No, indeed, you’re completely right. But as I said until I saw that scene in the film I could never imagine that happening so the notion that it COULD happen (and in the US no less) was a tad traumatizing.
Tom Wolfe is a great writer and I Am Charlotte Simmons is a great book. Tom Wolfe, and that book in particular, were widely criticized for what was seen as an incorrect portrayal of college life. Wolfe got some things right, and he got some things wrong.
Wolfe is a satirist so the fiction that he writes needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s likely that he was trying to parody certain elements of the American college experience with I Am Charlotte Simmons, rather than provide a completely realistic depiction of it.
With that said, there are arguably some big flaws with his picture of “Dupont” university (the made-up university in the book.)
It is described as an Ivy-League school, on the same level as Harvard and Yale. Yet the student body is depicted like the stereotypical students of a big state school - driven by sports, crude, obnoxious, more concerned with partying and getting laid than with education, lazy, stupid, etc. It doesn’t make sense.
At “Dupont” University, every student is either a spoiled, crude frat boy, a rich prep-school bitch, or a moronic party animal. And the few students who are genuinely intelligent and interested in learning are HUGE DORKS who are totally lame, never get laid, etc. There are no students who are just regular students. Wolfe really falls back on stock stereotypes instead of making the college seem like a real college.
What Wolfe did well, is accurately portray PART of the college experience in America, which is the crass, obnoxious, party-animal side. He set the book from the perspective of a naive young girl from a tiny town in rural North Carolina, who is repulsed by everything she sees at the supposedly Ivy-League university she attends. But the title, I took to be meaningful: “I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS.” By Tom Wolfe. In other words, Wolfe is Charlotte Simmons. Simmons represents Wolfe’s old-fashioned view of the new-fangled college where everyone’s more concerned with talking on their various newfangled cell-phone contraptions and partying than getting any real learning done. But it’s easy to see why a bewildered freshman would feel the same way.
What is NOT believable, is that someone like Charlotte Simmons would even attend “Dupont” University in the first place, if it really was such a vile and sinful place. Wouldn’t she in real life rather go to a Christian college, or a small private liberal arts college like Williams?
My overall impression of Charlotte Simmons was that it was a SATIRE of college, particularly the worst aspects of it like rich spoiled kids who are just partying their way through it without caring to learn anything, and the social pressures that a young female student might experience. A satire. A very funny, interesting and entertaining one.
I went to college in 1980 and then back to finish in 1985. I saw nothing like the OP mentions. There is always some cliques and the Greeks could play at being snobby at times, but I was always welcome at a frat or sorority party on a Friday night.
A real Ivy League school would never have admitted, much less awarded a full scholarship to, Charlotte Simmons. The only way a redneck like her could have gotten in was after a brief spell of national publicity owing to her receiving an advance from a prestigious publisher for a Sinclair Lewis-style expose of everyone she grew up with in her gray little hillbilly town, including her own inbred, Confederate-flag-T-shirt-wearing, tobacco-spewing family, with only herself and her heroic English teacher coming out clean.
You didn’t have those people in school?
I read the Wiki description and a few sample pages on Amazon. What it seems to portray is the overdramatized impression an elite college would have on someone from a rural town who grew up with nothing and was not from that world. A much greater importance is placed on everything than one would normally ascribe to the life of a 18-22 year old. In this sort of story, the regular students are just in the background.
Well actually, no, or hardly at all. In the late seventies when I was a student, National Lampoon had just come out with its classic “Are You A Nerd” self quiz, embodying all the things that were supposed to be part of nerddom, like high-water pants, glasses with ugly plastic frames, conservative haircut, underweight, etc. We all laughed at that and might jokingly call or refer to one another as nerds, but it wasn’t in the aggressive, somewhat nasty manner in which “dork” is usually applied. I don’t remember ever hearing the word dork used. UCSD students, particularly in Revelle, did have a rep for being grinds that is to some extent justified. And there were a few who fit fairly well into the nerd category, but nobody went out of their way to make life miserable for them.
I think this is key, now that you mention it.
The university in the book is a thinly-disguised version of Duke University. Not quite an Ivy, but Ivy-like in many ways. I went to Tulane, which, while prestigious, is not an Ivy. My take on Tulane is that is was distorted even more from the Ivies, but in the same direction that Duke is, if you consider a continuum. A little more decadent partying, a little more Southern-style sports culture, etc.
Based on that perspective, I find it totally believable that “Charlotte Simmons” would go to “DuPont,” assuming she has outstanding grades and SAT scores that won her a scholarship. Schools like that admit and fund a fair number of regular folks like her to meet either local-student or geographic-diversity goals. While perfect scores may not be that unusual in yet another Northeastern prep-school grad, students from a different background with top scores are often heavily recruited. She might not have had a lot of choice of schools, if she was economically dependent on the scholarship. Also, students like that don’t have money to visit all the campuses they are considering. DuPont, in her home state, would have made a lot of sense based on its reputation. She wouldn’t have time to consider fit. I knew several students like her at Tulane, so I’m sure there are some at Duke/DuPont.
More to the OP’s point, I remember when my cousin, who had been in the Army for a couple of years and grew up in the midwest, came to visit me for a week or so at Tulane in the early '90s. After hanging out with me and my friends for a week, his comment was “I can’t believe how mean you guys are to each other.” Our conversational style was very sarcastic and insulting. “unending snarking and put-downs among peers” absolutely describes our style. We didn’t really mean to be unkind, it was sort of our way of bonding as a group, but in retrospect it probably wasn’t all that healthy. And after a couple of years in the Army, where I don’t figure they sang kum-ba-yah and hugged all day, *he *thought *we *college students were cold-hearted 
We were a really jaded crowd. And we were a crowd of party hounds very committed to making it out with our degreee in 4 years. I can only think of a very few who got weeded out, and all after the first year. msmith537’s description of Animal House meets Bret Easton Ellis totally hits the mark for me.
The physical violence is the one thing mentioned in the OP that I don’t recall. If it was happening with any frequency, I sure didn’t see it. Kind of surprising considering how drunk people got on such a regular basis.
NMSU, 1985-1990.
Nope.
There were individual jerks, of course, but mostly the cliques just ignored each other. If you helped buy the beer, or if you had a car and offered to drive the drunks home, you would be welcomed at any party. There were a few spoiled rich kids, but they usually didn’t last long.
Ranking on others was a high art form at my school, but it was all pretty much internal and it really was not mean-spirited; visitors were not treated the same way. I could see where an outsider might miss some of that nuance, although I would think that anyone who missed that after a week, rather than a weekend, might be a bit clueless.
If the novel in question is narrated in the first person, I might see some excuse for a portrayal as described in the OP, but a third person narrative that made the same points/claims would clearly be exaggerating for effect.
I think it’s a culture specific to certain relatively homogenius private colleges and universities in the top 50 or so US News rankings where sports feature predominantly. It’s not really like that at other colleges. I remember traveling with some fraternity brothers to Rutgers for some sort of fraternity conference. One of the Rutgers guys made a comment after noticing some of our guys looked a little uncomfortable. Our president replied “oh…don’t worry about them. They’re just not used to this much ‘diversity’.”
That seems like the perfect typo to describe a bunch of guys who can’t handle the diversity at a fraternity conference.
Thank you! I wondered…
Absolutely. Especially for the non-US dopers who may be reading or participating here, it should be stressed that Ivy League unis, or any other selective ones, do not routinely reject people because they are either poor, or from the wrong part of the country. That’s not to say it’s impossible that a kid from an old, rich Northeastern family would enjoy some sort of advantage, particularly if the family has maintained an alumni and donor relation with a particular school for generations. But the schools are definitely not closed to those of ordinary means, or from other parts of the country.
It sounds like he just wasn’t used to that style of humor. I suspect the style of you and your friends wasn’t as bad as all that. One can usually tell the difference between friendly ribbing, joshing, and nicknaming on one hand, and truly pejorative insults and put-downs on the other. As you say, in-jokes and mild sarcasm are indeed part of the bonding process for many groups. On retrospect I wonder if even my image of the Saint Ray Fraternity brothers is overly prejudiced by their fluency in Fuck Patois, the author’s term for the extensive use of “fuck” or “fucking” every time they open their mouths. Not that I’m offended, or that we didn’t use the word in my time, but we either used it to express real anger or frustration, or the biological act. We didn’t want to dilute its expressive power by over-using it.
It was this aspect more than anything else that made me open the thread. msmith537 made the point that the lives of ordinary students don’t really figure into the story, and that is something more or less true of most fiction. One does tend to forget that when something is well written. For instance, I was briefly surprised when Saint Ray Brother Hoyt becomes involved with Charlotte. Of course, I had become so swept up in the story that I was overlooking that twenty pages or so had previously been devoted to Hoyt’s upbringing and background. Hello-oh! The author wouldn’t have done that if they weren’t going to meet at some point…I guess that’s part of the pleasure of good reading.
Well played.
for me, it was the opposite effect. I love Wolfe’s writing, but this time, he blew it. I expect his plots to be reasonable, and C.Simmons isn’t. The book is not about the exotic and unfamiliar–like in his last 2 books,(which took me to places I’ve never been–into the lives of the ultra rich, and the very poor, and a guy in jail.) This time, Wolfe is writing about something that I , and most of his readers know well, and have “been there, done that.”
So I was disappointed that Wolfe got the facts wrong. A super-cool frat boy would never date a girl who wasn’t a member of the proper super-cool sorority. A star jock who can’t do his own homework would never take a 3rd year philosophy course. And neither of them would ever spend any time with a hillbilly girl . The plot just simply doesnt work.
Of course, Wolfe’s writing style is fun to read. Many of his observations are accurate : the disdainful and rich roommate who never uses Charlottes first name, the description of a fraternity beer party, the ignorant athelete (who when assigned to write a paper about the catalyst to a historical event, says “I’ve heard of catalysts, but I don’t know what you use those things for” ).
But the book was a disappointment to me.
I attended college in the early to mid-90s. My school was mostly a commuter school, and many of the people who attend there have daytime jobs and no time for rushing fraternities or other such nonsense. That said, there were, and probably still are, clubs and fraternities, they were just a lot less important than they thought they were. Somehow, I fell in with a crowd that prided themselves on their sarcasm and ability to put each other down, as well as their partying ways (it was just those guys being mean to each other, not an established part of campus life). I just sort of hung around along the edges, but never became a serious partier. Also, after one disastrous weekend trip in '95, I realized I was never going to graduate unless I actually took my grades seriously. So I spent the next 2 years becoming one of the commuter students who came to campus, went to class, and got the hell out. I would have loved to live in the dorms when I was a freshman, because I had never lived on my own, but didn’t 'cause my parents were opposed to it. It was just as well, because later on there was about one or two rapes a year in the dorms, based on what I read in the school paper. Plus my friends who lived in the dorms always complained about stuff going missing. The common nickname for the dorms among their residents was “the projects.”
If Charlotte Simmons had gone to my alma mater she would have run screaming from the place after her first fall quarter there.
I was an undergrad at a huge state university (22,000 students). I loved it, although state universities have a high dropout rate, and it was obvious that lots of kids were there to drink and party. One thing I always wondered-I think I would have enjoyed a small college more-anybody comment on this? Are smaller schools a better experience?
I attended the University of Pittsburgh full time from 1988-1992, and graduated some years later after a Navy enlistment.
I think some things were exaggerated for storytelling purposes, but not by much. We had kids in the dorm who were horrible misfits - instead of being ignored they often drew more and more abuse. One poor guy pretty much had a nervous breakdown from this and dropped out.
The nature of the sports programs described in the book seemed spot on too, at least from what I saw.
The issue of binge drinking has only gotten worse since I attended, and I saw more than my fair share.
Allowing for the fact that it was fiction, the book rings true in a lot of ways.
Mine was a little of both.
I went to school in 1986-1990, and I didn’t see anything like the goings-on in Revenge of the Nerds and other films of that ilk.
I’m sure there was a mix at my school but even on the outskirts of it, I didn’t think of it as vile. There was certainly the elite group that would decide who to let into selective clubs (like the eating clubs) but I wasn’t part of that so I don’t know how vicious they might have gotten.
I’ve heard that some of the frat initiation stuff and “activities” could get pretty gross. Guys in a circle jerking off onto a cookie and he who comes last has to eat it, that kind of thing.
I went to Berkeley in the early-mid 90’s. I guess that isn’t a good comparison to Yale or Charlotte Simmons. My experience was certainly different than many people my age I talked with later. Berkeley had a lot of very smart kids who were there to work (some students were used to just coasting, and they crashed and burned), and while there was certainly a partying contingent, it wasn’t incredibly large. Fraternities and sororities existed but were looked down upon by the majority, and there were drugs for the non-frat partying types (duh). There were not a lot of wealthy students–some, but not tons. Most of us were pretty granola–not a lot of makeup or worries about appearance (of course, this was also the grunge era, so there were a lot of flannel shirts anyway). And I think for most of us, college was wonderfully liberating from high school.
There was not a lot of meanness at all. Sure, some people were snarky, but usually in a friendly way. What I remember is pretty much being able to start talking with anyone who was around. Hey, join in, have some fun. There was this one guy in my American Lit class who wanted to be an actor and we used to sing songs from Camelot because we sat next to each other…it was like that. I loved college, and in some ways I still think of Berkeley as home.
I was quite surprised years later to hear from other people that their colleges had been very appearance-oriented, that if you were a size 9 you were ‘fat,’ or that there were lots of slackers who were there to drink themselves stupid every week.