- Barrett Seaman. Former Time Magazine editor, author of Binge and trustee of Hamilton College.
Drinking has always been a part of college life. Indeed the mere fact that alcohol has been associated with the idea of rebelling is partly what has contributed to it being seen as the root of many problems. The truth is, that as residential colleges started to become more common in the US, problems started to arise. These problems, including violence, sexual promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, destruction of property and other similar 'immature' decisions and behaviors started to become serious problems that campuses have to deal with. Because these young people were able to live some of their youth years away from parental - or really any - oversight, they naturally become, well, more rambunctious than they had been. Alcohol was as much a part of that as anything else, though it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to conclude that alcohol itself (with no distinction as to how its drunk) was the cause. More likely, excessive and abusive alcohol use (which may lead to some of those problems) became the norm on college campuses.
When discussing the problems that college campuses face now, especially in regards to alcohol, I sometimes forget that my college experience is very different than the college experience of many of those whom I'm speaking with, who may have gone to school 30 years ago. (A time when my alma mater was just being built!)
This was brought up to me at my recent lecture/discussion "Rethinking 21" in Lake Luzerne, NY by a friend/audience member, who reminded me that there may be a large discrepancy of how people define campus life and alcohol culture.
Barrett Seaman lays down an very accurate view of modern college life in his book Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You. He sums this up well by saying, after spending two weeks living in student housing at Hamilton, "My two-week stay made me realize how very different student life was compared to what I had experienced."
When I speak about the problems of youth alcohol abuse with people older than myself they often share stories about crazy drinking parties when they went to college, yet as Seaman also notes, those events rarely, if ever, led to emergency room visits, stomach pumping or death. Unfortunately, college campuses are too often visited by ambulances, and as a student leader for four years, helping to organize many campus events, the goal is to reduce the number of ambulance visits from the previous year. Off the record, staff and organizers will use the number of ambulance visits on campus during an event to measure an events success. Many larger schools see multiple ambulance visits as inevitable and often specifically reserve ambulances to standby on campus. That didn't used to happen.
Although drinking culture on college campuses has existed for decades, if not more, in the US, the problems facing young people are vastly different than before and require a serious re-examination of the state of our college campuses to fully understand the problems that exist. I'll end with a quote from my thesis, Breaking Taboo:
Further Reading
Binge, By Barret Seaman
When discussing the problems that college campuses face now, especially in regards to alcohol, I sometimes forget that my college experience is very different than the college experience of many of those whom I'm speaking with, who may have gone to school 30 years ago. (A time when my alma mater was just being built!)
This was brought up to me at my recent lecture/discussion "Rethinking 21" in Lake Luzerne, NY by a friend/audience member, who reminded me that there may be a large discrepancy of how people define campus life and alcohol culture.
Barrett Seaman lays down an very accurate view of modern college life in his book Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You. He sums this up well by saying, after spending two weeks living in student housing at Hamilton, "My two-week stay made me realize how very different student life was compared to what I had experienced."
When I speak about the problems of youth alcohol abuse with people older than myself they often share stories about crazy drinking parties when they went to college, yet as Seaman also notes, those events rarely, if ever, led to emergency room visits, stomach pumping or death. Unfortunately, college campuses are too often visited by ambulances, and as a student leader for four years, helping to organize many campus events, the goal is to reduce the number of ambulance visits from the previous year. Off the record, staff and organizers will use the number of ambulance visits on campus during an event to measure an events success. Many larger schools see multiple ambulance visits as inevitable and often specifically reserve ambulances to standby on campus. That didn't used to happen.
Although drinking culture on college campuses has existed for decades, if not more, in the US, the problems facing young people are vastly different than before and require a serious re-examination of the state of our college campuses to fully understand the problems that exist. I'll end with a quote from my thesis, Breaking Taboo:
Some studies may correlate – sometimes very loosely - certain behaviors, but until you’ve been on the wrong end of the drinking age, and are leaving a party of high school students and have actually watched groups of intoxicated kids pull out their cell phones as they drunkenly climb into their cars trying to find the next party so they can drink more, you are missing a critical perspective regarding the drinking age.
Further Reading
Binge, By Barret Seaman
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