… stand for all the alcohol deaths among university students we will see this academic year.
Let her sad, addled end – drunk on a New York City window ledge – stand for all the early deaths we’ll read about on our campuses.
John was about to start her freshman year at the Parsons School of Design; her father, the US Ambassador to Thailand, had just brought her to New York to settle her in.
Because of Eric John’s high profile, his daughter’s story has received enormous attention. Maybe it will reverberate a little among returning students…
UD has, for seven years, read and blogged about the awful alcohol story on American university campuses, and she still has no idea what one might do about it. Universities try lots of things – mandatory online alcohol education courses; arrests; rapid notification of parents; restriction of alcohol, or types of alcohol, on campus; restriction of the number of bars that can operate within a certain radius of campus, etc.
We certainly know how to maximize alcohol death and injury on a campus: Have a wild, inescapable sports scene, have tons of fraternities, line the streets surrounding campus with bars. But no one seems to know how to reduce the havoc.
And, you know, so many people drink — so many of the administrators and professors and parents drink, and drink a lot… In Mankato, Minnesota, where there’s a big state university with a big drinking problem, the mayor was just arrested for drunk driving, and it wasn’t his first arrest.
August 30th, 2010 at 2:42PM
I think we do know how to reduce the havoc, but the best way to do so is a step no one really wants to take, for both valid and invalid reasons.
Obviously, mandatory expulsion, whether on first or second offense, of any underage student in possession of alcohol or found to be legally intoxicated, would reduce the problem. Kicking drunks off the campus reduces the number of drunks on campus. There are a ton of problems with this approach, of course. It would drive a good deal of campus drinking underground. It would promote riskier behavior by making students with impaired judgment more likely to find off-campus places to “hide out” for the night rather than be found out. It’s draconian and the zero-tolerance attitude required to make it effective is highly unpleasant. I think a compromise policy might be possible, but it would not be easy to create.
There are also some made-up problems that can show us some of the cultural factors that encourage collegiate bingeing. Admissions offices would wring their hands at the drop in applications that would result from students seeing the campus as “no fun.” Student life latitudinarians would roll their eyes at the naive assumption that rules will stop college students from drinking (they overlook that even if expulsion doesn’t stop offenders from drinking, it does stop them from being students at the college). Our culture teaches kids that college is supposed to be a lot of fun, and that vomit-level drinking is an essential part of the fun, so we have to tolerate this kind of thing even while we tut-tut at it.
I respect those who’d disagree with an expulsion policy based on their problems with its Big-Brotherish character and the fact that it might create more real problems than it solves — those are some of the reasons I think any kind of policy like that would have to be very carefully implemented and may not be desirable or possible.
Having worked on a campus and heard the *other* kind of arguments first-hand, I think those people aren’t doing much more than crossing their fingers that as long as the headline-level problems are on someone else’s campus, they can keep riding the wave.
August 30th, 2010 at 4:23PM
Surely the heavy drinking and extreme party culture is partly a reflection of the fact that many students are there because they’ve been told they *have* to be there, rather than wanting to be there and having a somewhat clear idea of what they want to accomplish there. Also, if it’s possible to go out and get totally boozed up 4 nights a week and still graduate, then academic standards are clearly too low at that institution.
August 30th, 2010 at 4:25PM
Actually, I’d say the best way to do so, at least based on the Harvard College Alcohol Studies, is to reduce the availability of alcohol, primarily by reducing alcohol outlets and increasing the tax on alcohol. The longer term success story is right there in youth smoking rates. Raise the taxes, make it damn hard for underage youth to get access to it, and, over time, use social marketing techniques to remove its appeal. The links between alcohol and future health problems is not as easy to draw as smoking, but it’s there. There’s lots of other things colleges could do–outreach to parents and local community members, linking off-campus behavior to on-campus consequences, activity programming to counter the “drinking’s the only way to have fun mentality”, tying alcohol violations to a host of individual and organization incentives and penalties (“Your frat gets busted for a nuisance party? No rush for you next semester!”) and some of the better ones have seen some reductions.
Still, graph smoking and alcohol taxes against youth smoking and alcohol consumption, and the picture tells the story. Both are still far undertaxed in terms of their negative consequences, anyway.
August 30th, 2010 at 8:31PM
1. The legal age for drinking should be reduced to 18.
2. There should be absolutely no alcohol tolerated on university campuses.
Those of legal age should drink off campus. When I was an undergrad at NU, Evanston was dry. Mrs. Tooze (that rhymes with booze) and the WCTU were in the driver’s seat. We used to have to take the el to Howard Street, the Chicago city limits. Ah, Nirvana… I don’t think my education suffered much.
The first point is to induce a more sane attitude toward alcohol. Many years ago when I started teaching the drinking age in Minnesota was eighteen and I think that the atmosphere about alcohol was better.
I am aware of some of the bad consequences of lowering the age.
The second point is to counterbalance the absolutely hypocritical position of most administrators at colleges and universities. Some of this has been alluded to above.
We have a stadium on campus right now and there has been a big brouhaha about not selling alcohol to general seating to protect the children. Naturally, our administration WOULD like to sell alcohol to those in (high priced) suites. For years the Gophers played football downtown in the Metrodome, and there selling alcohol to all of legal age, students or not, was permitted.
Alcohol is also served on campus at many events and I don’t ever remember seeing an ID checked…
August 31st, 2010 at 1:04AM
A tragic event, for sure. But why is the number of such tragedies in Europe much smaller? In practically all European states, drinking age is 18 or lower (in some jurisdictions, it is 16 for wine and beer – and econprof fondly remembers his own youth, when it was 14..).
I do not think Neopuritanism is the solution, especially if paired with prohibition-type restrictions on alcohol. It did not work the first time, so why should it work now? The age limit of 21 does not work – so it should be abolished.
In any case, the universities should relax and generate a safe drinking atmosphere, together with some education (i.e. do not drink liquor out of a bottle, because you can ingest too much..). Policy should help avoiding drunk driving: There should be enough emergency overnight accomodation for students (and guests). Especially academics should not panic, but learn from history. Drinking university persons – be it students, professors, even deans is nothing new: In the Carmina Burana from the 13. or 14. century (correct me if I got the dates wrong – I am a humble economist and not a historian) we have in the “In taberna quando sumus”
….
….
Tam pro papa quam pro rege
bibunt omnes sine lege.
Bibit hera, bibit herus,
bibit miles, bibit clerus,
bibit ille, bibit illa,
bibit servus cum ancilla,
bibit velox, bibit piger,
bibit albus, bibit niger,
bibit constans, bibit vagus,
bibit rudis, bibit magus,
Bibit pauper et aegrotus,
bibit exul et ignotus,
bibit puer, bibit canus,
bibit praesul et decanus,
bibit soror, bibit frater,
bibit anus, bibit mater,
bibit ista, bibit ille,
bibunt centum, bibunt mille.
……
….
(for people not aquainted with Latin: “bibit”= he drinks, “bibunt”= they drink..)
So i think we should not go into hysterical mood: Most of the students drank during the last 800 or so years – so why break with a tradition?
August 31st, 2010 at 4:42AM
Re: drinking ages and Europe. The stats on Europe say different. The lowered drinking ages do not result in any lower levels of high risk drinking. And, they have two significant negative consequences. First, they lead to much higher rates of cirrhosis, since the best predictor of that is the age at which one starts drinking. Second, drinking always bleeds below the age limit, so it’s no surprise that levels of alcohol related traffic fatalities among youths have dropped dramatically since the 1980s. It’s a good thing to have the driving age and the drinking age separated by more than 2 years. Lowering the drinking age may lessen the problems at universities, but it will dramatically increase them in high schools.
Given what we know about brain development now, the drinking age at 21 is a good idea.