Alcohol education seems like a good idea. Anything we can do to reduce the number of calls made to EST on any given Friday night should be positive. The AlcoholEdu program mandated by Residential Life, however, uses a counterproductive approach.
This year, all freshmen were forced to endure an informational video lasting more than two hours. Accompanying the video was a quiz to assess the information absorbed. Some of that information is quite helpful. Anyone who is going to drink should know what a BAC is and how to calculate it. It’s good to know how much liquid is in a standard shot or how many drinks a person can metabolize in an hour.
The majority of the video, however, blurs together in a poor imitation of a condensed D.A.R.E program. An annoyingly chipper, disembodied female voice explains that people may be drinking more now because it’s college. The voice goes through every stereotypical stratification of student found on campus, making sure to explain that athletes and members of the Greek community are more likely to be alcoholics.
But “don’t worry,” says the voice. If you play sports and are Greek, you may still not be a high-risk drinker.” That’s very reassuring, but it seems a mite ridiculous to spend an hour explaining to incoming freshmen who will and will not be drinking around them. Whether a person drinks or not should be a personal decision, and it should not be based on misleading statistics about sports and fraternities.
All of this is assuming that people are watching the video, which, to be honest, probably isn’t happening. It would be extremely easy to mute the computer and have the video playing in the background while Johnny Freshman learns the finer points of Snood. This is a problem. Given the length of this video and the rudimentary, sometimes insulting nature of its content, freshmen may end up ignoring essential information about alcohol in their haste to get past the tedium of watching the AlcoholEdu presentation.
In addition, the important information is something everyone should know, not just freshmen. The AlcoholEdu Web site is on lockdown for anyone who doesn’t have a password and user ID-and the only people issued those IDs are freshmen. Are we afraid someone might hack into the Web site and learn something?
A smug two-hour video is not the way to go. As part of Orientation, a group viewing of a much shorter, more pertinent, less condescending informational video would be much more appropriate and more conducive to eliciting satisfactory results.