Ford Alumni Center Giustina Ballroom 1720 E. 13th Ave. UO campus PDF flyer

College professor Elizabeth A. Armstrong spent five years inhabiting a dorm room on the Indiana University campus while studying the party culture that dominates student social life. In a public lecture titled “Sex, Alcohol, and Violence: How Status Competition Creates Risk,” Dr. Armstrong will talk about what she learned at 7 p.m., Thursday April 21, at the Ford Alumni Center’s Giustina Ballroom, 1720 E. 13th Ave., on the University of Oregon campus.

Armstrong, the coauthor of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2013), is a sociologist with research interests in the areas of sexuality, gender, culture, organizations, social movements, and higher education. She joined the Department of Sociology and the Organizational Studies Program at the University of Michigan in 2009. Before that, she held a faculty appointment in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. in Sociology and Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

This event is being sponsored by the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society, UO Departments of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, the Division of Student Life, and Fraternity and Sorority Life.

New York Times interview with Elizabeth Armstrong: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/elizabeth-a-armstrong-on-her-book-paying-for-the-party.html?_r=0

Comments from publisher on Paying for the Party

• In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.
• “With astute observations and insights, Paying for the Party sheds new light on the lived experiences of contemporary students. It is a very important piece of scholarship that will inform the national discourse on the current state of U. S. higher education.” —Richard Arum, author of Academically Adrift
• “By focusing on the lives of young women who spent freshman year living on a ‘party floor,’ Armstrong and Hamilton help us understand critical issues facing American higher education, including the outsized role of sororities and fraternities and how the values of affluent students coincide with the interests of universities to empower the ‘party pathway.’ Richly observed and vividly narrated, this is an important ethnography of American campus life.” —Steven Brint, University of California, Riverside