Features - March 24, 1999
Confronting the beast
It begins at 9:30 on a Thursday night when John the sophomore arrives
at a room party in Holder Hall. He has a few beers and talks to friends.
At some point, one of his roommates pulls him into a corner of the room,
where he and a couple of other guys take long swigs from a bottle of cheap
vodka. Although the hosts have drawn their shades over the windows to disguise
the party, two proctors, probably drawn by the Dave Matthews Band blasting
from the stereo, show up at the door and throw everyone out at 11. John
and five friends walk out to Prospect Street.
A little after midnight, John is playing his third game of Robopound
in the tap room of a club. He loses, again, which means that he and his
three teammates have to split a pitcher of beer. John's feeling brave, so
he drinks half the pitcher. Soon afterward, the evening gets fuzzy. He remembers
dancing for a while, and talking to a girl from his history precept. He
remembers another drinking game. At 2:30 that morning he's sitting in the
club's backyard and throwing up on his new Nike Airs. He pulls himself together,
chews a stick of gum and goes back inside to try to find a girl who will
go home with him. When it becomes obvious that he's not going to be successful,
he plays another drinking game. He's not sure what happens next, but around
4, having vomited all over the bathroom in his dorm, he falls into bed.
John's night was not unusual. In fact, for a substantial group of students,
such nights are fairly common. According to the most recent report of the
national Core Alcohol and Drug Survey, released last fall, nine percent
of Princeton undergraduates consume more than 15 drinks a week. An additional
34 percent said they engaged in binge drinking -- meaning that they consumed
more than five drinks in one sitting -- at least once in the two weeks prior
to the survey. Those numbers, which basically haven't changed since the
1993 and 1995 surveys, put Princeton right around the national average for
four-year colleges. "Alcohol is not an imaginary problem either here
or on other college campuses," President Shapiro says.
Of course, heavy drinking at Princeton isn't new. F. Scott Fitzgerald
'17's description of Princeton in This Side of Paradise contains
plenty of references to alcohol -- including a student killed while driving
drunk. In 1968, Cannon Club set a Houseparties record by consuming 52 kegs
in one weekend. That past makes undergraduates a little touchy when alumni
criticize their drinking habits. Still, serious binge drinking does seem
to be a relatively recent phenomenon. "We tend to remember the past
through rose-colored glasses," says W. Taylor Reveley III '65, "but
I don't remember people drinking a great deal in a short period of time
simply to get smashed. I don't remember people being dragged away to the
hospital." Statistics from McCosh Health Center support that idea:
the number of students treated for alcohol poisoning leapt from 26 to 39
between 1983 and 1984, and by the early 1990s McCosh was treating 60 students
a year.
THE COSTS OF DRINKING
Although the fact that undergraduates drink heavily is not exactly breaking
news, Princeton is finding that the costs of its drinking problem are rising.
First and foremost is the issue of student safety. Since most of the drinking
at Princeton happens either at the clubs or on campus, the university doesn't
have a big problem with drinking and driving. But there are other safety
concerns. An intoxicated freshman fell to his death from the roof of Campbell
Hall in 1985, and in 1990, Bruce L. Miller Jr. '93, after drinking at several
eating clubs, nearly electrocuted himself on top of the Dinky. This year,
a senior who had gotten drunk at a class event in Triumph Brewing Company
(a restaurant and pub on Nassau Street), ran off one of the roofs of Firestone
Library and fell 15 feet onto pavement. He landed on his face, yet escaped
with only minor injuries. And, of course, there was the Nude Olympics, which
sent six students to the Princeton Medical Center with alcohol poisoning.
"Severe drunkenness isn't seen as funny anymore," says Dean of
Student Life Janina Montero. "It's seen as dangerous. The likelihood
of injury or accident just increases so dramatically with the use of alcohol."
There is other damage affiliated with heavy drinking -- both to property
and to the students themselves. The post-party carnage on campus often defies
decency: when several deans walked through Holder after the Nude Olympics,
they found urine in the hallways, vomit covering the bathrooms, stall doors
ripped down, and trash strewn everywhere. The university has a serious morale
problem among its maintenance and cleaning staff, many of whom think that
cleaning up the students' messes is a degrading job. "Either these
students are too drunk to care," one janitor says, "or they have
no respect for other people."
Heavy drinking also leads to other, less obvious forms of destructive
behavior. A recent survey at Harvard found that frequent binge drinkers
are seven to 10 times more likely to both engage in unplanned sexual activity
and not use protection during sex. The Core survey, which looks at drinking
at many colleges and universities around the country, found that 64 percent
of students who had been sexually assaulted reported using alcohol or drugs
before the attack. Trustee Marsha Levy-Warren '73 says that on Princeton's
campus, "Virtually every instance of physical and sexual abuse has
been alcohol-related." A number of national surveys have also linked
academic performance to alcohol use -- the Core survey, for example, found
that the average "A" student consumed 3.3 drinks per week while
the average "D" or "F" student consumed 9 drinks per
week. Furthermore, organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous point out
that many alcoholics first develop their habits during college years, when
binge drinking can go largely unquestioned and unchecked.
On an institutional level, many professors and administrators privately
believe that the culture of alcohol at Princeton is hurting the university's
efforts to diversify. Last fall's report by the Faculty Study Group on Undergraduate
Admissions, which pointed out that Princeton was having trouble attracting
some of the students it most desired, cited the "alcohol-centered nature
of the social life" as one of the reasons frequently given by admitted
students who choose not to matriculate. Minority students in particular
seem wary of the campus climate, and Princeton recently failed to make Black
Enterprise magazine's list of the top 50 schools for black students
-- even though the magazine took into account academic as well as social
criteria.
THE SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS
Princeton's administration has not been blind to the alcohol problem.
The first crisis of President Shapiro's administration came in 1988, during
club sign-ins night, when more than 40 students ended up in McCosh Infirmary
-- and seven in the local hospital. In 1991, Shapiro declared that alcohol
abuse was "the single greatest threat to the university's fulfillment
of its mission," and he appointed an alcohol czar, Carl Wartenburg,
to look into possible solutions. McCosh received a $114,000 grant from the
Department of Education to teach students about the dangers of alcohol,
and the administration increased the penalties for violating the university's
alcohol policies.
Some progress has certainly been made. Reunions are undeniably different
today than they were 15 years ago, freshman orientation is no longer a five-day
party, and bicker went dry this year. Yet according to the Core survey numbers,
the university overall has made absolutely no statistical headway -- in
fact, the percentage of binge drinkers has actually risen. For over two
years now, a subcommittee of the Trustee Committee on Student Life, Health
and Athletics has been examining the abuse of alcohol at Princeton with
the goal of developing a more comprehensive strategy for attacking the problem.
Reveley, the chairman of the subcommittee, says, "What we need to do
is change the culture on campus. There's no magic solution -- we need to
involve all the pertinent parts of the university family."
The subcommittee asked virtually every group it could find on campus
to submit a proposal for addressing some aspect of alcohol abuse. The response
was excellent. At its January 23 meeting, the subcommittee reviewed over
80 proposals and selected a number of them for further discussion and development.
Student reaction to the trustee initiative has been predictably mixed. On
the positive side, an editorial in The Daily Princetonian said, "The
recommendations on countering campus alcohol abuse announced by the University
Board of Trustees deserve applause for their moderate tone." In particular,
the Prince commended the trustees' focus on education and providing
social alternatives. Princeton's approach does seem moderate, especially
when compared to schools such as Dartmouth -- where the trustees recently
voted to eliminate single-sex fraternities. "I think our approach is
unique," Montero says. "Other institutions have done a top-down
approach. We want the whole community to take on this issue with the idea
that we can all do more."
One obvious area where Princeton could improve would be providing more
social options for students who don't want to drink. "In a community
like Princeton," says Spencer Merriweather '00, president of the Undergraduate
Student Government, "people often say there's nothing to do at night.
That may seem like a stupid reason to drink, but the fact is that we have
to provide our students with other alternatives." As the USG has pointed
out, Princeton's campus -- in dramatic contrast to Prospect Street -- is
usually a dead zone after 11 on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. There's
no late-night movie club, few on-campus dances, and no 24-hour café
or diner. And while students may be partially to blame for not organizing
nonalcoholic events, the USG Projects Board and various student organizations
have long complained that university funding for such events has been inadequate.
For example, the number of funding requests that student groups filed with
the USG Projects Board doubled between 1997 and 1998, yet the amount of
available money remained the same. "We're all complicit in not creating
other activities," Montero says. The university seems serious about
creating options -- on the heels of the trustees' meeting, Provost Jeremiah
Ostriker announced that next year students will receive free ticket vouchers
for cultural events in the Princeton area, a program that will cost several
hundred thousand dollars.
The Camelot on the social horizon is the new Frist Campus Center, which
is scheduled to open in the fall of 2000. "We have a lot of eggs in
that basket," one administrator admits. How that space is used, however,
will determine its impact. Whether or not it will be a 24-hour facility
is still an unresolved question, and filling the new multipurpose room and
movie theater with consistent social programming seems contingent on the
university taking a much more active approach in mentoring student groups.
As Janelle Wright '00, head of the governing board of the Third World Center
(which runs many of the social events that cater to minority students),
said to the Prince this February, "We definitely need more administrative
support, especially financially."
Most of the proposals that the trustees are immediately implementing
involve educating students on the dangers of alcohol abuse. Mike Jackman
'92, an adviser to the clubs, says, "The biggest thing we worry about
is hard alcohol consumption that goes on before students get to the clubs.
There needs to be more education." While teaching students about alcohol
may on the surface seem like lecturing the Pope on religion, many students
don't seem to realize exactly how dangerous hard alcohol can be. At a party
several years ago, for example, a group of students replaced the 80-proof
vodka in a batch of Jell-O shots with 195-proof Everclear -- without telling
anyone. "I see kids do a lot of stupid stuff," says one senior.
"It's like they don't realize that chugging tequila is going to mess
you up."
While trustees and administrators are quick to claim that the university
isn't "cracking down" on alcohol abuse, some of the proposals
submitted to the trustees did recommend changing several university policies.
The Committee on Discipline recommended that the penalties for some infractions
be raised, including a mandatory suspension for any student caught serving
alcohol three times. University proctors and college masters will meet to
discuss how to consistently enforce the existing rules on drinking. The
trustee committee also endorsed removing any student caught committing alcohol-related
offenses against the community -- such as vandalism -- from student housing.
As a service to nondrinkers, the university has already created a small
"substance-free" housing block for next year, and if the trial
goes well, the program will be expanded. Most ominously for undergraduates
who enjoy their current three-day weekends, the Dean of the Faculty is currently
considering a big increase in the number of Friday classes, which are now
rarely scheduled.
THE CLUBS
Any discussion of drinking at Princeton must inevitably involve Prospect
Street. Princeton may not be unique in having a drinking problem, but the
11 private clubs that serve free beer most weekend (and some weekday) nights
make the problem more complex. The university has no direct control over
the clubs, and the clubs themselves are held together only by the loosely
organized Inter-Club Council. Jackman, who is employed by the Princeton
Prospect Foundation to find a middle ground between the clubs and the university,
points out that the clubs have made significant progress over the last 10
years. "The biggest change has been a larger sense of responsibility
on the part of the clubs," he says. "These places are more than
just frat houses. We're trying to teach kids to have fun and still be responsible
-- and liability keeps everyone awake."
In fact, there hasn't been a major incident at the clubs since last year's
bicker, when the parties spilled out onto the street on a Sunday afternoon
and raised hackles in the community. This year, bicker was dry. The clubs'
graduate boards, Jackman says, "felt that taking alcohol out of the
process created an aura of responsibility about the scene. It also removes
any questions about whether this can be considered hazing." Princeton
administrators do agree that the clubs have made progress. "The club
leadership -- graduate and undergraduate -- has taken some very important
and serious steps in the right direction," Montero says. "And
most clubs have been reasonably receptive." The clubs do always have
nonalcoholic options at their parties, and most clubs have tried to de-emphasize
alcohol at their big social events. "If there were no clubs,"
Jackman says, "students would just drink in their rooms." And,
as the clubs are quick to point out, all the drinking before this year's
disastrous Nude Olympics occurred at room parties.
What the clubs do provide is an opportunity for some Princeton students
to drink large quantities of free beer in an often unregulated setting.
And when trouble does arise, the clubs often frustrate university administrators
by being uncooperative during the disciplinary process. The clubs, of course,
are private entities -- which raises the question of whether what happens
behind their doors is Princeton's problem at all. The answer to that question
depends on who you ask. One student, a leader of a club on campus and a
former varsity athlete, says, "I am 20 years old. What I choose to
do at 2 in the morning in my club is my business. And it's hypocritical
of any alum who did the same thing to criticize me." But there are
other students who feel differently. Merriweather, for one, thinks that
the campus is becoming far more aware of the problem of alcohol abuse. "I
think students realize that it's something we need to change about our culture,"
he says.
Ultimately, if Princeton provides John the sophomore with other social
options, teaches him about the dangers of alcohol abuse, and punishes him
when he vandalizes his dorm or when his behavior affects other people --
if Princeton does all that and John still abuses alcohol... well, that will
say more about the culture of America than the culture at Princeton. But
if the university is to get to that point, both the trustees and leaders
on campus will have to maintain an unusual level of focus on their initiative,
because so many previous efforts have faded with time.
"Everyone in the country's struggling with this problem," Reveley
says. "And usually everyone stands on the sideline and says that it's
somebody else's problem. But it's not. It's everyone's problem."
Wes Tooke '98 is PAW's assistant editor.
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