Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  But the return to university is usually excellent. For many students the vacation has consumed almost two weeks (they left days before school officially closed, and they returned days after classes resumed), and they “scope out” who has the best tans, and swap tales of adventure, particularly of binge drinking. They also bring back souvenir T-shirts, such as these from Mazatlan: “I’M NOT AS THUNK AS YOU DRINK I AM,” and “THE FOUR STAGES OF DRINKING: (1) I’M HANDSOME. (2) I’M RICH. (3) I’M INVISIBLE.

  (4) I’M BULLET-PROOF.”

  In the questionnaire for this book, to the query, “After you graduate from and/or leave your university, what do you think you will remember most vividly about your time here?” many students replied with a version of “Going on Spring Break with my friends, and the wild things we did at ____ [name of Spring Break location].” These responses did not appear to answer the question until it became apparent that for these students, “here” was a concept that transcended ordinary space and time. Even though for Spring Break they had traveled far from their home campus, they never left their collegiate subculture; in this way, Spring Break formed a crucial part of their university experience.

  One of the most interesting answers from this group of respondents was written by a senior male at Pennsylvania State University:

  By far my most vivid college memory will be a spring break one that has happened every year (it’s now 4). I’m looking over the balcony of the hotel in different places in Florida or Texas where we’re staying, and I’m seeing every single balcony in the place full of college kids yelling and drinking.

  It always strikes me as very weird, because usually when you go out on a hotel balcony, all the other ones are empty. But at spring break, they’re full of people drinking and screaming. Floor upon floor of them on all sides. Packed. That’s what I’ll always remember about college.

  Finally, collegiate drinking has not only moved off-campus and into the bars and apartment complexes that surround all beer-and-circus schools, as well as further off-campus to various Spring Break sites, but, as the above questionnaire answers suggest, it has become a way of life for many young people. They transport the drinking culture with them when they return home from school, and they take it to public occasions, particularly sports events and rock concerts, in their hometowns and when they travel.

  At Woodstock 1999, drunken collegiates trampled the peace-and-love folks. One of the organizers (a veteran of the original Woodstock), viewed the 1999 scene and commented sadly, “This is a frat party to a large degree.” Most newspapers and TV networks had the same take on the spectacle, one reporter summing up: “Forget peace. The rallying cry among the predominantly white male crowd was ‘PARTY!’ Aggressively.” And after partying, RIOT. The riots that ended the event resembled the 1990s “Right to Party” riots at Michigan State and other universities, and the main participants were similar collegiate types. In all probability, in future, more “frat boy” riots will occur in college towns, in vacation spots, or wherever large numbers of collegians gather and consume amazing quantities of alcohol.

  This chapter attempted to take the reader on a bar tour of college towns and Spring Break locations, paralleling the informal bar tours that many college students regularly undertake during the school year, and the scheduled “pub crawls” that travel agents include in Spring Break vacation packages. On all of these occasions, many students drink to their capacity and beyond.

  The bar tours reveal that large corporations and a multitude of small businesses encourage and benefit from student drinking. Universities claim that they want to control undergraduate alcohol consumption, but they never challenge the on-campus presence of these corporations and businesses, nor do they seriously attempt to diminish the off-campus drinking scene. The question becomes: Are the current university anti-alcohol campaigns empty rhetoric to appease parents of students and concerned government officials, or are they sincere attempts to change undergraduate behavior?

  Focusing on the beer-and-circus aspect of this situation—drinking in conjunction with big-time college sports events—provides one answer, and the topic of the next chapter of this book.

  16

  PARTY ROUND THE TEAM

  In the late 1990s, as public concern about student alcohol consumption and binge drinking increased, a number of important government officials addressed these problems. Donna Shalala, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, had encountered them in her previous job as president of the University of Wisconsin. She saw a link between beer and circus and offered her suggestions on loosening it at the 1998 annual convention of the NCAA:

  I believe that the time has come for schools to consider voluntary guidelines that say, “No alcohol advertising on the premises of an intercollegiate athletic event. No bringing alcohol to the site of an event. No turning a blind eye to underage drinking at tailgate parties—and on campus. And no alcohol sponsorship of intercollegiate sporting events.”

  I know that there has been stiff resistance—both inside and outside the NCAA—to these kinds of tough guidelines in the past. But the time has come to reconsider them, especially in light of the recent alcohol-related deaths [of students], and some research suggesting that advertising may influence adolescents to be more favorably disposed to drinking.

  Secretary Shalala, when questioned after her address to the NCAA, also declared that the association and all athletic conferences and schools should insist that TV and radio broadcasts of their college sports games exclude alcoholic beverage advertising. To say that her proposals “fell upon deaf ears” is to portray the reaction at the NCAA convention as positive. In her audience sat university presidents, faculty representatives, and athletic directors, as well as almost all NCAA officials, conference commissioners, and many other leaders of intercollegiate athletics. According to observers, they dismissed her recommendations before she had finished uttering them, their main concern being how to spin their negativity to the press.

  The commissioner of the Pac-10 conference spun his answer for the Chronicle of Higher Education by noting that the NCAA, the conferences, and individual schools sign multiyear television and radio contracts—for example, the Pac-10’s deals extended for another eight years—and said, “We would not be in a position to go back and do restrictions” on the advertising that the broadcasters sell for the games. Moreover, “the beer industry is one of the major interests in sports broadcasting” and, the unstated but omnipresent premise, every school in big-time college sports needs every dollar that the TV and radio deals produce.

  Some university presidents also considered Donna Shalala’s remarks hypocritical. “After all,” one pointed out privately, “she was president of the University of Wisconsin before taking her present job, and her athletic department there accepted beer ads, and her campus police allowed tailgating and drinking in the stadium. And I mean serious, dangerous drinking.”

  Yet her recommendations make sense, particularly coming after the Harvard Public Health and the Center for Science in the Public Interest studies on binge drinking. Possibly, if she still headed UW, she would try to implement her ideas; then again, as a member of the Big Ten conference, probably she could not convince her fellow presidents and the commissioner to redo the national TV and radio contracts to exclude beer advertising.

  However, praise for her suggestions came from a longtime supporter of big-time college sports who attended the NCAA meeting—Furman Bisher, sports columnist for the Atlanta Constitution:

  Of all that took place this week, what I liked most was the challenge by Donna Shalala to turn off the beer money. It has always seemed to me to go against everything that college sports is about when a game is interrupted for a commercial delivered by a bunch of varmints pushing beer.

  Fisher represents the traditional view of intercollegiate athletics, with its deep faith in the student-athlete ideal. On the other hand, the men and women now running big-time college sports worship “Media Demographics,” and they
know that networks and advertisers crave the young male audience that college sports events attract—the very fans who dismiss the student-athlete ideal and who believe that intercollegiate athletics is about winning at all costs and enjoying beer-and-circus. A PR executive for the beer industry explained, “If you had to choose the best audience in the world for a beer advertiser, it is twenty-one-to-thirty-four-year-old men who participate in sports and are avid sports fans … . [Our] fit with the college sports audience is hand in glove.” (Note the “twenty-one-year” reference in his comment: he carefully avoided saying “sixteen-to-thirty-four-year-old men” but that is the target audience: if the brewers sold no beer to sixteen-to-twenty-year-olds, they would have to downsize considerably.)

  Furman Bisher ended his piece by referring to a number of brewery PR men at the NCAA convention “running around the hotels wearing Anheuser-Busch T-shirts and beneath the brewery’s name, ‘We’ll Fight for a Better Future.’” Apparently the T-shirts were one brewer’s mocking response to Secretary Shalala’s recommendations.

  After her keynote speech, Donna Shalala returned to Washington, D.C., and turned her attention to other social problems, but the alcohol beverage people continued working full-time for their version of a “better future,” and the leaders of college sports fully cooperated with them.

  In that future, two years after the Shalala speech, college football held the greatest extravaganza in its history, the championship playoff game between Florida State University and Virginia Tech in the New Orleans Superdome. The scene was a triumph of beer-and-circus, USA Today noting that many fans came to the game “staggering, soused with spirits,” and, in front of the Superdome, “a rock band—on a huge stage between a pair of giant Budweiser cans—played … .”

  Historically, only two Division I-A universities have adamantly refused to allow alcohol or alcohol beverage advertising in their home arenas and stadiums, or to permit beer ads on the TV and radio broadcasts that they control: Brigham Young University and Baylor University (as strict Mormon and Baptist institutions, they disapprove of alcohol consumption). From time to time, other schools have instituted similar bans, but neither they, nor BYU and Baylor, ever objected to their teams playing in out-of-town arenas and stadiums that displayed beer signs and sold beer to spectators. By 2000, these contrary policies amplified: an increasing number of schools now prohibit spectators from bringing alcohol into campus arenas and stadiums (although the hidden flask continues as an essential “game item” for many fans), and some universities have removed the beer signs; however, all of these schools eagerly seek bookings for their teams in out-of-town facilities, particularly in large cities, that flash beer ads and also sell beer during games, often to underage drinkers. Moreover, every member of Division I-A wants to play in a bowl game and almost every one of these venues has brewery ads and sells beer. And no school would have objected to the giant Budweiser cans outside the Superdome if their team had played inside. Again, the ambiguity of the situation produces a clear message to undergraduates: university officials who ban alcohol on campus are hypocrites and fools, to be ignored or, if that is impossible, defied.

  Experts in alcohol abuse indicate that these mixed signals also encourage students to disregard all warnings about binge drinking, and, ironically, they make alcohol beverage ads more effective. The beer message is distinct and relentless: it constantly “creates the impression,” according to the Stanford University director of alcohol abuse prevention, “that everyone is drinking all the time, and [it] leads some students to assume that if they are not drinking alcoholic beverages, they are missing an important part of collegiate social life.” The Stanford authority also agreed with Donna Shalala that collective action was necessary, that universities could not change student mores with individual bans. Thus far, the beer companies have won, their advertising has forged “this link … through the years between sports—college and professional—and beer,” and it will not uncouple easily.

  Yet, thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a number of universities, including such Big-time U’s as the University of Iowa in Iowa City, are acting unilaterally and attempting to change student attitudes about drinking on their campuses. They also hope to nullify the effect of national and local alcoholic beverage advertising upon their undergraduates. This experiment is worth examining.

  My hat’s off to Iowa for participating in the Johnson program. They call it “Stepping Up,” and that school really stepped up. They went public with the fact that they have a binge drinking problem in their student population, and they want to do something about it … .

  Many schools refused to participate in the program. I know we did—we didn’t want to touch it at all, we were worried that it would give us lots of bad publicity. But the Iowa folks did what people with an alcohol problem should always do—take the first step and admit that you have a problem, and then go from there. Most schools in Iowa’s situation just won’t do that, and so they dig themselves a deeper hole. You’d think that the student deaths and near-deaths from bingeing would wake everyone up, but that hasn’t happened yet. I say, good for Iowa.

  —An Indiana University administrator

  In 1996, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in conjunction with the American Medical Association, gave the University of Iowa a substantial grant to try to combat college student binge drinking on its campus. The Des Moines Register proclaimed that the school “has been chosen to lead a national effort” to fight this widespread problem but, as significantly, UI president Mary Sue Coleman acknowledged that “the national figures and our own figures on binge drinking provide vivid confirmation that we have a serious problem with the number of college students who are drinking to get drunk.” Comprehensive surveys of the Iowa student body confirmed her words: almost 64 percent of UI undergraduates regularly engaged in binge drinking, as opposed to the 42 percent national student average.

  A spokesperson for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in announcing the grant to Iowa and a number of other universities, explained “the profile of schools with drinking problems … [They are] schools with big athletic programs and big Greek systems.” A journalist specializing in medical issues also emphasized the link between big-time college sports, the collegiate subculture, and bingeing: “The highest-risk campuses … [those with] big sports programs, fraternities, and sororities … got that way for two reasons: They attracted binge drinkers and they turned non-drinkers into binge drinkers.”

  In this period, some of the college guidebooks aimed at high school seniors described the University of Iowa in beer-and-circus terms. The Insider’s Guide reported:

  Drinking? Awwwww Yeahhh!

  Undergrads party hard … . Drinking is a large part of student life … . Greek life at the university is also strong: the frats sponsor parties open to all students for a small fee … .

  Big-Name Sports

  A member of the Big Ten Athletic Conference, the University of Iowa has a strong sports program that captures student enthusiasm. During football season, tailgate parties bring students together to bolster school spirit.

  One of Iowa’s first steps to counter binge drinking was ordering all Greek units on campus “to go dry.” But in a concession to their party traditions, the university gave the fraternities and sororities two years, from 1997 to 1999, “to taper off” before completely shutting their booze taps. Similarly, the university did not ban beer from its football stadium parking lots but created an “alcohol-free area” for tailgate parties without alcoholic beverages. The Des Moines Register reported that the typical Hawkeye fan considers “‘tailgate’ … a verb meaning ‘to drink beer,’” but some students venturing into “alcohol-free … parking lot No. 14” enjoyed the free soft drinks, hot dogs, and volleyball games.

  Then, in 1999, the school refused Miller Beer’s offer for advertising rights to the Hawkeye logo, and for ad space on the weekly TV programs of UI’s football and men’s basketball coaches. Throughout the 1990s, S
troh Brewery held this contract and Miller wanted it. A university spokesperson explained that these beer ads were not “consistent with trying to reduce consumption of alcohol within the student population,” and by rejecting a brewer’s top-dollar sponsorship, the school had to settle for less money from other advertisers. Despite this laudable unilateral move, Iowa cannot alter the Big Ten or NCAA television contracts, or the regional and national beer ads that stream across the TV screens viewed by its students.

  In April 2000, the UI student newspaper examined the Stepping Up program, “formed in 1996 with a five-year $830,000 grant to combat UI’s binge drinking rate. Nearly three years and almost $400,000 later,” a recent UI campus survey of binge drinking revealed that “the rate hasn’t budged.” The program had encountered the intransigence of the collegiate subculture and its resistance to change. During the three years, campus drinking had increasingly migrated to off-campus locations. The Daily Iowan report is discouraging news: the single most ambitious anti-binge drinking campaign ever conducted at an American university has not yet dented the problem.

  Iowa undergraduates clarified this result: one woman commented that some of the non-alcoholic activities sponsored by Stepping Up were interesting but, “I have a lot of friends who won’t go out with me if it doesn’t involve alcohol.” Other UI students noted the proliferation of sports bars in the Iowa City area, and their popularity with female as well as male students.

  Joel Eskovitz, the 1999 editor-in-chief of the Indiana Daily Student, explained part of the attraction of binge drinking for undergraduates at Big Ten schools like Indiana and Iowa, and how the pleasures sometimes rivaled those gained from sports: