Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life

College isn't just a training ground for live. It is life.

Students inhabit a society and culture all its own, with customs, beliefs, jargon, legends, and jokes.

In Piled Higher and Deeper, folklorist Simon J. Bronner takes a long, engaging look at the experience of American campus life and how it shapes the cultural and social values of all who pass through it.

The menacing profs, fumbling jocks, and curve-setting dweebs are all here, along with bed races, bar crawls, and a rich assortment of tales, rituals, and practical jokes. Bronner shows us orientation, exams, cheating, Greek life, drinking games, homecoming, spring celebrations, graduation, and more as he examines the social, cultural, and psychological development taking place in America's institutions of higher learning.

Bronner draws his material from a wide variety of campuses--large and small, black and white, men's and women's, Ivy League and ag school--for a work broadly representative of America's colleges and universities.

For today's students, it's a funny and entertaining look at themselves and their peers; for alumni, it's a nostalgic trip back.