Let's be honest

There is no safer college party environment in the United States than Prospect Avenue.

Not only is there no hard alcohol available in the clubs, but students go out with friends who look out for one another. There are officers present with a vested interest in keeping their clubs incident-free, and most importantly, there is no driving involved. Additionally, clubs spend thousands of dollars a month on security to regulate flow into the club and deal with any issues that could arise once members and guests are inside.

Dangerous drinking at Princeton occurs when alcohol, especially hard alcohol, is consumed in the absence of figures who are looking out for the drinker's wellbeing. Any Princeton student will tell you that room parties on campus are very different from going out to the Street.

The vast majority of the time, room parties involve hard liquor consumed at a fast rate and the complete lack of any figure akin to a club officer who can observe and regulate alcohol flow to the drinker. Indeed, the reason many people drink in their dorms is to get ready to go out to the Street where alcohol flow is less and there is no hard liquor to be found.

In all seriousness, a packed taproom and a lack of cups is not a recipe for drunkenness.

The eating clubs, of course, take the beating on campus drinking because at the end of the night it seems to be where everyone ends up. I would be extremely curious, however, to see statistics on the course of the nights of students requiring medical attention for alcohol. Something tells me that in a great majority of these cases, heavy drinking of hard liquor on campus is involved at one point or another.

As the former president of an eating club, I feel entitled to speak on this subject with some authority.

I will say this to President Tilghman and her administration: If the understanding of drinking at Princeton as a Street phenomenon does not change, something awful is going to happen to a Princeton student. If on-campus drinking is not seen as a major cause of alcohol-related incidents at Princeton and addressed in some way, then the situation will never improve and someone won't wake up after passing out.

Drinking in the dorms is especially dangerous because it usually involves underclassmen who may not know their limits as well as an older student does and may be very new to drinking. I went through months of legal issues this year dealing with a situation in which a younger student who, as it turns out, had drank heavily in their dorm before coming out to the Street required medical attention and mentioned my club while being questioned — while severely intoxicated, mind you.

If the Borough police and the administration are serious in their claim that it is not underage drinking that bothers them but instead dangerous binge drinking, then the eating clubs must be viewed as an ally to achieve this goal, not the enemy.

The enemy is the on-campus tradition of "pre-gaming," and the harder the crackdown on the clubs, the more the pre-gaming will turn into the actual game as students choose to stay in their dorms instead of heading to the Street.

The eating clubs are valuable to the University because they divert attention away from the campus proper whenever alcohol-related incidents occur.

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They are gorgeous buildings that adorn the front pages of local papers when such stories arise. But the covers of those same newspapers should show the gorgeous gothic architecture of the dorms that house Princeton students, because the incidents the papers talk of — hospitalizations and the like — are incidents that are not the fault of the Street. They are the fault of dangerous on-campus drinking.

It is time for shift in thinking, President Tilghman.

While it is convenient for the eating clubs to clean up the mess that comes wandering out to the Street on midnight two times a week, if you care about your students it is time for you to address on-campus drinking, the root of the problem. Cullen Newton is a politics major from Washington, D.C. He is the former president of Princeton Tower Club. His column appears every other Friday. Cullen can be reached at cnewton@princeton.edu.