A time to swill

Tomorrow is Newman's Day. As a holiday to be observed, Newman's Day presents would-be revelers with a plain physical challenge: consume 24 beers, in 24 hours. As a cultural practice, it offers ample material to any alert anthropologist.

Any doctor will tell you that trying to drink 288 ounces of anything in a day — roughly twenty pounds of fluid weight — is probably not a good idea. Trying to metabolize that much alcohol, the doctor would also point out, is not the best way to make friends with your liver.

But college students from time immemorial have chosen to spend a few years shunning the reasonable advice of their elders, and most emerge none the worse off for it. As long as medical care is freely available without stigma, the odds that a single day of excess will become a tragedy are reasonably remote. Newman's Day is surely stupid and self-destructive, but the practice of letting people discover the virtues of moderation through trial and error is not. Princeton's drinking culture could, obviously, be more healthy — but we think a student-led effort to discourage full observance of Newman's Day, rather than a crackdown on its observers, is the best way to promote improvement.

Of course, students aren't the only people who care about excessive drinking — local hospitals clogged with hungover Princetonians do little to improve relations between town and gown. If you need an extra reason not to do Newman's Day, consider the effect a wave of sick students might have on the public attitudes that have guided local police to undertake their current crackdown against the clubs. We find it ironic that this weekend, as Newman's Day victors emerge bleary-eyed from their rooms, they will find Communiversity underway — the annual zenith of the University's effort to ingratiate itself with local residents. We hope, after Thursday. that they will still feel like celebrating. — The Daily Princetonian Opinion Board