Depaw's Drinking Culture Analysis

Analysis DePauw’s Drinking Culture through the Students’ Frontstage and Backstage Using Erving Goffman’s Theory of Presentation of Self

As a school of only 2,400 students that has been on the Princeton Review for being in the top 20 party colleges in the U.S. since 2010, it is clear that DePauw students have a very intense relationship with alcohol. While DePauw University released a flyer to parents that claimed “The majority of DePauw students who drink are responsible, safe drinkers who socialize with peers who do not drink to get drunk,” in the same report, they also stated that “During the past several years, DePauw’s binge drinking rate has been at or higher than the national average,” (DePauw). It is clear that binge drinkers and “responsible,

Choosing who you want to be and what you want to represent can be hard when you are on a campus in which you are constantly being pressured to be and act a certain way. This is indicative of Erving Goffman’s theory of presentation of self, which is defined as “the dramaturgical model,” (Goffman, 340). This can be described as one’s efforts to create specific impressions of oneself in the minds of others. Goffman goes on to explain how the “Performances can be either cynical or sincere and honest,” (Goffman, 340). Genuinity is specifically called into question in the presentations of self that clearly play a role in interactions involving the party culture on DePauw University’s campus. In my experience with my peers at DePauw, drinking has turned into the primary way for students to make new friends and build relationships with people; I believe this is a byproduct of students attempting to create this controlled impression of themselves in everyone else’s minds. Goffman elaborates on this idea of control, and defines it to be impression management, or the way in which an individual attempts to influence others’ perceptions of oneself by regulating information in a social interaction. Students participate in this impression management of their presentation of self by controlling the way in which their front and back stage interact in relation to the drinking culture at