Drinking… fits comfortably with what some see as a just-regular-folks, anti-elitist strain in Wisconsin’s character. You know, the kind of people who would take an insult from Illinoisans – “cheesehead” – and turn it into a symbol of pride.
… Part of the anti-elitist attitude, [one observer says,] is a sense that we exemplify a true folk culture, and that “real people do these real things like getting drunk.”
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Last night, to toast her friend Courtney’s next stage in life (naval officer), UD sat at the bar at Sushi Damo in Rockville and hoisted an Asian Pear Martini. (Courtney had a Margarita.)
As an elitist, UD felt comfortable limiting herself to one low horsepower drink for the evening.
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Here is a long article (part of a series!) about why the state of Wisconsin leads the nation in drinking. (What does this have to do with universities? Hold on a minute!) It features a tidy paragraph of Reasons:
Climate. Ethnicity. The historical importance of the brewing industry. The interpersonal dynamics that govern how people learn to live comfortably in a group. The social nature of most drinking. A relative lack of newcomers who might foster change. The premium many here place on being just a regular person. The need for identity.
A shivery clannish German-derived person in search of identity… How can you stop being this and start being a temperate cosmopolitan solitude-seeking Jewish-derived person who puts a premium on being irregular?
Well, you can’t. You can’t make yourself over like that. Nor would you want to. You like being what you are just as much as UD likes being what she is.
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But when one of your state’s universities loses seven students in two years to alcohol, you have a problem. Administrators at the University of Wisconsin Stout are cracking down this way and that in an effort to save lives, keep students out of jail, and generally reduce mayhem and injury. They’re doing all the things universities do when they try to get out of the alcohol mess: Upping penalties for underage students in possession, and for riotous partying; begging some of the hundreds of bars just off campus to shut down or at least stop offering insanely cheap drinks; mandating alcohol education courses; increasing Friday classes…
But when even that high a body count has many Stout students taking to Facebook rebellion…
November 7th, 2010 at 4:43PM
A big problem is that most college drinking doesn’t take place in bars, so there’s very little control, other than self-control, on how much a student consumes. The second problem is that a lot of college bars have stopped being bars, where there is a bartender and a wait staff to maintain some limits on individual consumption, and try to foster an unconstrained party atmosphere in which they make their money on volume.
November 7th, 2010 at 4:59PM
I didn’t know about the second thing, Polish Peter — that some bars have little in the way of supervision… or even staff.
November 7th, 2010 at 5:47PM
I think they walk a fine line, UD. College towns need more taverns, fewer bars.
November 7th, 2010 at 6:23PM
Years ago, the social set at my high school weighed the relative merits of attending La Crosse or Oshkosh or Whitewater for the party scene. Stout State (to use the old name, it and the other three I named are converted normal schools at one time part of the Wisconsin State University System) wants a piece of that action.
At the time, getting into Madison or Milwaukee, the only campuses of the University of Wisconsin, was somewhat harder.
It’s a shame The Five Year Party isn’t better written … Stout and some of the other former Wisconsin State University branches look like exemplars of sub-prime party schools.
November 9th, 2010 at 10:41AM
It’s weird – the only people I know from Wisconsin are members of the computer science faculty at Madison, and they are very serious; not the kind of people who over-drink at conference banquets. 🙂