It seems like every week, someone in the English department will post an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on his or her office door lamenting the fact that “26% of college graduates can’t correctly make change” or “43% of American collegians can’t pick out China on a World Map.” Now, obviously, these are problems that need to be addressed – because, in my opinion, a third-grader who can’t do these things should be labeled “a little slow.” But, there’s another problem with our college graduates that I never see addressed in the Chronicle – and that is that 94% of America’s brightest young pupils (which, given the whole “change-counting” thing might be a bit of a generous label for “college graduates”) leave their alma mater with absolutely no idea how to date. And this is just a disaster.

Now, as best I can tell after spending the last ten years at three distinctly different American universities, college students who don’t date fall into two camps.  On one side, we’ve got a group of extremely conservative evangelical Christians, who have all read a book by Joshua Harris entitled I Kissed Dating Goodbye.  Practitioners of Harris’s doctrine engage in a Victorian-era courtship, and after sealing their pending nuptials with a handshake, get married while they are still undergraduates and immediately begin making babies.  Because this group seems to be happy, and because the early returns have proven these marriages to be fairly successful, this post has very little to do with the “courtship” alternative to dating.  Just keep on, keeping on – I suppose.

The far greater majority of you, however, don’t date because in college it is just too damn easy to hook up with a girl for the night. If things go well during the initial encounter, you then simply continue to hook up with the same girl for a period of two weeks to six months, until you are either forced to acknowledge the arrangement as a “relationship” or forced to begin hooking up with someone new.  If you choose the latter, you will get high-fives from your other single buddies after explaining to them that “a player’s gotta play.”  If you choose the former, you will then take the girl with whom you  have entered “relationship”-status to a formal dance twice a year, and this experience will constitute your semi-annual date.

Now, before I explain in full the reasons why dealing with the opposite sex in this manner is both stupid and conducive to a state of arrested development, a word about “formals.”  Every service organization, fraternity, sorority, academic department, and athletic team seems to hold at least one of these formals each year.  And while going to a formal can be fun, it absolutely can not be considered the type of dating that prepares you for the real world.  After you graduate, you will never again be able to invite a girl who you haven’t even had coffee with to accompany you and one hundred of your fraternity brothers to Niagara Falls for a weekend of formal wear, Jello shots, Kanye West, and a night at the Radisson.  It just doesn’t translate past the age of 24.

And this now leads me to a discussion of the two biggest reasons why you should learn to date in college:

The first – YOUR HEALTH. Hooking up leads to more sexual partners, less use of protection, and therefore greater risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases or producing a child.  Let’s think about both of these options in terms of the mainstream media.  You know how those people in the Valtrex commercials seem to be quite happy to have herpes and to act like it’s their privilege to take pills three times a day?  They’re trained actors and actresses who don’t really have the disease.  If they did, they’d look a lot less comfortable sitting on that park bench.  And, as for the unexpected pregnancy issue, let’s consider the movie Knocked Up – just in terms of the random sexual encounter as a means of selecting the person with whom you are going to be raising a child for the next 18 years.  Guys, listen to me.  That girl you end up sleeping with after thirteen tequila shots doesn’t usually end up looking anything like Katherine Heigl – she probably looks more like Carrot Top. On the flip side – girls, the random guy you sleep with after eight apple-tinis usually does look a lot like Seth Rogen.  This doesn’t happen if you go on dates first, then have sex.

The second – YOUR FUTURE GAME. In the United States, the average age at which males get married for the first time is 27.5; women get married around the age of 26.  Do the math.  This means that most of you will not be marrying one of the people you hooked up with in college.  Throw in those average-lowering “courtship” specialists and the guys from your high school who went straight to Diesel-Mechanic School, and it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re going to have to navigate the grown-up mating world for at least half a dozen years.  What you’ll quickly find is that the people who are still hooking up at bars on weekends are not the type of people who you want to be in a long-term relationship with.  All of the sudden, you’re like Willie Mays Hays in Major League 2: your college game was big enough to hit home runs in the University-world that is Spring Training for Life, but once you enter the regular season, all you’ve got is the kind of warning-track power that leads to long, pathetic put-outs.  The guys who can hit major-league home runs with doctors and lawyers and architects and graphic designers are the guys who’ve had substantial practice at asking girls out on dates, and who know how to operate in date-situations.  So, start learning now.

Lastly, it doesn’t take a lot of money to date in college.  You don’t need to be the guy who takes girls to two hundred dollar dinners or the opera – in fact, they’d probably find you creepy if you did.  But, for the same amount of money that it costs to buy thirteen shots of tequila and eight apple-tinis, you can afford to meet a girl once for coffee, follow that first date up with Thai food and a movie, and still have enough money left over to send her flowers and a card the morning after you first make out –  all without contracting one single case of the clap.

Dr. Wizard

If American civilization is ever snuffed out by some sort of worldwide pandemic, asteroid crash, or global-warming induced Ice Age, my hope is that the universe’s future archaeologists will find a carefully preserved DVD player, an untouched 52-inch plasma TV, and a hermetically sealed Net-Flix vault.  Nothing will be better able to tell these future great thinkers about The United States’ culture than a year spent watching our movies.  They will see our conceptions of beauty, and they will come to know us through the very medium that we as a society hold to be most valuable.

Undoubtedly, these future citizens of the universe will draw some interesting conclusions.  They will, for example, come to understand that the four years (or seven – in the case of Van Wilder) that America’s youth spent in the 21st century as university undergraduates were part of a hallowed and cherished coming-of-age ritual celebrated in a disproportionate number of films.  They will also, quite probably, assume that this “Samuel L. Jackson” fellow who appeared in so many of our stories was in fact a family of identical quintuplets – only this could possibly explain “his” ubiquity to the future historian.  (My prediction: “Enough is enough!  I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” will be the most quoted phrase of the 34th century.)  But I digress.  So, back to our Hollywood glorification of Ivy-covered walls, and on to today’s lesson.

In the last 30 years, there have been, as I’ve noted, a plethora of movies made about college life, and as an avid philosopher of the college experience, you can bet that I’ve seen them all.  Now let me be clear, The Paper Chase, Higher Learning, With Honors, PCU, and maybe even How High (starring Reginald Noble and Clifford Smith) are better movies than the one I’m going to recommend that you watch, but it is my belief that no film better captures the multiple directions in which college freshmen find themselves pulled than Dead Man on Campus.

“Really,” you must certainly find yourself asking at this point if you’ve seen the movie.  “Wasn’t that an MTV Films project meant to revive the career of Zach Morris, built upon the premise that if your roommate commits suicide, the university is forced to give you straight A’s?”  Yes, that’s all true.  But if you forget about the last half of the movie, where Josh and Connor hysterically run through a series of roommates looking for Mr. Z (Daleman’s most depressed student), and you re-watch the first 40 minutes carefully, you’ll find that Dead Man on Campus is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of college life.  There are mixed-gender dormitories, there are fake IDs, there are students taking Adderall, there are consequences for not studying, and there are a group of professors who take themselves way too seriously.  There is the availability of alcohol, there are students getting it on while their roommate is present, there is the availability of weed, there are the expectations placed on students by their parents, and there is the need to maintain a certain GPA to hold onto a scholarship.

There is also, as Josh quickly finds out, no one to tell him to study or to force him to go to class.  In fact, more often than not, Connor ends up offering Josh tempting reasons to skip these responsibilities altogether.  What Dead Man on Campus portrays is the very real possibility that you’ll have at least one friend who doesn’t take the academic challenges of college as seriously as they should, and they will want you to join them.  (Secretly, they are hoping that your choice to do so will validate their own decision, and assuage the guilt they have for wasting their parents’ money.)  But that’s the reason that I’m taking my time to type out these pieces of advice for you, the college students of America.  I’m here to tell you that getting stoned all day and playing Guitar Hero can only take you so far in life.  It’s like King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, or The Byrds sang in 1965 – “To everything (Turn, Turn, Turn), there is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn), and a time for every purpose, under Heaven.”  Bottom line: you must find a way to balance your time, or you’ll end up like Connor, working for Flushels, the Toilet Cleaning Clown.

NOTE: As difficult as I find this to believe, according to imdb.com, Snakes on a Plane is a better movie than Dead Man on Campus.  That’s just fucking crazy.

Joe Webb teaches American literature at Saint Louis University, where he spends equal time discussing Entourage and Leaves of Grass.  His book, Dr. Wizard’s Advice for College Students, is scheduled for national release in the fall of 2009, and will include lessons on everything from Greek Life to Greek literature.  For more of Dr. Wizard’s Advice, check out www.dr-wizard.com.

For almost a year, I have been in a long distance relationship.  When people hear this, they ask me how it works. Um…it just does?  I’ve learned that you can’t “make” a relationship work; if you’re meant to be together, the distance between doesn’t matter.  For me, being in a long distance relationship is especially convenient because of my busy schedule.  If I don’t have time to breathe, I definitely don’t have time to go on dates with a guy from UMD. It should be noted that the best part about being about in a long distance relationship is making fun of the fact that I am serious about dating someone miles away, who could potentially be cheating on me on a daily basis.  (I personally try not to think about this possibility).

There are definitely perks about dating someone far away. If your boyfriend isn’t around, he can’t get on your nerves every five seconds. Getting presents or love letters in the mail is always a nice surprise and unannounced visits are even better, and make you appreciate your boyfriend even more. Not to mention, you’ll always be a hot item.  Guys want what they can’t have, and because you have a boyfriend that isn’t around, it drives them up the wall.

So although being in a long distance relationship may seem like a hassle, it’s the exact opposite.  It forces both you and your significant other to become more mature about your relationship. So forget random hook ups at the bar, settle down like a real adult.