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Saturday, March 19, 2005
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UD SALUTES… …the editors at The Roundup, the student newspaper at New Mexico State University, who complain in a recent editorial that …the university has made plans to include alcohol education in the curriculum of English 111 courses in light of the alcohol-related student deaths that occurred this year. While we are pleased the university is addressing the issue, it seems administrators have not properly researched the impact of these changes. First, adding alcohol education to the curriculum of English courses will create duplications of course material. University 150 classes already discuss such topics. Why should incoming freshmen have to attend multiple classes to learn the same material? Additionally, how is a section about alcohol education any more appropriate in an English class than it is in a math class? Requiring English professors to change their lesson plans and cover something entirely off-subject implies that their discipline lacks importance and therefore may suffer interruption. ... If the school really wants all freshmen to receive alcohol education, it should research effective measures to take and possibly make University 150 courses mandatory for all incoming freshmen. This is also a perfect opportunity for the university to work with the Associated Students of New Mexico State University to devise new programs that would increase student awareness and safety related to alcohol. Other institutions, such as Rice University, have "drunk-sitter" programs in which student volunteers go through training to learn the proper way to care for a drunk person. Those volunteers then make themselves available for students to call for assistance. ASNMSU could develop such a program and possibly pay those students willing to dedicate their time to helping drunk people. UD salutes the New Mexico students because they understand that professors are not social workers. If UD wanted to go into the field of alcohol education and become conversant with phrases like drunk-sitter programs, she would have done so. Instead she read and studied and now writes about and teaches novels like Under the Volcano … whose main character, to be sure, is drinking himself to death in Oaxaca…but the novel is not a morality tale about the evils of drink. On the contrary, it can be read as suggesting that drink -- along with other forms of chemical indulgence -- may stimulate a valuable sort of thinking about existence. So it is not merely, as the students rightly say, that forcing English professors to moralize about the evils of drink in classes devoted to rhetoric or poetry or the novel conveys a belief that “their discipline lacks importance” (you can hear the conversation among the deans: “Where do we shoe-horn this in?” “Oh, I dunno … English department?”); it also conveys a belief that they don’t have a discipline. To UD, the creeping moral didacticism of the university classroom is every bit as insidious as the political indoctrination people go back and forth about lately. As English professors, for instance, are more and more instructed to incorporate social work into their subject matter, UD foresees the emergence a new genre of novel, expressly written to the English 111’s of the future. UD doesn’t mean to trivialize the problem. She’s written a lot on this blog about American university students who have died with astounding amounts and varieties of alcohol in their bodies. She has singled out notoriously alcohol-soaked campuses and towns. And she is aware, as Inside Higher Ed points out, that the situation is getting worse: ' Death by Drinking Alcohol consumption accounted for 1,715 deaths among traditional-age college students in 2001, according to a study released Thursday by the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. That represents an increase of about 6 percent (after being adjusted for the rise in the number of college-age people) from the 1,575 alcohol-related deaths three years earlier, in 1998, according to the study, which was published in the latest edition of the Annual Review of Public Health. The study also found a sharp rise in the proportion of students aged 18 to 24 who acknowledged driving drunk, to 31.4 percent in 2001 from 26.5 percent in 1998. That represents an increase in the number of students who drove drunk over that three-year period to 2.8 million, from 2.3 million. The researchers drew their data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the Harvard College Alcohol Survey, as well as national coroner studies and census and college enrollment data for 18 to 24 year olds. The deaths exclude homicides and suicides. “This paper underscores what we had learned from another recent study — that excessive alcohol use by college-aged individuals in the U.S. is a significant source of harm,” said Ting-Kai Li, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But the English or philosophy or chemistry classroom is about the disinterested consideration of the complexity of the world; professors should not be in the business of sermonizing (UD recognizes and regrets the fact that many professors are already sermonizers). The study of literature in particular should be about allowing challenging and often morally ambiguous writing to have its say. |
