus Culture: Social Norms Strategies Colleges and universities have, in the past, sometimes surrendered the field and abandoned the task of strongly asserting social norms. Many students seem to understand, at least intellectually, that many of the popular culture's messages are unhealthy. Without competing norms, the pathological behaviors and environments often closely identified with campus life (things like drinking and drugging) are reinforced by the enormous scale, ubiquity, and social norming power of the popular culture. The messages and values in which the media bathe students are at odds, often directly, with the messages and values the college or university seeks to instill in students. There is a strong David versus Goliath feeling associated with this problem. Increasingly, however, schools are pursuing what has been called social norms strategies, boldly asserting a differing set of values. A number of such programs are at work across the country at institutions such as the University of Arizona, and to great apparent effect. (Johannesen, 1999, Zernike, 2000) Through no fault of our own, Student Affairs professionals are often too busy managing emergencies on the typical campus to stop and develop a coherent strategy to counteract the unhealthy social norms that are often their root causes. Putting out the fires can become the job. But, as Jean Bethke Elshtain describes, the core job of the educator is to introduce children to the adult world. We must be emphatic and unapologetic in our introduction lest others do the introducing for us. The fires will always be there, but they will get worse if nothing is done to address their fuel. We need to emphasize that the well-publicized pathologies of the stereotypical college campus are not the adult world, at least not the adult world in which we would hope our children will live. It is left to us to assemble a realistic and healthy picture for students. This is what social norms strategies appear to do so well. Rather than simply and reflexively react to unhealthy messages and values, troubling behavior, and antisocial conduct, social norms strategies work in the realm of ideas to create a set of counter-assumptions and competing narratives about the college experience. From something as direct as Arizona's assertion that 68% of students do not binge drink (instead of merely reacting to repeating the fact that 42% perhaps do) to an institution's emphasis on the intentional community present in special interest housing, early indicators have shown that such messages have an effect. (Johannesen, 1999, Zernike, 2000) Social norming takes a leaf from the book of popular culture, ironically counteracting its less desirable effects. Its goal is the creation of a competing campus culture for students. In an age that has seen the power of positive traditional cultural structures diminish, Student Affairs professionals find themselves in the business of creating new ones for their institutions. The Future It is hoped that this two part exploration provokes some thought as to the changing role of the Student Affairs professional in relation to culture off as well as on the campus. There are seemingly endless intersections between our work and culture, and this article explores only a few and only briefly. This article also only touches upon a selection of the measures educators can take to address the problem of culture on campus. Significantly, it also does not explore those aspects of the popular culture that are positive for the campus, and the uses we may make of these important resources. It also does not explore the problem of what might be called a "creeping" consumerist attitude toward higher education among students and parents, impelled possibly by the skyrocketing costs of tuition and fees. With this in mind, it is the author's hope that this subject will continue to be revisited, researched, debated, and expanded in the future by all of us concerned with students and their education. That said, it remains clear that Student Affairs professionals must be engaged in and aware of the larger culture's influence and changes in order to make the messages we are charged by our institutions to send more effective. The curriculum that is comprised by life and experience on a campus depends on this awareness. Further, we must be acutely observant of the possible negative effects trends and changes in popular culture-- some obvious and some not-- have on students and on campus life. We have direct concern with the messages media are currently sending about alcohol use, college life, violence, sexuality, responsibility, and a host of other things not mentioned in this article. This is simply the case because these messages often contradict our own in ways we would be naïve to assume have no effect on the decisions and behaviors of our students. This societal contradiction, a failure of the market to serve the larger interests of the public, is a larger topic than this paper can fully address, but one that should also concern educators as citizens. Finally, we must resist the impulse to acquiesce in the face of such a strong trend. To give up is to cede the campus and its culture to interests that have things other than the student, their education, and their development as priorities. We do not have the luxury of an "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude toward these issues. As has been the theme of the second half of this article, our challenge is to resist and to translate engagement and awareness of the popular culture into strategies that will counteract its unhealthy values and messages. Such strategies are necessary if we are to preserve the campus as a place for the education of good citizens. References Lipset, S.M. (1968). The Activists: A Profile. In Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol (Eds.), Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities. New York, NY: Basic Books Bell, D. (1996) . The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bennett, W. (1999). The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. New York, NY: Doubleday. Core Institute at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1998). 1998 Statistics on Alcohol and Other Drug Use on American Campuses [On-Line]. Cureton, J. and Levine, A. (1998). When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's College Student. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Etzioni, A. (1993). The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Fisher, B., Cullen F. , Turner, M. (2000). The Sexual Victimization of College Women [On-Line]. Gose, B. (1998, May) At Connecticut's Party Weekend, Days of Music Replaced by Nights of Vandalism. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A47. Glendon, M. A. (1991). Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: NY: Free Press. Graber, D. (1988). Mass Media and American Politics. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press. Herbert, B. (2001, January). A Musical Betrayal. The New York Times, p. A23. Hernandez, K., Hogan, S., Hathaway, C., and Lovell, C. (1999, Spring) Analysis of the Literature on the Impact of Student Involvement on Student Development and Learning: More Questions than Answers? NASPA Journal, 36, pp. 184-197. Hoekema, D. A. (1994). Campus Rules and Moral Community: In Place of In Loco Parentis. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Jhally, S. (1989). The Political Economy of Culture. In Ian Angus and Sut Jhally (Eds.), Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. New York, NY: Routledge. Johannesen, K. (1999). Influencing the Drinking Culture at the University of Arizona. Catalyst, 5, 9-10. Ladd, E.C. (1994). The American Ideology: An Exploration of the Origins, Meaning, and Role of American Political Ideas. Storrs, CT: The Roper Center. Lowery, J. W. (1998, Summer). Institutional Policy and Individual Responsibility; Communities of Justice and Principle. New Directions for Student Services, 82, 15-27. Oaks, D.H. (1998). Rights and Responsibilities. In Amitai Etzioni (Ed.), The Essential Communitarian Reader (pp. 95-105). New York, NY: Rowan & Littlefield. Posner, B., Rosenberger, J. (1997, Fall). Effective Orientation Advisors are Also Leaders. NASPA Journal, 35,1, pp. 46-56. Sperber, M. (2000). Beer and Circus: How Big-time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Student Rioters Demand 'Right to Party. (1998, May). The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A46. Zernike, K. (2000, October). New Tactic on College Drinking: Play it Down. The New York Times, p. 1. Zimmerman, R. (1999). Alcohol and Student Disruptions on Campus. Catalyst, 5, 6-7. About the Author Christopher Rodgers is the Director of Residential Life for Judicial Affairs at Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in New York City, where he began his career as a Resident Director in 1992. As Associate Director of Residential Life for Staff and Student Development for the last six years, Chris has, among other responsibilities, supervised Resident Directors, Resident Assistants, and overseen programming in the residence halls at Rose Hill. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., holds a Master's Degree in Political Science from Fordham, and is a doctoral candidate in the Administration, Policy, and Urban Education Division of Fordham's Graduate Education Department. He and his wife, Regina Dougherty Rodgers, live just outside the university's gates in the Belmont section of the Bronx.