• U.S.

Education: Campus Dryout

3 minute read
TIME

No one has ever succeeded very well at keeping college kids from drinking — but town and gown authorities have never stopped trying. In Princeton, N.J., last week Municipal Court Judge Russell Annich Jr. hit two Princeton University students with 30-day jail sentences and $500 fines for serving alcohol to minors at an initiation bacchanal last February. On that occasion, 39 pledges at two of Princeton’s notoriously wet eating clubs had wound up in the infirmary or the hospital after having been led, blindfolded, through a rite at which club members helped to pour liquor down their throats. One student lay in a coma for 24 hours.

Judge Annich refused to treat the matter as a simple “undergraduate frolic that got out of hand” and professed shock that “no one had the ability, desire or guts to intervene.” Denouncing the sentences as “totally inappropriate,” Defense Attorney Kim Otis claimed that his clients, Kenneth Simpler, 20, and Lisa Napolitano, 21, the president and social chairman of the Princeton Charter Club, had been unfairly singled out as scapegoats. Princeton’s President Harold Shapiro, while condemning the drinking incident, also criticized what he called “disproportionate and excessive” sentences.

Other colleges are experiencing similar alcohol-related confrontations. With every state but Wyoming having imposed a legal drinking age of 21, schools are faced with the task of trying to enforce selective prohibition. At the University of California, Berkeley, drinking has been banned from public areas of dormitories and at all fraternity and sorority rushes. Last April the University of Oregon forbade the purchase of liquor by the school’s 16 fraternities. In New Brunswick, N.J., last month Rutgers University students were indicted for aggravated hazing following the drink-related death in February of an 18-year-old Lambda Chi Alpha pledge. The university has since suspended the fraternity for at least five years.

But while such restrictive actions aim at cutting booze consumption, the fact is that students have become more furtive rather than more abstemious. Furthermore, they may be drinking harder stuff on the sly than they did in the open. A survey of 76 New York colleges and universities in 1986 showed that the percentage of schools with serious drinking problems actually rose from 38% to 43% after the state drinking age went from 18 to 21.

To stem this rising tide of alcohol, Berkeley, Stanford and a number of other schools have instituted undergraduate awareness programs featuring lectures and discussions on the dangers of drinking. A voluntary alcohol- awareness organization called Bacchus, begun at the University of Florida in 1976, has spread to some 280 campuses across the nation. “There has generally been much greater attention on what damage alcohol can do,” says Robert % Saltz, senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley. But he adds, “There is still very little consensus on what to do about it.”

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