Staff Editorial | Education key to curtailing dangerous drinking culture

What’s your limit? No, we don’t mean “limit” in terms of the number of shots you can take before you start dancing on tables. Instead, think of a limit this way: What’s the maximum amount of alcohol that a person of your build can handle before alcohol poisoning (a potentially life-threatening condition) occurs? It appears that many Vassar students do not know the answer, according to a group of deans who recently presented statistics that indicate an increase in high-risk drinking at the College.

Of the over 130 Emergency Medical Services (EMS) calls in Fall 2007, 80 were related to severe intoxication, and some students had blood alcohol levels that were potentially life-threatening, according to presenters at the Feb. 10 Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council meeting.

“A community concern is that alcohol is embedded in some ways with student culture, with the social life, with stress relief, with self medication and with peer pressure in ways that are uncomfortable,” said Dean of Students D.B. Brown, who attended the meeting.

Many of the incidents of severe intoxication were cases of freshmen who drank beyond their limits. Unsurprisingly, freshmen are the most likely group to drink beyond the limit that their body can process, a fact that can be attributed to students’ wide range of levels of exposure to alcohol and alcohol education before starting college. Although students are asked to participate in an online alcohol education course (AlcoholEdu) prior to their arrival, this only provides a small fraction of the education necessary to be properly informed about a college drinking environment.

What, then, is the solution to high-risk drinking? The answer would probably be more clear-cut if this phenomenon were unique to Vassar. As Time magazine reported in August 2005, “Pregaming is probably unfamiliar to people who went to college before the 1990s. But it is now a common practice among 18-, 19-, and 20-year-old students who cannot legally buy or consume alcohol. It usually involves sitting in a dorm room or an off-campus apartment and drinking as much hard liquor as possible before heading out for the evening’s parties.”

An easy solution, which was raised and discussed at the VSA Council meeting on Feb. 10, would be to remove alcohol-related items from the public eye—ranging from shot glasses that student organizations sell to our sports teams’ identities as Brewers. Under this faulty logic, Vassar would probably need to censor any mention of the fact that founder Matthew Vassar was a brewer.

As any Vassar student knows, the easiest answer is almost never the best answer (and easy answers, at times, tread on being ridiculous). Limiting alcohol-related iconography isn’t going to change the problem that many students unknowingly teeter closer and closer to drinking themselves to death as a result of not knowing their limits. Social drinking is deeply embedded in the culture of colleges and universities nationwide. While there are students who choose not to drink, it is dubious to claim that those who do drink are going to stop because just student organizations no longer sell shot glasses.

A shift needs to occur in the time that Vassar devotes to alcohol education. AlcoholEdu is one step toward educating students about the fact that being aware of drinking limits is not about paternalism but is instead about making sure that students stay alive and healthy. Taking AlcoholEdu as a jumping-off point, student fellows should have regular and frank conversations with their fellowees about drinking throughout the fall and spring semesters.

Repetition can be tedious, but it is also key for teaching any concept: Tell students three times, four times, five times, 10 times about the limited amount of alcohol that the human body can process. A consistent message delivered by a peer and mentor will sink in, even if reiteration is not a glamorous pedagogy.

It would actually help to post bulletin boards with charts that plot the number of drinks per hour against a person’s body weight in order to demonstrate how quickly a person’s blood alcohol level rises. The current alcohol education board is in a dark corner above a trash can in the Retreat. Putting boards around the College—including in academic buildings, where students spend much of their time—would be another way to ensure that students know why limits matter.

Will consistent conversations with student fellows and a handful of bulletin boards solve the problem of student binge drinking? No, probably not. But beginning with student fellows and education is a more productive starting point than abolishing shot glasses and other alcohol-related iconography.

A major key to a successful shift in drinking culture at Vassar will be for the College to avoid the impulse to impose a paternalistic message about drinking as dangerous or bad, and to instead focus on framing an understanding of alcohol limits as a way that students can self-determine their (healthy) adult lives.

Put simply, Vassar student culture is created by students. Within a few months, Vassar will be accepting the Class of 2012, and the onus will be on students in the Classes of 2011, 2010 and 2009—not solely on the shoulders of administrators—to continue a cultural shift in how Vassar students approach drinking in order to ensure that no Vassar student drinks themselves to death.

—The staff editorial reflects the opinion of at least two-thirds of the 13-member editorial board.