Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  At Seton Hall University in January 2000, the plague of false alarms claimed a number of victims: when an actual dorm fire occurred, many students ignored the alarm and were caught in the blaze, three dying and sixty-two injured.

  At High Binge schools, a majority of students report frequent “secondhand alcohol-related” incidents. At Low Binge colleges, only a minority experience these problems, as well as such other effects as “personal property damaged” by drunks. As a result of secondhand problems, some High Binge schools have established substance-free housing, entire dorms or parts of dorms where residents agree to ban all alcohol products and illegal drugs. The Center for Science in the Public Interest points to these dorms as proof of “student willingness to pass up some conveniences (being able to drink in their rooms) in exchange for a safe and sure place to live and study.”

  In reality, only small numbers of undergraduates sign up for these dorms (and many of these students are pressured into doing so by their parents). At one eastern university with championship hockey teams and a well-earned “party school” reputation, the students conducting campus tours for visitors and prospective applicants refer to the alcohol-free dorm as “the place where the geeks live.” The university official in charge of this school’s substance-abuse program admitted that, at his institution and similar ones, “It is more acceptable to come out of the closet as a gay than to come out of the closet and say you’re a nondrinker.”

  A few years ago, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, one of the country’s premier beer-and-circus schools—an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 65 percent of UW undergraduates binged—instituted substance-free sections of Witte Hall and Adams Hall. About one hundred fifty students chose to live in these areas, out of about seven thousand in all UW dorms, and almost thirty thousand UW undergraduates. Unfortunately, the substance-free dorms did not help all the residents. Early one Sunday morning, a drunken student wedged himself into a small garbage chute in Witte and fell nine floors to the bottom, almost dying as a result. School officials admitted that it was difficult to change the drinking culture of the school, particularly the weekend party scene, even for those undergraduates in the substance-free dorms.

  In the last decade, many colleges and universities have discovered what administrators at Wisconsin have long known—that it is very hard, if not impossible, to alter or even slow the huge drinking culture at their schools. The president of Indiana University spoke at the national student convention of a major fraternity, and he asked these Greek leaders “to consider an alcohol ban” in their houses across the country. The president described the response to his suggestion: “They booed me.”

  Subsequently, the IU president officially banned alcohol from all university dorms and Greek houses on his campus. However, like Prohibition in the 1920s, the ban prompted widespread disobedience, much of it covert but some so overt that campus police intervened. In autumn 1999, after the police “busted” one fraternity for repeated alcohol violations, and the school put the house on “disciplinary probation,” the chapter president said, “We were irresponsible about what we were doing,” allowing lots of people to leave our parties very drunk, some requiring medical attention. But the fraternity leader did not consider this a crime, just carelessness and bad luck, because “this kind of stuff happens in every fraternity [here], but we happened to get caught.”

  Not only does a disjuncture exist between the current policies of school administrators and the drunken reality of collegiate life on their campuses, but there is a major disconnect between the national policies of many Greek organizations and the members of their chapters throughout the country. The executive vice president of Phi Delta Theta, one of the oldest and largest fraternities, claimed that “we have refocused on a message … [of] good fellowship, good opportunities for academic excellence, leadership opportunities … . We [also] insist that no alcohol or drugs be in the houses.” Yet, the Phi Delta Theta official admitted that changing the Animal House image of Greek organizations will take time because the public sees fraternities as “houses with goofy-looking letters that basically say ‘bar.’” This Greek official added, “I’ve often kidded that if somebody wants to party, they ought to rent an apartment, not join a fraternity.” But most

  Greeks do both during their university careers: they live and party in the fraternity or sorority for a year or two, and then, along with their closest Greek brothers or sisters, they rent a house or an apartment off-campus and party on for their remaining college years. In fact, a large majority of American undergraduates, including those at schools in small college towns, live off-campus (one study put the number at 85 percent of all nonfreshmen students).

  As a result, the off-campus party scene, although connected through Greek and dorm affiliations to the campus one, has become the true center of party action at most Big-time U’s. On-campus parties continue, but the hosts now run the risk of campus police intervention, and the participants, if under twenty-one, of arrest for underage drinking. Therefore, just as the sorority women with the pink condoms held their pledge night in the private room of a Chinese restaurant, many other Greek organizations rent off-campus facilities for parties or gather their members and friends in private houses or apartments. Furthermore, university authorities are pleased with the party scene moving off-campus because it absolves schools of many legal responsibilities, and it distances them from negative incidents. A University of Michigan administrator said:

  If the girl in the Detroit News story had never come out of Scorekeepers alive, legally that’s the bar’s problem, not U of M’s. It occurred on their property, not ours. They served her, they should have seen that she was drinking too much. You know, there’s an excellent and expanding body of case law for just such eventualities.

  Changing the off-campus drinking culture is almost impossible; in addition, most beer-and-circus universities have no desire to alter it; they just want to keep it at a safe legal distance. For all of the official pronouncements about “cracking down on student drinking,” most administrators realize that alcohol, particularly cheap beer, is the oxygen of the Greek system and the party scene at their schools.

  In the 1980s, most Big-time U’s practiced “benign neglect” in regard to student alcohol consumption. In the 1990s, “benign harassment” became the policy: administrators used the campus police to control excessive drinking in dorms and Greek houses, and to move large parties off-campus. But officials did not discourage drinking to the point where their institution gained a reputation as, to use Princeton Review’s category name, a “Stone-cold sober school.”

  No Big-time U wants to make the top twenty in this category. If that occurs, applications will decline, students will transfer to less sober schools, and tuition dollars will plummet. Big-time U’s willingly allow Brigham Young University and similar institutions to head the “Stone-cold sober” list, while Big-time U’s retain their reputations as “fun” and “happening” places, the new code words for beer-and-circus.

  15

  DRINKING OFF-CAMPUS AND FAR OFF-CAMPUS (SPRING BREAK)

  In the 1990s, school authorities, prompted by university lawyers, prodded the party scene to off-campus bars and apartments. Not only did this increase student alcohol consumption and binge drinking but, during Spring Break, it turned various far off-campus locations into mammoth bacchanals. This chapter details this phenomenon.

  Visit some fraternity houses these days and you might be hard pressed to get so much as a cold beer. The venerable beer keg that has served so long as a centerpiece in fraternity houses has fallen into disgrace—a victim of the times, not to mention lawyers and risk managers.

  No, college kids haven’t quit drinking. They’re just doing it on someone else’s property. More and more, fraternity officials are advising their chapters to move drinking parties out of the house—preferably to bars, which are licensed, staffed, and insured for such debauchery.

  —Steven Gira
rdi, Tampa [Florida] Tribune reporter

  In the late 1990s, after Playboy named a bar in Tampa as one of the top college bars in the United States, Tampa Bay newspapers started examining the local college-student drinking scene. The Playboy award surprised Tampa/St. Pete residents who thought of their area in terms of tourists and retirees rather than college kids boozing year round. However, the University of South Florida in Tampa, in its attempt to rise in the academic world, had created a strong collegiate subculture with many fraternities and sororities as well as college sports teams elevated to NCAA Division I-A. By the late 1990s, USF had gained beer-and-circus status, and various newspapers described its party scene.

  The St. Petersburg Times reported that “many USF students say the week begins Monday with song and beer at the Greenery Pub next to the University Townhouse Apartments. The bar’s proximity to campus attracts” students, as do the sports events on the large-screen TVs. The reporter followed USF students through their drinking week: “On Tuesdays … Goodfellas not far from the USF campus turns into a college sports bar, offering 2-for-1 drink specials”; “On Wednesdays, the Oak Barrel hosts Liter Night, with a liter of beer, about 34 ounces, for $4.” A nearby bar—the one on Playboy’s list—also does a huge Wednesday and Thursday night business by hosting “‘Out of Control College Night’ … a couple of hours of free draft beer and bargain-priced [liquor] drinks.” But some students, particularly USF women, spend Thursday nights in Fat Tuesdays (Mardi Gras), because of the $1 drinks, including “18 varieties of daiquiris churning in vats built into a pink neon wall.”

  The reporters dropped out before the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night festivities, however, for many USF students, these encompassed the usual college weekend fun. In interviews for this book, USF undergraduates described frenetic weekend parties, including at bars in St. Pete Beach and along the Gulf in St. Petersburg, and at private beach houses and condos. A fraternity man added, “I can’t wait until our football team gets good, and we can show the Gators [University of Florida] and the ’Noles [Florida State] that we outparty them and outplay them.”

  If the party scene at this school begins on Monday and runs through the following Sunday, the question occurs: When do USF undergraduates study? “This school is a joke, it’s unbelievably easy,” said a female vocational student. “It makes Florida State, the all-time party school, look like Harvard in comparison. I’m only here because I’m from Tampa and can live at home and work my way through, but I really worry if my degree will be worth anything. Why can’t this school become famous for something educational instead of rowdy students and now big-time sports.”

  Playboy, in its article on the top college bars in the country, explained the beer-and-circus value system: “Why study when you can work on critical social skills? The best part of a college education is not included in the tuition. The facts of life are learned not in a classroom but in a college bar.” Then why bother paying tuition and a bar bill? Why not just pay the latter? Indeed, if research universities were honest and acknowledged that they could not provide meaningful educations to most undergraduates, then many young people could attend college elsewhere, or they could keep their tuition dollars, spending all of them on fun and games. Playboy described how beer-and-circus works at Big-time U’s: “Early afternoon happy hours draw students straight from the lecture halls,” where they have learned little or nothing; and throughout the week, “theme nights prevail, creating the feel of perpetual Saturday—how can a Tuesday study session compete with two-for-one margaritas and free tacos?”

  Other national magazines also list the top college bars, usually overlapping with Playboy’s choices. ESPN The Magazine began its list with, “If they held a national championship for college sports bars, the Esso Club would be our pick to win it all. This converted gas station on the edge of the Clemson University campus” has great deals on drinks and food, and patrons can “taste-test the beer in a niche dubbed the ‘Educational Corner’” (this theme—drinking is the true education—runs through all the college bar literature and lore). Trailing the Esso Club on ESPN’s list are such famous watering-holes as State Street Brats in Madison, Wisconsin; Ivar’s in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; McDuffy’s Sports Bar in Tempe, Arizona; 44’s in Syracuse, New York; and Harpo’s in Columbia, Missouri. Not surprisingly, all of these bars are attached to Big-time U’s with famous Division I-A sports programs and party scenes. The bars contain large screen TVs perpetually showing sports events, particularly intercollegiate contests, and feature large displays of college sports memorabilia.

  Outstanding in the memento category, and also high on the ESPN and Playboy lists, are Nick’s English Hut in Bloomington, Indiana, and the Touchdown Club in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nick’s hangs jerseys from former IU basketball players from its rafters and serves beer in large buckets—committed patrons earn personal silver ones. The managers of the Touchdown Club at Michigan, after years, according to Playboy, of “hard partying at Indiana University,” migrated to Ann Arbor and installed Nick’s-like memorabilia in the bar there, including “bench seating from the school’s original football stadium.”

  These bars and the ones in other college towns are the temples of beer-and-circus, testimony to its current dynamism and its storied past. Every Saturday before and after home football games, and in the evenings before and after home basketball contests, crowds of worshipers line up outside these shrines, waiting for a chance to enter and to drink the sacramental liquor. Alums and undergraduates mingle in the lines, and many of the older people have made pilgrimages of thousands of miles to reach the sacred places.

  A reporter for the Los Angeles Times traveled around the country examining this religious phenomenon. In Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, he noticed that “at Barry’s Bar and Grill, two blocks from the stadium … the doors open at 10 A.M. and the premixed Bloody Mary’s start flowing out of 20 gallon containers.” Thirty-seven bars cluster in this area of Lincoln, and students call the sidewalks in front of them “the most puked-upon stretch of concrete in the United States.”

  The L.A. Times writer journeyed on, chronicling such traditions as Saturday morning “kegs and eggs” at Ohio State, and the drinking and college football scene at the University of Georgia at Athens. Beyond the fun and UGA (the bulldog mascot), an official of this school’s health service pointed out: “There are at least fifty-two businesses that serve alcohol within walking distance of this campus. The simple fact is [that] it would be impossible for them to stay in business if they sold just to students who were twenty-one” or older, and to alumni; thus the undergraduate drinking culture at this school and similar ones raises serious public health questions. Georgia undergrads told the Insider’s Guide that their “campus mascot” should be “a drunk person,” not UGA.

  Yet in the fall of 1999, for ESPN’s coverage of the Georgia-Florida football game, Chris Fowler, the lead announcer, constantly called the contest “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party,” and the cameras frequently focused on student and alumni fans of both schools, spotlighting their drunken antics and lubricated happiness. Therefore, when the same university administrators who embrace ESPN and other TV coverage of their college sports teams announce a school campaign against student drinking, many undergraduates spot the hypocrisy and consider the effort absurd. Living in a collegiate subculture that glorifies drinking, reinforced by the national media, students know that university officials are either lying to them or to themselves when they encourage temperance.

  Hip sarcasm is the mode with which some student commentators approach the drinking problem on their campuses, and, in this way, they hope to communicate with their fellow students more effectively than do “out of it” administrators. A woman at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, recent NCAA champion in men’s and women’s basketball, and a contender for “Party school of the East,” if not the nation, wrote an article in the student newspaper mocking the bar scene at her school. Her a
dvice to those undergraduates not yet involved, “Get a fake ID”:

  Although it’s illegal, and you will end up with $7 in your bank account by the end of the semester, it can be a whole lotta fun. Having a fake ID is the underaged undergrad’s ticket to a whole new social world otherwise known as “the bars.” With many options ranging from Wednesday’s Nickel Nights to Friday’s Happy Hour, with a fake ID one can find something to do involving alcohol almost every night of the week. And when you can go to the bar whenever you want, you always have a reason not to study … .

  The reader wonders if the average UConn student caught on to this criticism of “the bars”? In tone and content, the writer is so close to Playboy’s and ESPN’s hip laudatory style that the sarcasm might be lost on the average student, particularly those who want to participate in the bar scene and neglect their studies.

  An unambiguous approach to “the bars” characterizes The Real Freshmen Handbook, published nationally by Houghton Mifflin. In the section “How to Get a Fake ID,” the author suggests finding an upperclassman who “resembles you,” and then “offering to buy or borrow [your look-alike’s] old IDs.” If this method fails, “Ask around campus: you should be able to find someone who either makes fake IDs himself or knows how to order them.” In fact, in an Internet age, entering the keywords “Fake IDs” into various search engines turns up many firms specializing in them.

  Some bars in some college towns—particularly if they have had licensing problems with local or state authorities—require an authentic-looking ID for admittance. But at many other bars in most college towns, amazingly hokey IDs will usually work for underage drinkers. The student head of the Panhellenic [Sorority] Association at the University of Kansas said that in Lawrence, “All bars card, but there are some bars where you can practically scribble, ‘Yes, I’m twenty-one,’ on a piece of paper in crayon and get in.”