Johnny ChangDrinking is bad for you.
OK, maybe one glass of red wine is good for your heart, but if you drink much more you can kiss your liver goodbye. But wait, you ask, drinking may be bad for your body, but isn’t there a great social benefit? The truth is, I’ve never met anyone for whom alcohol has done spectacular things. Nice drunks are usually pretty nice sober, and mean drunks are no fun. The one thing drinking gives people is a bad excuse to do things which are socially unacceptable under normal circumstances (hitting on your roommate’s sister, for example).
Because drinking is bad, I am convinced that people should drink less-and by “people” I mean myself and every other student at this university. Let’s face it, there are a lot of people here that probably drink too much a little too often. So I am sympathetic to the aims of the University, which has been gradually tightening its alcohol policy ever since I came here as a freshman.
A major part of the recent push to reduce alcohol consumption is the social norming campaign, Just the Facts. According to the campaign’s website, its goal is to correct misperceptions of “normative expectations (social norms) around drinking.” That is, students think other students drink more than they actually do, which causes students to drink more. If we can get students not to think other students drink so much, students won’t drink so much.
I have no moral objection to the campaign. I don’t mind most kinds of propaganda, since they seldom manage to convince me of anything. For exactly this reason, though, I doubt its efficacy. Pictures of ethnically diverse students having good, sober fun won’t affect my drinking habits. Besides, if students aren’t really drinking all that much, why are we trying to get them to drink less? Trying to fix a drinking problem by denying the problem actually exists seems an odd strategy.
Far more bothersome are the coercive parts of the University’s strategy. These involve more stringent requirements for registering parties (for example in Millbrook, where the number of parties per week is now limited) and breaking up parties that are not registered (as happened at Beta recently). WILD’s alcohol regulations become more restrictive every year. I have even heard anecdotal evidence of WUPD handing out alcohol citations to students.
These are all fine ways to reduce drinking. After all, if you make it harder to drink, people will drink less. But that does little to prepare students for the real world. Washington University will not be able to regulate our alcohol intake for our entire lives. By pursuing these policies, then, the University is failing in its mission to get students ready for real life.
Human beings are beings of choice. Some choices we make out of inner conviction, some based on habit, and some based on rewards and punishments from others. Of these, we will only take our convictions and habits with us after graduation, and both are extremely difficult to influence. They cannot be changed by statistics and pictures, and they will not be changed by harassment.
So if you want “just the facts,” here they are: the alcohol problem is not a university problem. It is a cultural problem that has come about because young people are not put in situations where responsible drinking is normal. Parties do not encourage good drinking habits, whether or not a majority of students has less than 5 drinks, for the party always has an element of the Bacchanal, of excess. Instead of confining alcohol to parties, students should be drinking a glass of beer or wine at dinner.
And yet, this is impossible. As a result of state law and university regulations, student drinking must take place behind closed doors and away from society’s gaze. Nevertheless, only drinking among responsible adults will teach young people that drinking too much is a social embarrassment. Young people’s alcohol use cannot be socially normed because their use of alcohol is by definition abnormal. Students will only become healthy, “normal” drinkers when their drinking takes place in Center Court instead of on Frat Row.