An unusual program helps students stay sober and get a degree
At age 7, Neil Hurta took his first drink, a shot of Wild Turkey poured by his father while they were deer hunting. He began smoking marijuana the same year, he says, and was snorting cocaine by eighth grade.
Mr. Hurta came here to Texas Tech University to get away from family and friends in Houston, who permitted and even encouraged the substance abuse. But the “drinkin’ and druggin’” resumed with a fury during the spring of his freshman year, he says.
He entered a recovery program associated with the university in April 1999, but had a relapse after eight months -- a three-day booze- and cocaine-fueled bender that he cannot remember. Another student dragged him to the recovery program’s office, where he vowed to stay clean. He learned that day that his grandfather, the eldest of a three-generation family of alcoholics, had shot himself through the temple. An open bottle of Wild Turkey was found on a table near the lifeless body. “The irony is, that was my drink of choice as well,” Mr. Hurta says.
Today, the irony in his life is for the better: He is being paid to go to college precisely because of his troubled past. Texas Tech may be the only institution in the country that awards special scholarships to recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
The university’s Center for the Study of Addiction gives scholarships to 36 students each semester. Even those with atrocious high-school marks are often admitted to the program. The grants range from $500 to $2,000 per semester, depending on the recipient’s college grades; the higher awards are enough to cover in-state tuition plus books.
Students applying for the money must demonstrate that they’ve been sober for at least a year. They must also agree to attend recovery meetings on the campus at least twice a week.
Mr. Hurta, who says he hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol since the day his grandfather killed himself, earned a 3.49 grade-point average last semester, good for a $1,000 scholarship this spring (a 3.5 would have netted him an extra $500). He aspires to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work, and to become an addiction counselor.
“Without the aid, I don’t think I would have stayed here,” he says. “My parents weren’t willing to help me out -- they thought I’d blow it on booze.”
Many students in the program seem slightly taken aback by their change in fortunes. “I’m getting paid to go to school and stay sober,” says a smiling Chris Upton, a sophomore who three years ago was spending more than $200 a day on crack cocaine, and flunking nearly all of his classes at a nearby community college. “Have you ever heard of anything like that?”
The center was founded 13 years ago by Carl Andersen, a 6-foot-4 former Methodist minister who favors cowboy boots, suspenders, and Winnie the Pooh ties. “Dr. A,” as he is affectionately known by the students, remains the director of the program, and has won the highest teaching awards that the university offers. All of the scholarship recipients are required to take “Seminar in Recovery,” in which he encourages students to focus on spiritual growth as they rebound from substance abuse. (He notes that the focus is on personal spiritual growth, not Christianity.)
The program probably would not exist were it not for Mr. Andersen’s own alcohol problems. He didn’t drink during his days as a preacher, but picked up the habit after joining Texas Tech’s family-studies department in 1965. “I was an instant alcoholic,” he says. “From the time I took my first drink, there was no going back. I like to have lost my family, this career, everything.”
Mr. Andersen, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, tried to quit drinking several times. Something finally clicked at the Hazelden Foundation, in Center City, Minn. He says he hasn’t touched a drop since December 1982. Now he is a regular at the university’s Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, held during lunch hour three times a week. In his office hangs an old Texas license plate: “AAIOU.”
The center began as an academic program to train addiction counselors. Even today, many of the students who complete the six-course certificate program in chemical-dependency counseling are not alcoholics or drug addicts.
But in the fall of 1986, during the first semester of the inaugural course, a student coping with his own alcohol and cocaine problems approached Mr. Andersen, who persuaded him to seek treatment at Hazelden. At the clinic, a counselor urged him not to return to his old friends. Some 95 per cent of alcoholics and drug addicts who return to the same environment following treatment suffer a relapse, according to Mr. Andersen.
“That’s when the idea hit that we needed to be a community of recovering addicts,” he says. Two years later, in 1988, he had raised enough private money to begin the scholarship program.
The idea of giving scholarships to addicts didn’t sit well with Robert W. Lawless, the university’s president at the time, according to Mr. Andersen and other Texas Tech administrators. “He went on record as saying, ‘We don’t want those kinds of people at Texas Tech,’” Mr. Andersen recalls. “He was getting a lot of complaints from parents, along the lines of, ‘My kid has never touched the stuff -- why can’t he get a scholarship?’” The complaints have dropped off in recent years, as the public develops a greater understanding of alcoholism as an illness, Mr. Andersen says.
Mr. Lawless, who left in 1996 to become president of the University of Tulsa, did not return phone calls.
Texas Tech’s current brass has a more favorable view of the scholarships. John T. Montford, the chancellor, regularly approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds for the program when he was head of the state Senate’s finance committee. “I went to one of Carl’s sessions when I was still in the Senate, and I was significantly moved,” says Mr. Montford, who came to Texas Tech in 1996. “I saw a lot of students who needed help and were getting it.”
Richard A. Yoast, director of the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse at the American Medical Association, in Chicago, had not heard of the Texas Tech program, but says he’s not surprised to learn that it initially faced opposition.
“Some people will say, ‘Well, they made their bed, why should we reward them?’” he says. “But the reality is that people with all kinds of medical conditions need extra help. This program is saying, ‘We recognize that you have this medical problem and you’ve dealt with it, and we’re here to help you go further.’ I think that’s great.”
Until recently, the program relied heavily on state and federal funds. But when a fraud scandal engulfed the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse four years ago -- it had nothing to do with Texas Tech -- the commission substantially reduced the budgets of adult programs, including a cut of more than 80 percent in the $250,000 that it had annually awarded the center.
Mr. Andersen responded by honing his fund-raising pitch. All of the scholarships -- the center will award $64,500 during this academic year -- are covered by a $1-million endowment made up of donations from individuals. Parents of students who have received scholarships in the past are among the biggest contributors. “We have survived the last couple of years in large part because of private support,” Mr. Andersen says.
The program also has worked out a nice arrangement with the admissions office, he says. “If I meet with a student and I say that she should be in, then the university admits her regardless of how she’s done academically.”
Dale Grusing, Texas Tech’s director of undergraduate admissions, says that students with poor academic marks in high school or at another college can enroll in the center’s nondegree certificate program, but that admission to a four-year degree program is by no means guaranteed. Students must do well in the certificate courses to have a chance at those, he says.
Mr. Andersen, however, insists that virtually all of the students admitted to the nondegree program do well academically, and that the vast majority choose to pursue a four-year degree.
Mr. Upton, a sophomore, says he was amazed to hear Mr. Andersen tell him that he could gain admission after posting a 0.38 grade-point average at South Plains College, a two-year institution near Lubbock, Tex. “I said, ‘Are you sure about that? My grades are pretty bad.’” Mr. Upton, who had been jailed several times while using crack cocaine, was admitted to the certificate program in 1998. He soon switched to a degree program in biochemistry, and this semester his 3.95 G.P.A. has netted him a scholarship of $1,500.
The average grade for recipients of the recovery scholarships last semester was 3.6 -- nearly a full point higher than the university average (2.77). What’s more, only 5 percent of the scholarship winners have been booted from the program for resuming their use of drugs and alcohol, Mr. Andersen says. About 600 students who received the scholarships have earned a degree or certificate from Texas Tech, he adds.
While many of the students in the program say they probably wouldn’t be in college without the scholarships, most add that Texas Tech’s strong “recovery community,” not the money, is the most important aspect of the experience.
Christa Lee, a junior from Tyler, Tex., had been a social drinker for years, but says she didn’t realize the extent of her alcohol problem until she took an addiction course taught by Mr. Andersen in the spring of 1998. As part of the course, students were required to attend several recovery meetings. Ms. Lee attended Celebration, a regular Thursday-night meeting at which recovering alcoholics are honored for reaching various sobriety milestones -- 30 days, a year.
Ms. Lee cried throughout the event, which typically draws more than 100 people. Mr. Andersen spoke with her afterward, and suggested that her experiences fit the profile of an alcoholic, even though she had not hit bottom.
The bottom came that summer, when she returned to Tyler. “I was drinking when I was upset and when I was happy,” she says. “I drank while waitressing at Applebee’s. I would ring up a drink -- just as if a table had ordered it -- and then I’d go hide somewhere and drink it.”
She got drunk only once more after returning to Texas Tech that fall. With the center’s help, she’s been sober since September 1998.
She now receives a scholarship of $1,500 per semester and attends five or six Alcoholics Anonymous meetings each week, splitting her time between on-campus and off-campus groups. “There’s strong sobriety” in the off-campus groups, she says -- including alcoholics who haven’t touched a drop in 30 years.
But she is most grateful for the on-campus meetings, which the scholarship recipients regularly attend. “Having a community of young people to be friends with who don’t drink is really helpful,” she says. “In a college setting, it’s just hard to find people who don’t drink.”
The students tend to hang out together. They go dancing and bowling, attend rodeos, sit in coffee shops just to talk. “The things that we used to make fun of people for doing -- that’s what we do now,” says Rusty Fuller, a 28-year-old sophomore who abandoned his son and wife several years ago while abusing alcohol and several illegal drugs. “Most of us know what it’s like to be miserable and full of pain,” adds Mr. Fuller, who now has custody of his son, Dusty. “Not having to live like that is the biggest gift.”
Despite the program’s successes, its future is unclear. Mr. Andersen, who is 65 and owns a ranch near Spur, Tex., plans to retire within the next two years. Elizabeth G. Haley, dean of the College of Human Sciences, which houses the addiction center, is interested in finding a successor who can put more emphasis on research and outreach to the Lubbock community, in addition to serving as a mentor for the scholarship recipients.
Finding such an individual will be difficult. The likeliest candidate will either have been through a recovery program or be familiar with such programs and committed to serving recovering alcoholics.
“My hope is that somebody out there somewhere will express an interest in it,” Mr. Andersen says. “I’ll step out of the director’s chair in a minute if we can find someone who says, ‘I’ll come right now.’”
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