A few years ago, I found myself sitting in the corner of a campus student lounge, talking to a 19-year-old named Jessica about what brought her to college, how much she studies, and why her weekends almost never involve getting drunk.
She wasn’t a teetotaler for religious reasons and it wasn’t because there were many other fun things to do. Her college was in Rochester, Minn., which, in midwinter, consists mainly of subzero temperatures and a lot of elderly sick people in and around the Mayo Clinic. After three days there, the hotel bar seemed particularly enticing.
Jessica wasn’t a party animal for two reasons. First, she had a lot of school work to do. The University of Minnesota’s Rochester campus is new and unusual. There are only two majors: health professions and health sciences. The classes are small and the workload demanding. Jessica told me she spends 30 to 40 hours per week studying outside of class, far more than the typical undergraduate.
Second, there is no organized collegiate-drinking infrastructure in Rochester. Fraternities, sororities, and big-time sports are nonexistent. The bars and restaurants are set up for the elderly sick people, not 25-cent drink specials and pregame keg blasts.
Some of Jessica’s high-school friends went to St. Cloud State University and came home with stories of lost weekends and more than a few lost weekdays. But Jessica was too busy to party, and there were no parties to attend.
These realities offer the beginnings of a solution to the scourge of collegiate alcohol abuse.
No one emerges from the womb with a DKE T-shirt and a beer-pong paddle.
To be sure, nobody is going to change the nature of youth. As one angry father wrote to his son in medieval times, “I have recently discovered that you live dissolutely and slothfully, preferring license to restraint and play to work and strumming a guitar while the others are at their studies, whence it happens that you have read but one volume of law while your more industrious companions have read several.” Plus ça change.
But there’s a difference between idle young men consuming too much mead in the taverns and the kind of relentless, quasi-industrialized alcohol consumption common on many campuses. No one emerges from the womb with a DKE T-shirt and a beer-pong paddle. Students behave this way because we teach them to, primarily through popular culture.
Like many people, I’ve watched and enjoyed Animal House multiple times. It’s one of the funniest movies ever made, and also one of the most inadvertently destructive. The conceit, as we all know, is that the hard-drinking brothers of Delta House are anti-authoritarian heroes. But in order to gain the audience’s sympathy, the movie cleverly expunges every consequence of the Deltas’ allegedly depraved behavior.
You may think you remember watching a toga party that a member of rival Omega House later described as featuring “individual acts of perversion so profound and disgusting that decorum prohibits us listing them here.” But wait—what acts is he talking about? The movie shows none. The party consists entirely of people standing around having fun and dancing to Otis Day and the Knights. All of the sex is consensual. Nobody gets poisoned or assaulted. The drunk drivers all step out of their cars unscathed.
That’s the way collegiate drinking always looks on the screen, whether it’s in a bar or a frat house or on a spring-break beach: music blasting, people dancing, cups raised high. The images haven’t stopped since Animal House was released in 1978: two of this year’s biggest box-office hits were the frat-party comedies Neighbors and 22 Jump Street. Our culture provides a detailed instruction manual for undergraduate alcohol abuse, and students comply with something close to obligation.
Our culture provides a detailed instruction manual for undergraduate alcohol abuse, and students comply with something close to obligation.
The movies don’t show what comes next: rape, illness, and tragedy. Scroll down the death list on CompelledToAct.com—it takes a while—and the stories start to blend in similarity and repetition. “Lost his life in an automobile accident.” “Fell into a ditch near railroad tracks.” “Found unresponsive while on spring break.” There are no ditch-shrouded corpses in Neighbors, because that’s not entertainment.
As a result, thousands of young lives are being lost and ruined, and colleges are increasingly being called to account. The federal government’s recent high-profile expansion of scrutiny into campus sexual-assault policies is mostly a response to terrible things that happen after excessive drinking.
Colleges can’t change Hollywood. But they can increase the distance between those fantastical movie parties and real college life. While fraternities aren’t inherently bad (full disclosure: I was in one), it’s no secret where the biggest alcohol risks are often found.
Caitlin Flanagan’s recent Atlantic exposé suggests that some universities are colluding with national fraternal organizations to shift legal liability for alcohol-related damages onto parents’ insurance policies. That’s reprehensible. Greek organizations exist at the pleasure of colleges, not the other way around. College presidents who bend to pressure from outside groups or alumni with fond, hazy memories of youthful hijinks are failing their most basic obligations to their students. Organizations that are a danger to students should be permanently shut down. The same is true for the parasitical bar owners and party planners. Alcohol abuse will never be eliminated, but there are many lives to be saved between there and where we are now.
Students also drink because they have a lot of time on their hands. Studies have found that today’s full-time undergraduates are spending fewer hours on academic work in exchange for better grades than in previous generations. Substance abuse can be a product of aimlessness and boredom, something to do to fill the time.
In the long run, the most effective alcohol-abuse- prevention policy is to be a better college: a place where students are continually challenged, provoked, and engaged by the difficult work of learning.
When my daughter reaches college age, I’m going to look for places that have a reputation of being “where fun goes to die.” Better fun than something else.
