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Binge drinking dismays college officials
Friday, August 27, 1999 By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
WASHINGTON -- More than four out of 10 American students engage in some level of "binge drinking" on the nation's college campuses, and Graham Spanier, president of Penn State University and chair of the NCAA Division I board of directors, intends to try to stop it.
"Alcohol has become the drug of choice on campuses today. . . . It's fashionable," Spanier said yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington. He said alcohol was now one of the top concerns whenever college administrators got together.
Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks at a time by a male and four or more by a female; men and women metabolize alcohol at different rates.
The urgency of what Spanier says is now "a major challenge" confronting all U.S. colleges and universities hit home at Penn State this week. A returning student went on a bar tour to down 21 alcoholic beverages on her 21st birthday and went into a coma. Her blood alcohol content was 0.682, or about seven times the legal limit.
On Sept. 10, Penn State, in association with land-grant colleges and universities, is spearheading a national advertising campaign to warn parents how prevalent binge drinking is and to alert students to how dangerous it can be.
Spanier, a family sociologist and therapist by training and author of 10 books, said that when he first brought his concerns about drinking on college campus to his board and to parents, he was disheartened at the low level of interest.
He said they told him many of them had partied too heartily in college but had turned out all right and that their children would, too. And, in fact, the number of college drinkers has not gone up significantly over the years.
The difference, he argues, is that while roughly the same percentage of students are drinking, they are drinking far more heavily and more often. They are drinking to "get drunk," he said. And students have, he said, far more money to drink than they used to have.
Twenty percent of binge-drinking students, he said, are going on binges three times or more a month.
Alcohol is now a factor in 40 percent of all academic problems and in 28 percent of all college dropouts.
Spanier and his colleagues are not aiming to stamp out all drinking by college students, realizing, he said, that this is a lost cause. "None of us in higher education will change the nature of youth. I'm not opposed to youthful indiscretions," he said, conceding that adolescence was a "transition to adulthood. There will be indiscretions."
But binge drinking is different, he says, insisting that it quickly becomes a reflection of character, civility, conduct and citizenship. Drinking is a major factor in unwanted sex, crime, property damage and fights.
What Spanier and his colleagues are trying to do is introduce to college students the concept of responsible drinking and safe drinking.
One way he hopes to do it is to enlist the help of fraternities and sororities, where there is more alcohol abuse than in residence halls, and to offer alternatives to drinking.
In the wake of a riot a year ago at State College that involved 1,500 students, many of them inebriated -- mayhem in which police officers were injured and parts of the downtown were heavily damaged -- Penn State's student union is now open 24 hours a day. It offers weekend concerts, late movies and classes in such social pastimes as ballroom dancing. "That's a big one," Spanier says of the dance class' popularity.
And he said the emergency room reports that he sees every month were showing a decline in the number of students admitted for alcohol-related reasons.
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