The Academy Awash in Alcohol:

A Turning Point for Higher Education

Richard Culliton

Binge drinking has received heightened attention in the media and among families of college bound students over the past several years. Research has revealed that while alcohol use by college students overall has declined slightly over a ten-year period, certain types of behaviors associated with high-risk drinking have increased. A growing number of college presidents and national organizations have identified alcohol abuse as the number one problem facing colleges and universities today. This article will review some of the positions and approaches taken towards responding to this national problem. While there are opposing views about the strategies that show promise, it is evident that traditional responses to alcohol abuse have been largely ineffective and most have lacked comprehensive evaluations. In order to turn the tide on the dangerous drinking that is impairing our learning communities, we must critically examine the role that alcohol plays on our campuses, develop new strategies, and demonstrate their effectiveness.

Riots, accidents, police custody, sexual assault, alcohol poisoning, and death are realities of the binge drinking culture that has overwhelmed campuses in the 1990s. The debate over the role of alcohol on campus and in our society has divided many throughout the history of higher education. What role should higher education play, if any, in facilitating college students’ use of alcohol? The options range from prohibiting alcohol to promoting it, from educating about its effects to teaching responsibility. Anecdotes of drunken revelry on the campuses of Harvard and Yale date back to the 1700s, only to have been followed by hundreds of years that have inextricably linked drinking alcohol and college life (Horowitz, 1987).

It does not take long when examining this issue to come across the strong opinions either in support of or against the regulation of alcohol within our society. Mary Hunt of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, an early champion of the prohibition movement, argued her philosophy before the turn of the twentieth century:

Popular ignorance of the fact that alcohol and other narcotics have the power to create an uncontrollable and destructive appetite for more, leads to the formation of such appetites and their awful consequences. At that point the people are misled and we must let on the light. No boy expects to be a drunkard when he begins to drink....He must be shown that because of the nature of the drink there is a scientific connection between the first glass and the drunkard’s fate. (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1891, p. vi)

While it is widely known that America’s grand experiment of prohibition was short-lived and largely unsuccessful on a national level, some argue that "neo-prohibitionists" are attempting to revive a ban of alcohol on college campuses (Hanson, 1996). Although prohibition may seem an unlikely solution for most campuses, past attempts by colleges to educate, modify behavior around alcohol use, change attitudes, and reduce harm have proven largely ineffective in reducing alcohol use and abuse among college students (Hanson, 1996; Meacci, 1990; United States Department of Health and Human Services, 1992; Williams and Knox, 1987). Almost 80 years after prohibition and more recent experimentation with an eighteen-year-old drinking age, the abuse of alcohol is widely reported as one of the most significant problems facing colleges (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990; Commission on Substance Abuse on College Campuses, 1994). If we are truly committed to addressing the problem of high-risk drinking, then we must see that there is more to this issue than lowering the legal drinking age, and we must offer more in terms of solutions than either prohibition or the unrestrained promotion of alcohol.

Should the academy be a place where students can experiment with alcohol and learn under the watchful eye of friends and administrators? The horrid realities of high-risk drinking are known, all too well, to campus police, student affairs professionals, and custodians on residential campuses. For years, students have died from alcohol poisoning, car accidents, and senseless pranks committed under the guise of drunkenness. In recent years, the general public has begun to acknowledge the ugly and tragic realities that occur when students drink their college years away. While national organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) have raised awareness around drinking and driving, much of the heightened media attention and parental consternation around college binge drinking can be attributed to Dr. Henry Wechsler and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health. Through their landmark studies, they have shifted the focus from drinking as a moral or legal issue to the "secondary effects" that binge drinkers impose upon their campuses and communities. This shift examines individual behavior as well as the environments in which we live that promote excessive drinking (Wechsler, Davenport, Dowdall, Moeykens, & Castillo, 1994; Wechsler, 1998).

Wechsler et al. (1994) defined binge drinking as the consumption of five or more drinks in a sitting for a man and four or more drinks for a woman. This measure was chosen because at that level of consumption there was a correlation with an increase in adverse effects on the individual and community (Wechsler et al.). Others have asserted, however, that the measure for identifying the problem drinkers should consider the number of drinks that an individual consumes over the period of a week and not just one "sitting" (Engs, Diebold, & Hanson, 1994).

It is important to note that research on binge drinking and drinking rates in college populations has focused on the "coming-of-age" adolescents who have typically dominated campus life in America. Today, as the demographics of college populations are shifting, so too are the levels of binge drinking on particular campuses across the country (Wechsler et al., 1994). Despite some of these shifts in demographics that include more non-traditional age students, some four-year residential campuses that cater largely to traditional-age students have not benefited from the moderating impact of older students (Wechsler, 1996). As a result, administrators and faculty on these campuses are struggling to protect the academic integrity of their colleges from the negative effects of alcohol abuse (Commission on Substance Abuse on College Campuses, 1994). While countless studies and articles have documented some aspect of alcohol use by college students, there is little agreement and no consensus as to the best way to prevent or respond to the abuse of alcohol on college campuses (Meacci, 1990).

Despite the debate surrounding appropriate measures of the problem and a lack of consensus surrounding solutions, the political tide is turning on the culture that accepted alcohol abuse as a part of college life. Binge drinking does not need to be the rite of passage that many perceive it to be, but it is not likely to change unless we look more critically at the messages of abuse that get passed down through our institutions and social interactions.

Is the Problem Alcohol or Binge Drinking?

There are few who will agree that the abuse of alcohol is a good thing for our campus communities. However, despite the rational agreement that abusive drinking is unacceptable, too many of us passively support the status quo. Some parents and alumni contend, "what’s the big deal, I drank in college and I am doing fine." College administrators send mixed messages when we state things like, "the drinking age should be eighteen years old, so we would only have to deal with the problem drinkers." Students debate with some regularity, "if I could be sent to war for my country, then why shouldn’t I be able to go into a bar and have a beer?" While none of these positions support high-risk drinking, all of them tacitly support disregarding current laws and policies governing the use of alcohol.

None of these arguments could convince Scott Kreuger’s (a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who died in 1997 from alcohol poisoning) mother and father that alcohol should be a rite of passage in college. While the drinking that occurred on the night that Scott Krueger died appeared to be anything but "social," it is the way that a growing number of college students are socializing. Nationally, more than 40% of college students reported that binge drinking is associated with vandalism, sexual assaults, fights, and academic failures (Wechsler et al., 1994; Wechsler et al., 1998). Despite finding a consistent level of binge drinking in Wechsler’s two most recent studies, what has changed in the past four years is a 20% increase in the number of students who report "drinking to get drunk" (Wechsler et al., 1998). It is clear that alcohol is not being used responsibly by many college students.

Given the newfound responsibilities that most first-year students are shouldering, it seems unwise to add the responsibility of using alcohol to this period of transition. Just because alcohol has been closely associated with college life is not reason enough to support the status quo. Many parents and alumni did drink heavily in college, but not without consequences. Many college administrators and students argue that an eighteen-year-old drinking age would improve the situation on campuses because then only the problem drinkers would present difficulty. Unfortunately, when 40-50% of college students are binge drinking, it becomes obvious that the problem will not go away by simply lowering the age of majority to 18 (Wechsler et al., 1998). It is also important to point out that a shift in the drinking age also imposes the dilemma of ready access of alcohol upon our high schools that are already overburdened by growing problems of substance abuse (Johnston, O’Malley, & Bachman, 1996).

It would be too simple-minded to believe that lowering the age would solve the complex problem of binge drinking. Alcohol is a part of our society and the majority of adults can and do drink alcohol without tragic or even adverse consequences. The tension that we have experienced with college students comes as a result of believing and expecting that students will be mature adults. What then is the problem? Is the problem alcohol or is it binge drinking? When we are talking generally about college students, the answer is becoming increasingly clear that it is both.

In addition to the increasing number of young people who are "drinking to get drunk," (Wechsler et al., 1998) our free market system has created an under-regulated, overly-competitive alcohol industry. This competition, not unlike that in the tobacco industry, is based on capturing and retaining consumers, regardless of whether they are legally old enough to consume the product. As a result, images of alcohol in our society abound, from those in the business of making and selling alcohol to those in Hollywood promoting products through films. From the perspective of many Americans, alcohol is simply another product on the shelf. For a disproportionately high number of college students and youth in America, it is a way to lose control (Wechsler, 1996). To many bright college students, it is an additional obstacle to a successful future.

While Budweiser’s frogs, Coors’ silver bullet, and many companies’ Halloween promotions could all be accused of targeting underage drinkers, the problem stretches beyond direct marketing. Over the summer of 1998, Abercrombie and Fitch, a clothing retailer which targets college students, published a catalogue with a section entitled "Drinking 101". The catalogue, with recipes for potent elixirs and descriptions of drinking games, was published and subsequently retracted after attracting the wrath of watchdog organizations like MADD. The company could not have walked into this issue as blindly as they claimed. An astutely market-driven company made a business decision based on the growing divide between college students wanting to get drunk and "adults" telling them not to.

A critical deconstruction of music videos, advertising promotions, and event sponsorship reveals the many ways that young people are bombarded with messages to use and sometimes abuse alcohol. There are some administrators and researchers who believe the problem today is not any worse than it was twenty years ago. In fact, some argue that our time would be well spent to correct prevailing misperceptions about the level of abuse on campuses which is creating false social norms (Haines, 1996).

Other researchers contend that binge drinking is not simply a problem of the abuse of alcohol by college students, given the growing problem in our high schools in the 1990s (Johnston, O’Malley, & Bachman, 1996). How alcohol is marketed, sold, and made freely accessible to young people are important considerations to solving this problem.

A Turning Point for Higher Education

The mistake that we cannot make is to place this burden solely on college students to solve. Individuals make decisions and should be held accountable for those decisions. The context in which individuals make decisions is influenced by many social factors that we have a collective responsibility to change. The college experience that we know today has been marketed to students in every form possible from the Animal House movie to the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. While marketing practices of the alcohol industry may seem difficult to change, the first step is to review our own campus policies and community ordinances to insure that they are clearly written and consistently enforced. If we disagree with a law, we should do what we would challenge a student to do: work through the system to change it. It is wrong for us to undermine laws and policies by disregarding them or passively conveying to students our ambivalence. We must examine our own campus advertising policies and the roles our universities are playing in promoting alcohol and its excessive use. We should challenge reporters and news organizations that are out to misrepresent incidents of abuse through sensationalism or the normalization of the problem. We should challenge our students to look critically at the thousands of messages that bombard them daily. If they are 21 and they choose to drink, challenge them to drink moderately. If they are not 21, challenge them to follow the law and the policy of their college. If there are university functions that underage students will be attending, challenge the organizers not to serve alcohol. Alcohol does not have to be hidden from sight but it also does not have to be at the center of campus life.

When and where to serve alcohol are important questions that need to be asked by students, faculty, staff, and communities alike. The answers are sure to vary from person to person and from campus to campus. It is, however, only by asking these questions and wrestling with the answers that higher education will turn from the problem of binge drinking that we have come to know all too well. The problem will not be solved by lowering the drinking age or prohibiting alcohol; we must each become attuned to the ways that we perpetuate this culture of abuse that erodes the health and safety of our campus communities. Clear and consistent enforcement of well-written policies and laws and a willingness to change some of the campus practices that have become traditions will go a long way in moving us forward.

References

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1990). Campus life: In search of community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Commission on Substance Abuse at Colleges and Universities (1994). Rethinking rites of passage: Substance abuse on America’s campuses. New York, NY: Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

Engs, R. C., Diebold, B. A., & Hanson, D. J. (1996). The drinking patterns and problems of a national sample of college students, 1994. Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education, 41(3), 13-33.?

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Wechsler, H., Dowdall, G., Maenner, G., Gledhill-Hoyt, J., Lee, H. (1998). Changes in binge drinking and related problems among American college students between 1993 and 1997. Journal of American College Health, 47, 57-68.

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Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1891). A history of the first decade of the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction in schools and colleges of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Boston, MA: G.E. Crosby & Company Publishers.

Richard Culliton received his bachelor's degree in English and Philosophy from Boston College in 1991 and a master's degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration from UVM in 1995. He served as UVM's Judicial Affairs Officer from 1995-1997 and is currently the Assistant to the Vice President for Student Affairs coordinating a five-year project to reduce binge drinking under a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.