A student columnist for a Big Ten campus newspaper glimpsed this alternate future while contemplating what would occur if his university actually banished alcohol from all on- and off-campus Greek housing units: “It would literally destroy the school. Frats with no alcohol would quickly lead to frats with no members (I know, I know, people don’t join frats to drink, they join frats to improve their grades and get involved in community service). A housing crisis of unforeseen proportions would occur,” and this university would be depopulated.
Big-time U’s, for all of their current pronouncements about curtailing student drinking, will never allow their schools and the surrounding areas to become dry. Officials of these universities know that if their institutions became deserts without alcoholic irrigation, this terrain would not sustain undergraduate student life.
Binge drinking is not evenly distributed across all student groups. Some, like fraternity and sorority members and students involved in athletics [particularly as super fans], are more often binge drinkers. Nor is it distributed evenly at all colleges. Indeed, binge drinking ranges from 10% of students at the colleges with the lowest rate to 70% at the highest. Colleges with Greek houses and [collegiate type] dormitories, with NCAA Division I teams and with alcohol outlets within one mile of campus have higher binge-drinking rates.
—The Center for Science in the Public Interest
Health professionals define binge drinking as an average-size male consuming five or more drinks within a fairly short period of time, and a female, four drinks (body weight, not gender, is the determining factor here). To speed up alcoholic intake, sometimes bingers dispense with glasses and bottles, and “funnel”—pour quantities of alcohol into a funnel attached to a rubber hose, aiming the hose spout at the throat. In the 1990s, a number of major studies discovered that over 80 percent of all college students consumed alcohol, and over half of this group binged on occasion. However, the key finding was the fact that almost 20 percent of college drinkers binged once a week or more. And throughout the decade—during and after the immense media attention to the problem—the number of frequent bingers grew. A dean at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a famous party school, admitted, “More kids drink every day, they stagger from party to party.”
Nevertheless, as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other authorities indicate, student alcohol consumption varies from campus to campus and according to type of school. Yet, student drinking is so widespread that experts do not divide institutions into Drinking U’s and Nondrinking U’s, but High Binge Schools versus Low Binge Schools. Similarly, researchers do not separate students into Drinkers and Abstainers, but Bingers versus Non-Bingers. Nationally, college students buy $6 billion worth of alcohol products a year—more money than they spend on books, snack foods, and all other beverages combined. In terms of beer, each student averages sixty six-packs annually.
Predictably, a majority of bingers belong to the traditional collegiate subculture and attend beer-and-circus schools, notably those with big-time college sports teams. Moreover, members of fraternities and sororities lead all collegians in the consumption of alcohol. Conversely, a majority of nonbingers do not participate fully in the collegiate subculture and many attend academically oriented schools, particularly those in NCAA Division III. In addition, unlike bingers, most nonbingers are not alienated from the academic aspects of their institutions, and usually they have responsible adults, even faculty members, to turn to when encountering personal difficulties, including alcohol-related ones. On the other hand, bingers mainly respond to peer pressure from other bingers, and if their drinking evolves into alcoholism, often they will not seek outside help, or it is not a viable option at a Big-time U.
(It is important to note that some students at the best small colleges in America, as well as at Ivy League universities, binge drink, and that a number of Division III institutions have reputations as “hard-drinking” places. However, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the Harvard University School of Public Health—the main researchers on this issue—examined extremely large samples of undergraduates at hundreds of schools and, despite the above exceptions, their studies indicate that the schools with the highest percentage of binge drinkers also had large Greek systems and big-time college sports teams, in other words, Big-time U’s where beer-and-circus rules.)
When people ask me why college students [binge] drink, I say, “Why not?” People in the “real world” have too little time and too many responsibilities to drink heavily night after night. They have to get up early five days a week, work all day, then go home to their families. College students are usually only responsible for themselves. All they have to do is go to a few classes and study when it’s convenient.
—David Hanson, professor of sociology at
the State University of New York
This portrait of undergraduate behavior excludes all the vocational students who work at full-time jobs and/or head families and, predictably, tend not to binge drink. However, students who work part-time and belong mainly to the collegiate subculture engage in a certain amount of binge drinking, and spend a proportion of their income on this activity. In addition, rebel students sometimes indulge in heavy drinking, and even some academically inclined undergraduates consume their portion—although they rarely binge more than once a week and, even more rarely, on weekday nights. Their explanation is usually, “We work and study hard all week, and party hard on Friday and Saturday nights.”
But finally, Professor Hanson’s comment on average student drinkers having too much time on their hands and too little to do academically is accurate for many undergraduates in the collegiate subculture at beer-and-circus schools. The faculty/student nonaggression pact allows these undergraduates to spend a majority of their time and energy in extracurricular activities; sometimes these pastimes are organized, such as playing recreational sports and attending college sports events, but often they are pure leisure, watching TV and boozing (for a breakdown of hours per week spent by regular undergraduates in these activities, see Chapter 16).
In contrast, a recent study found that “nonstudents of the same age … 17- to 24-year-olds” did far less binge drinking than average undergraduates. The reason is obvious—most nonstudents have the same work pressures and responsibilities as others in the “real world”—but the finding is important because of the class background of a majority of nonstudents. Usually working class, they live in a culture where binge drinking has long existed and, to some extent, is tolerated. On the other hand, college students are mainly middle class, and, historically, this culture has not fostered binge drinking. Therefore, as a university president remarked after reviewing this study, “It’s very clear from the data that something is going on at college campuses, and in the college experience, that makes the problem very significant for us to get hold of.”
Dr. Henry Wechsler of Harvard has studied college-student binge drinking more intensely and for a longer period of time than any other researcher in America. His most recent work reveals that, despite 1990s public and university campaigns to solve this problem, binge drinking is increasing. Wechsler has long argued that Greek organizations are central to the problem; not only do “four out of five” fraternity members binge, half of them on a regular basis, but they “play a prominent role in campus [social] life” far out of proportion to their numbers within the student population.
In a period when the collegiate subculture is more inclusive than ever before, fraternity parties attract many non-Greeks, particularly collegiates living in dorms and apartments. As the Insider’s Guide explained in the introduction to every edition in the 1990s, the Greeks have “an important role in campus social activity … [because] at most schools,” as the saying goes, “‘frats don’t card.’”—ask party-goers for proof that they are twenty-one or older. And, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, when schools ban alcohol from frat houses, usually the Greeks move “the parties off-campus, to unofficial fr
aternity houses rented out by upperclassmen” (see Chapter 14 for more on this phenomenon).
Wechsler urges universities to clamp down on Greek drinking and Greek-sponsored parties, but he admits that “many administrators” hesitate to do so “for fear of angering [Greek] alumni donors who fondly remember their own college years of partying.” Moreover, he indicates that another major “impetus for binge drinking on college campuses—one rarely mentioned publicly—involves alumni at tailgate parties during homecoming activities and sporting events,” and undergraduates participating in or imitating these celebrations. He wants schools to ban alcohol on these occasions, but he fails to acknowledge that booze-plus-college-sports is at the core of Big-time U’s culture. Prohibiting alcohol from stadium and arena parking lots would be like barring athletes with low SAT scores from playing inside those venues. “Logically, Wechsler makes sense,” said an official at the University of Kentucky about the researcher’s proposals, “but it ain’t gonna happen, Henry … . Any president of a SEC school who tells his alums that they can’t tailgate would be lynched, then roasted in little pieces on their barbecue grills.” (Ironically, Big-time U alumni give much less money to their alma maters than do alums of non-big-time college sports schools, see Chapter 21.)
The main patrons of Greek organizations will never change the drinking culture and, as a 1998 study discovered, future Greek alumni leaders—today’s house presidents—the people “who ought to play responsible roles in helping address” the binge drinking problem, “are by far the heaviest drinkers on campus.” This study included more than twenty-five thousand undergraduates at sixty-one colleges and universities, and also revealed that “fraternity house members averaged 20.3 drinks per week compared with 7.5 drinks for all other male students” in the sample—thus, the fraternity leaders consumed more alcohol than any other cohort of undergraduates.
A similar pattern emerged for sorority women and their leaders: “Sorority house residents averaged 6.2 drinks per week,” much less than their male counterparts, but almost twice the rate “for all female students.” And sorority leaders paralleled male house presidents and officers with a higher alcohol consumption rate than regular “sisters.”
The news about Greek women is particularly negative because it reveals one of the major changes in collegiate culture in the final decades of the twentieth century: female college students are drinking, and binge drinking, much more than their mothers and grandmothers did while at university. In other words, although the alcohol consumption of all students has increased during the last two decades, and dangerous kinds of drinking, especially binge drinking, have escalated, the rate of increase for women has exceeded that of men. The reasons are complex and connect to the changing role of women in American society; nonetheless, the statistics are depressing.
At 1 A.M., paramedics rush into Scorekeepers [an Ann Arbor, Michigan bar]. A young woman has thrown up and passed out. As police and rescue workers try to help, spectators encircle the prostrate woman. Most have drinks in their hands … the crowd dismisses the woman as a “dumb drunk” who didn’t know her limit. Meanwhile, others [students] crowd around the bar three deep, holding out money and trying to get the bartender’s attention.
—Ron French, Jodi S. Cohen, and Wendy Case,
Detroit News reporters
The young woman at Scorekeepers survived, but, increasingly, college women binge and end up in life-threatening situations. Nationally, the number of female students who binge more than tripled from the 1980s to the 1990s and, as with fraternity men, sorority women drank more and faster than all other female undergraduates—Wechsler’s Harvard study found that 62 percent of Greek women binged versus 35 percent of non-sorority women. Wechsler also commented that “50 years ago, drinking by college women was not considered a problem” but, today, female college students are catching up to the alcoholism rate of male collegians.
Anecdotal evidence supports Wechsler’s statement. “In the 1950s and 1960s,” a sorority woman of that era recalled, “it was very sociable to drink a cocktail or two during the weekends at a party, a Pink Lady or an Old Fashion.” Another “co-ed” of that period remembered, “We never drank beer at all. It tasted awful and was considered really low class.” Even in the 1970s, when the legal drinking age was eighteen, few college women consumed the quantities of alcohol that female students do now, and only a small minority binged.
Fast-forward to the beginning of the twenty-first century: many college women favor a highly potent drink with the innocuous name of Long Island Iced Tea—a mixture of rum, vodka, tequila, and triple sec containing 400 percent more alcohol per volume than the average Pink Lady or Old Fashion. In addition, college females toss down much more beer than ever before, beer drinking games often introducing them to the “strange brew”—not an immediately pleasant taste, but no longer déclassé. As a researcher explained, the games serve as initiation rituals for younger students, particularly women, and while playing them, females feel “more at ease drinking beer and engaging in publicly assertive behavior,” including public drunkenness—conduct that their mothers and their grandmothers would have avoided.
Sometimes sororities formalize the alcohol initiation rites by requiring their pledges (new, probationary members) to consume drinks in hazing ceremonies. On occasion, the drunken pledges attract the attention of campus police and university authorities, resulting in fines and other penalties, but, more often, the drinking initiation is merely a “fun part” of collegiate life, only noticed by the participants and their friends. One young woman described her sorority’s “pledge night,” held off-campus—beyond the reach of college officials—in the party room of a local Chinese restaurant:
Jennifer, our president, brought out a big basket decorated with pink ribbons and threw handfuls of pink condoms to every table. We all started cheering and screaming “More, more!” The chapter advisor [an alum], a nice but clueless suburban type, looked like she was going to faint, but the sisters were pretty drunk and she intelligently did not interfere with our revelry.
In an era of gender equality, women will be women, but, unfortunately, some boys, hormones raging, will remain boys. One reporter began a story on drunken college student behavior with, “If the legendary Sweetheart of Sigma Chi were an undergraduate today, she’d probably be in court bringing charges against the brothers for date rape.” Many studies indicate that binge drinkers, both male and female, “engage in unplanned sexual activity” far more frequently than nonbinge drinkers, and this activity is not only unplanned but often “unwanted,” including, in its most extreme form, “date rape.” In addition, despite the distribution of pink and other colored condoms, bingers “have unprotected sexual relations” much more often than nonbingers. Rolling Stone magazine, in its fall 1999 college issue, featured a vivid article about sorority life at Ohio State University that concluded with a number of the sisters totally drunk and on the verge of unprotected and unpleasant sexual misadventures.
Campus police officers deal with many cases of “unwanted sexual advances,” and they indicate that a large majority of perpetrators and victims have high alcohol blood levels when the incidents occur. Not only does alcohol lower inhibitions, but according to one researcher, “‘I was drunk’ is [considered] a get-out-of-jail-free card by college students who act like idiots.” Men often use this excuse to explain their sexual advances, and according to this researcher, “women, who still face a double standard when it comes to sleeping around, can blame one-night stands on alcohol.” Indeed, a common student expression on many campuses is “the Walk of Shame”: the trip home from the male’s housing unit, often a fraternity house or dorm, that a woman takes the morning after a one-night stand. (On a few campuses, the term also applies to a man’s trip from a female’s room.)
In this emotionally charged collegiate world, thoroughly befogged by far too much booze, date rape also takes place. “No” must mean no, and when uttered, it should end the predatory advance. H
owever, most date rapists deny ever hearing the word no; many victims feel guilty about stumbling into a situation where they need to say the word; and the authorities despise the paperwork, the legal hassles, and the bad publicity that results from the word being uttered. An administrator at Ohio State University commented:
Date rape is a nasty part of the school’s cost of doing business. It’s awful, it’s obscene, but it will never end as long as students allow themselves to get drunk out of their heads and end up in locked bedrooms … . The school puts on countless Awareness Clinics, but students are sober and rational when they attend them. Binge drinking is wholly irrational and that’s when date rape happens most often.
Another part of a university’s cost of doing business is borne directly by undergraduates in the path of student drunks, and indirectly by the school. The Center for Science in the Public Interest indicates that “student vandalism, including trashing dormitories, stealing property, and writing graffiti goes hand-in-hand with heavy drinking.” Henry Wechsler has also studied this side-effect, pointing out that 82 percent of all students in his large sample had experienced “secondhand binge effects.” An undergraduate at the University of Connecticut complained to the student newspaper that, at 2:30 A.M., some drunk had pulled the fire alarm in his dorm:
An event that doesn’t happen more than, I’d say, 17,000 times a week. So, in the middle of a snowstorm I had the great honor of standing outside in my pajamas … as various parts of my brain froze while firefighters risked their lives and the lives of everyone else out on the roads by driving heavy trucks as fast as possible on ice-covered roads.
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