Early this semester, Jonathan C. Gibralter traveled to Washington, D.C., to accept an award for cracking down on student drinking at Frostburg State University. But within days, Mr. Gibralter, Frostburg’s president, was already wondering whether he should give it back.
The night after Mr. Gibralter returned from Washington, a Frostburg freshman landed in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. The 18-year-old had been drinking Everclear grain alcohol mixed with juice at an off-campus party and nearly died.
“I actually had the feeling I didn’t deserve the award,” says Mr. Gibralter, who was chosen over 17 other college presidents for the national honor bestowed by higher-education associations and anti-drinking organizations.
What happened at Frostburg illustrates how difficult it is to wipe out dangerous drinking on college campuses even when the president makes it a top priority. Since Mr. Gibralter came to this rural campus in the Appalachians two years ago, he has tried to erase its party-school image. He has cracked down on boisterous off-campus parties, reached out to city police — who have stepped up their patrols — and written letters to parents and students about the problem. His goal is to reduce underage and binge drinking.
“I’m not a vigilante against alcohol,” he says. “I just don’t want a student to die.”
Students here are well aware of Mr. Gibralter’s campaign. But they say that while they may be quieter now about their partying — holding smaller gatherings with friends as opposed to big, open-door bashes — they are drinking just as much as they ever have. Alcohol, they say, is simply part of college life. And they doubt that President Gibralter or anyone else can do much to change that.
“It used to be you’d pay $3 at the door and in five minutes, you were down drinking in the basement,” says Andrew, a senior, explaining the house-party scene before Mr. Gibralter became president. “Now, at parties you only let in people you know. If kids are looking to have fun and drink, they’re gonna do it whatever way is possible.”
The ‘Burg
Frostburg is one of 11 four-year colleges in the University System of Maryland. Known to students as “the ‘Burg,” it is a campus that many have chosen as a last resort, when their grades and standardized-test scores haven’t been good enough to qualify them for the state’s flagship, the University of Maryland at College Park.
Located less than a mile off Interstate 68, which runs through rural western Maryland and on into West Virginia, Frostburg sits at an elevation of 2,070 feet and can get 50 inches of snow a year. Many of the students here are outdoor enthusiasts, and it isn’t unusual to see an undergraduate practicing his bow-hunting on a life-size replica of a deer.
Because of its remote location, though, students say there is not much to do at night besides party. The university, with its 5,215 students, is the biggest thing happening in the town. Pittsburgh, the nearest large city, is 100 miles away. There is a tiny movie theater here, a few stores on Main Street, and a half-dozen bars within walking distance of the campus.
The major social scene takes place on a few streets just off the campus, where most of the university’s upperclassmen live in closely spaced rental homes.
It was outside a party at one of those houses on Maple Street where a local man was nearly killed in September 2006, a month after Mr. Gibralter began his presidency here. The 45-year-old man was walking home from work when he was punched in the face by a student who walked out of the party. The man fell backwards and smacked his head on the curb. He went to the hospital in critical condition, and for a while Mr. Gibralter and others on the campus thought he might die.
The next weekend, local police raided another off-campus party that was overflowing with students, issuing 86 citations for underage drinking.
Mr. Gibralter says he was stunned by the two incidents. He hadn’t known much about the party scene at Frostburg before he came. But he was haunted by the memory of a fatal alcohol-fueled incident in 1989.
Back then, he was an assistant professor of social science at the State University of New York A&T College at Morrisville, and his wife ran an alcohol-prevention program for students there. She told him that the college’s president needed to do something to stem student drinking or someone would die. Mr. Gibralter relayed her concerns to the president. But a few weeks later, one of Mr. Gibralter’s own students fatally slashed another student with a knife at an off-campus party where both of them had been drinking.
“I knew I would never see him again,” Mr. Gibralter says of his student, “and his life would never be the same.”
Zero Tolerance
Now that he is president of Frostburg, Mr. Gibralter is determined not to let something like that happen on his watch. He admits that right after the incidents in September 2006, his first impulse was to make Frostburg alcohol-free. “I have the authority and the ability and the will to do that,” he says.
But he didn’t want to punish the entire student population because of the actions of a smaller number of students. And besides, he says, “I don’t believe that completely outlawing alcohol would change the situation for students who binge drink.”
In fact, some college presidents think the wisest move may be to lower the drinking age. More than 100 of them have joined a campaign called the Amethyst Initiative, saying colleges’ efforts to combat underage drinking just aren’t working and have actually encouraged “a culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge drinking.’”
But Mr. Gibralter, who didn’t endorse the Amethyst Initiative, says he isn’t ready to give up trying to combat underage drinking. After the incidents here in 2006, the president responded forcefully. He issued a “zero tolerance” policy for underage and binge drinking both on and off the campus.
And he held a universitywide forum to explain the policy, which states that all drinking infractions, even those that students commit off the campus, will be prosecuted through the campus’s judicial system, and that students’ parents will be informed. The university has stepped up communication with local police so that, unlike in the past, it now learns of all off-campus infractions.
Students weren’t happy with the new rules, and one of them stood up during the forum to tell Mr. Gibralter so. “He said, ‘I came to Frostburg State because I knew it was OK to drink here, and if you are going to crack down on that, I’m going to leave and I’m going to tell my friends not to come here,’” the president remembers. Mr. Gibralter says it took all his reserve not to respond: “There’s the door.”
The president also regularly talks to first-year students and their parents during freshmen orientation. “I stand in front of them and say, This is what’s going to happen: 1,700 students nationwide are going to die from alcohol abuse this year and are never going to come home.”
That kind of involvement by a president is unusual, and it is part of what won Mr. Gibralter the leadership award. But Brandon Busteed, founder of Outside the Classroom, a company that combats high-risk drinking, and which helped sponsor the award, isn’t surprised that Frostburg still has trouble with alcohol. “Even on campuses that are doing some of the best work,” he says, “the issue is still such a big problem that all of us are a heartbeat away from potential disaster.”
Progress Has Been Made
Frostburg has seen some progress since Mr. Gibralter took over as president. Off-campus alcohol citations have decreased by nearly 40 percent — from 245 in the 2006-7 academic year to 150 in 2007-8. Administrators have successfully encouraged the local Liquor Control Board to pressure some bar owners to stop offering all-you-can-drink specials.
And by working with law-enforcement and local civic groups, which now check with the university before agreeing to rent their buildings to Frostburg students for large parties, the university has been able to stop some beerfests before they begin.
The Chronicle did talk with some students who say they don’t spend their free time drinking. Melinda Croft is a senior and president of the Burg Peer Education Network, which promotes alternatives to drinking. She turned 21 last month, and, like every year, she spent her birthday at a Denny’s restaurant, which serves no alcohol. She and her friends don’t need alcohol to have fun, she says: “We listen to music, watch movies, and just hang out.”
But Mr. Gibralter knows many students here aren’t like Ms. Croft. He is reminded of that every morning on his drive to the campus, where he sees beer cans overflowing in the trash bags outside homes on Bowery Street.
Earlier this semester, a Chronicle reporter spent a Thursday evening talking with students at their houses along Bowery Street and at the Acropolis Restaurant & Lounge, which locals call the Diamond Lounge, on Main Street. Although most agreed to give only their first names, they were open and friendly and eager to explain the effect they thought Mr. Gibralter’s campaign has had on their social lives.
Brent, who is in his fifth year as an undergraduate at Frostburg, says he hasn’t changed his drinking habits at all. And he offers a quick chronology of his day to prove it. He had a beer with his cereal at 9 a.m., he says, then watched Pure Country music videos on TV, then went to his first class of the day — advanced finance. At 12:30 he chugged a Keystone Light beer, then another, then went to a lab at 1 p.m. After that, he says, he downed six more beers before going to his advanced tax class at 3:30. In the early evening, he played Frisbeer, a drinking game. By the time Brent meets a Chronicle reporter around 7 p.m., he figures he has had around 16 beers and a whiskey drink.
While Brent is relating his day, Mark, a 22-year-old wearing a black North Face jacket, is waiting to talk about an incident last spring that nearly got him kicked out of the university. Frostburg took students on a sightseeing trip to New York City, and on the bus ride there, Mark and a buddy each drank a fifth of vodka. In New York, he says, “we got off the bus and started buying beer and chugging.” The young men proceeded to do the same on the way home until the bus driver, who had warned them to stop, pulled the vehicle over somewhere in Pennsylvania and called the police. Mark and his friend got off the bus and wandered into a neighborhood. (Mr. Gibralter remembers the incident well, including the telephone call he got at 3 a.m., saying the young men were missing.) Mark is now on academic probation.
‘Never Any Blowouts’
While it is clear that drinking antics have continued even since Mr. Gibralter’s crackdown, some students here say some things have changed. It used to be, they say, that students would get fliers under their residence-hall doors advertising keg parties.
“You used to know where you were going to go party,” says Greg, who is wearing an Alaskan Brewing Company T-shirt and sitting on his porch when a Chronicle reporter comes by. “Everyone would be there, and you were pushing your way through to the beer. Now it’s word-of-mouth, and there are never any blowouts.”
Cops circle the neighborhood here in the evenings — a police car goes by about every 10 to 15 minutes while the reporter talks with students on Bowery. But the students say as long as they aren’t on the sidewalk or in the street with an open can of beer, the police won’t bother them.
“It’s not the keg sitting on the sidewalk anymore,” says Mark, the student on academic probation. “It’s inside now, with the door closed.”
Students here acknowledge they drink a lot, but several contend it doesn’t jeopardize their academic work. “I have a 3.4, but I still have a really good time,” says Andrew, the 21-year-old senior who is sitting on his porch with friends. “I have a paper due tomorrow for advanced English comp. I’ll write it tonight, in an hour or two.” Andrew and his friends offer the reporter a glass of orange soda and vodka while they talk, as country music plays in the background.
Up the hill on Main Street outside the Diamond Lounge, three sophomore girls are standing around in short black dresses. They had gotten inside the bar earlier using fake ID’s.
Caroline, a 19-year-old blonde with a tongue stud, says she came to Frostburg knowing about its reputation. “In high school I partied,” she says. “That’s what I was used to.”
Her friend Kaila, a 19-year-old psychology major, says she came to Frostburg from her home, in Baltimore, “because it was the farthest away I could get from home and still live in Maryland.”
But then Brittany, a 19-year-old business major, pipes up. She doesn’t want the reporter to think that she and her friends aren’t serious students. “We make sure drinking doesn’t affect our schoolwork,” she says. “And we vote.” Kaila and Caroline agree. “I’m a great American girl,” adds Caroline.
On Thursday nights, the Diamond Lounge sells nine-ounce cups of beer for 10 cents each. Inside the bar, the basement is packed with students who have written their names in black marker on clear plastic cups. Chris, a 21-year-old business-marketing major, takes a look around and tells a reporter that about a quarter of the students he sees are underage.
Since Mr. Gibralter came, says Chris, students at Frostburg have become smarter about drinking. “Partying hasn’t stopped,” he says, “it’s just changed.” After all, the students who come to Frostburg “got just good-enough grades in high school to get by,” he says. “Those are the people who party, and those people are all here now.”
“Nobody will ever stop this.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 55, Issue 15, Page A1