The Ol' Bloviator has not gotten so old that he doesn't
recall ranting about the "get-drunk-party-till-you-puke-or-pass out-or-both"
culture that dominates the student scene at far too many of our universities
these days. Since this comprehensive report on the pathological potential of booze-fueled fraternity life ran in The Atlantic
a while back, outrageous accounts of massive alcohol abuse linked to deaths, physical
injury and especially to sexual assault, have become standard fare in major
newspapers and magazines. Despite individual and programmatic efforts by campus
administrators to curb it, binge drinking appears to be a regular activity for
four in ten of today's students. Recent data shows roughly 1,800 college students
die each year from some sort of alcohol-related injury, and some 97,000 annually
report sexual assaults where alcohol was a contributing factor.
Escalating
concerns about rapes committed on and around campus took on even greater
urgency after Rolling Stone's recent
piece about this problem at no-less-storied an institution than "Mr. Jefferson's University"
in Charlottesville, which was already under serious federal scrutiny for its
inadequate handling of previous sexual assault charges. RS's report centered on "Jackie," a female student who claimed that
she had been brutally gang-raped as a freshman after attending a party at the
Phi Kappa Psi house in 2012 and that, while apparently sympathetic, university
officials discouraged her from pursuing her claim or discussing the incident
publicly and took no action against her accused assailants.
Skeptical of
some of the details of Jackie's account, the Washington Post and
other media outlets opted for a little fact-checking on their own and are now
reporting that certain of her claims about the identity of her alleged
assailant and the place and date of the alleged assault could not be
corroborated, Rolling Stone's
representatives admit that they may have given Jackie too much benefit of the
doubt and that they ran the story without securing comment from those she
accused. Jackie continues to stand by her account, however, and her supporters
point out that confusion about details is not uncommon among deeply traumatized
victims of sexual assault. Still, this sorry and reckless excuse for journalism
is certain to bolster the skepticism of those who think the prevalence sexual
victimization on campus is overblown.
For their part, however, UVA administrators, who
responded to the initial RS article
by clamping down hard on Phi Kappa Psi and other campus fraternities, have not
leapt forward to claim vindication merely by virtue of the holes poked in
Jackie's story as it was reported. Rather, in what may be a classic case of
better late than never, they have reaffirmed their awareness that university
has some serious 'splainin' to do where
handling sexual assault charges is concerned. Thus quoth UVA prez Teresa
Sullivan: "Over the
past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the
most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual
violence on college campuses. Today's news must not alter this focus. Here at
U.Va., the safety of our students must continue to be our top priority, for all
students, and especially for survivors of sexual assault."
This stance
is, to say the least, prudent. Not only because of the federal investigators
who continue to hover about, but because UVA's history in this area demands it.
The university's "honor code," which not only forbids acts of academic
dishonesty but demands that students report such acts by others, is a genuine
point of pride among students, faculty, and alums. The thing is, however,
although 183 students have been expelled
for honor-code violations since 1998, there is no record of a single matriculant having been expelled for
sexual assault, including those who have admitted to it. Given the revelations
of countless investigations and surveys of the incidence of sexual assaults on
campus, a ratio of 183-0 would seem pretty hard to justify.
For all the
questions about the details of Jackie's personal account, the RS piece nonetheless provides credible
evidence of an entrenched social hierarchy whose exclusiveness not only
discourages female students from filing claims of sexual assault but
aggressively stigmatizes and marginalizes those who do. The OB has always
wished that his own university could achieve a greater semblance of the
powerful sense of academic purpose that pervades the UVA campus, and he still
does. Secretly at least, he has also been taken with the notion as one student
put it, "the most impressive person at UVA is the person who gets straight A's and
goes to all the parties." The more he ponders the significance of such a
student role model, however, the more the O.B. is forced to consider its full
implications. What happens to all the kids bent on establishing their bonafides
as both budding scholars and big-time drinkers when pursuing both goals proves
mutually exclusive? Outfit yourself with the emotional maturity of an
eighteen-year-old, even a very bright one, and venture a guess as to which aim
is most likely to be compromised.
All of the dangerous and potentially disastrous
possibilities that arise when young people are put in a situation where they
are free to choose beers over books (and most anything else) are brought home
quite literally in this Chronicle of
Higher Education story that shows our beloved Classic
City virtually Dawg paddling in '"a river of booze.".As these things go, this piece seems reasonably balanced, notably more so
than the RS expose on UVA. There are
concerned people, like UGA Police Chief Jimmy Williamson and alcohol counseling
specialist Liz Prince, who seem to be doing what they can to reduce underage
drinking or excessive drinking in a downtown which offers 50 bars within a
quarter of a mile of campus, as well as roughly that many more restaurants that
also serve alcohol.
Ironically, legend has it that Athens was chosen over
nearby Watkinsville as the site for the nation's first state-chartered
university because the latter was already home to a prospering tavern likely to
corrupt the college lads. The writers trace Athens's history as "a big booze town" to the 1980s when, with
downtown businesses closing or migrating out to "mall-ville" and only a
relatively few bars downtown, UGA officials began trying to cut down on
drinking at frat houses, even issuing a ban on keggers. Fearful that downtown
would continue hemorrhaging businesses to the 'burbs and eager to accommodate
thirsty young collegians, municipal officials did not limit the number of bars
or restaurants that started to pop up, especially after the city's music scene
exploded. Despite credible efforts to make bar owners and bouncers more
accountable, however, for local officials it all came down to, as one
tavern-keeper put it, "they hate we're here, but they love the money." One
reckons so, since Athens-Clarke County reportedly collects seven cents on the
dollar for every mixed drink, in addition to a three-cent excise tax and a
twenty-two-cent levy for every bottle of booze emptied. Needless to say, the
proprietors of Athens's drinking establishments are not particularly opposed to
making money either, and they scramble mightily to keep their places packed
into the wee hours. To remain competitive, some bars resort to unannounced "specials"
involving one-cent beers, free drinks for women, etc., all of which are spread
instantly across a vast network of texters and tweeters leading, practically in
the blinking of an already bloodshot eye, to wholesale migration of committed
young boozers from one watering hole to another. And so it goes, until
mandatory closing hours force them to disgorge their drunken denizens onto the
streets of Athens, where the scene can easily turn from celebratory to scary in
the drooping of an eyelid.
For example, a Chronicle writer
looks on as UGA police discover a young man "lying on a public bench, at the
end of a trail of vomit. He is unconscious; his front pocket gapes, a wallet
falling partway out. An officer shakes him, and again, finally rousing him.
'How much,' the officer demands, 'have you had to drink?'" The kid's response
of "Zero, Zero?" is needless to say, undermined by his present condition and
circumstances; the trusty Breathalyzer simply confirms the obvious, and he is
off to jail. "I can't just leave him on a bench with a citation in his pocket,"
Chief Williamson explains. "A citation's not going to sober him up."
There is also the
student who "has tripped and fallen after a night out and hit her head.
Officers arrive to find Jacqueline, a nineteen-year-old with long,
honey-colored hair, stretched out on the cold slab of a bus stop, surrounded by
concerned friends. After falling she was unresponsive, for maybe thirty
seconds, maybe a minute or two--no one seems quite clear--but long enough to
prompt a call to 911. Now an egg-shaped welt has begun to swell next to her
right eye, and her speech is slurred. Asked who is the president of the United
States, she names her sorority president." (This is no laughing matter, of
course, but the image of Barack Obama trying to bring a meeting of chatty
Tri-Delts to order might well serve as a metaphor for his efforts with the
Senate.) In this case, Jacqueline is bundled off to the ER, but UGA's
campus cops are reportedly making 900-1,000 underage drinking arrests a year,
and although they have caught considerable flak for being too aggressive on
this front, even casual observers of the early morning scene downtown will
surely see this figure as indicative of a restrained approach.
It is hardly news that
college students drink a lot and always have, but if you are using this to
persuade yourself that there is nothing to be bothered about here, your head is
buried not in sand, but concrete. As the writers note, "Average blood-alcohol
levels in students stopped by the police have risen steadily--this year one blew
a 0.33, more than four times the legal limit. With heavier drinking, the police
now make drunk-driving arrests in midmorning, pulling over students on their
way to class still intoxicated from the night before."
The O.B. has no reason
to doubt this based on the number of students he has encountered in morning
classes who show up smelling as if they just crawled out of a vat of Natty
Light and proceed immediately to surrender themselves to the clutches of
Morpheus in a head-thrown-back, mouth-wide-open-pose that seems de rigueur when
sleeping off a world-class bender. It is hard to think of a more underweighted
or unrepresentative stat than the 25 percent of college students who admit to
academic difficulties brought on by alcohol abuse. If you could throw in those
who don't even recognize this has happened and those who do but simply won't
admit it, that number would doubtless shoot up dramatically.
We might well yammer
back and forth forever about whether universities or law enforcement officials
have done enough to try to curb student alcohol abuse without realizing that we
are letting one critical group of culpables off scot free. Chief Williamson
notes that the mother of the aforementioned young "Zero, Zero," who was found
virtually insensate on a public bench, practically begging to be robbed and/or
assaulted, did not take kindly to his arresting her innocent little boy. He is
quick--and correct--to point out that, thanks to this kind of indulgent excuse
for parenting, too many freshmen show up in Athens with a firmly established
drinking habit as part of their baggage. Though he speaks to thousands of
students a year about the dangers of excessive drinking, "How can I do
something in five minutes," he asks, that their parents "couldn't do in 18
years?" The Chronicle writer adds that "too many parents have
failed to talk to their children about responsible alcohol use. They've looked
the other way. They've dismissed binge drinking and other risky behavior with,
'Kids will be kids.'" In reality, so thinks the O.B. anyway, they have actually
done worse than that by trying to be kids along with their kids, succumbing to
some nostalgia-blinded notion that it's OK to relive their own collegiate years
through their children, as if the perils and pressures awaiting their
college-bound offspring are no different than they were thirty years ago. The
O.B was around back then, and, in outright defiance of fate, gravity, and
public opinion, he is still around today. He knows better, and if the Moms
and Dads of today's collegians would drop the Peter Pan fantasy and face up to
reality, they would, too. It's much easier, though, to abandon any pretense of
trying seriously to discourage underage and/or excessive drinking, wink at fake
I.D.s and reports of prodigious alcohol ingestion, and chuckle about Tara and
Trey simply being chips off the old one-time champion chugger block. This may
be a sure-fire way to endear yourselves to your kids but it's also a no
less certain means of putting them at greater risk. The O.B. has never been too
keen about universities operating in loco parentis, but by
golly, when the parents abdicate their responsibilities and go plumb loco
themselves, a poor substitute seems better than none.
