Taking the initiative

When you think you might have an alcohol problem, the first step toward controlling that condition is admitting that it exists. Since it introduced the Trustees Alcohol Initiative in the fall of 1999, the University has started coming to terms with its own problem — the extent to which alcohol underpins student social life — and begun mobilizing resources to help limit alcohol abuse on campus and expand alcohol-independent social options. The new Prospect Initiative, coming into effect next fall, shows that administrators and students are carrying this response one step further, redirecting their attention to the garrisons of Princeton's alcohol-centered social scene: the eating clubs.

The campaign to support social alternatives to the Street must overcome many students' cynicism, apathy and hardwired social preferences. When compared to the battle that the individual alcoholic must wage, though, the University has a clear advantage: In order to score a major victory, it need not (nor could it hope to) expunge alcohol from campus social life. All the University really needs to do is make a big enough dent in Princeton's social space for a critical mass of alcohol-free social activity to develop.

But it's not clear what effect the Trustees' Initiative has had on alcohol consumption at the Street. Until recently, it has primarily served as seed money for alcohol-free social and cultural events around the periphery of the campus social scene, injecting a little more life in venues like the residential colleges, Frist Campus Center and the Fields Center. Only recently, as Initiative money has been used to support large concerts and events on the Street itself, has the University even entered this larger arena where its campaign to diversify the social scene must be played out.

Cynics will say it's just good PR for a university whose local reputation has been marred by a string of high-profile alcohol-related incidents over the last decade. But it also goes at least partway toward showing a real commitment to the task of weakening alcohol's hold on campus social life. If the new Prospect Initiative can give nonalcoholic options a foot in the door of the 11 eating clubs, it has the chance to be more than a merely a gesture toward loosening alcohol's grip on Princeton social life.

While ensuring that at least one nonalcoholic event will take place at the Street each weekend, however, the Prospect Initiative may not go far enough in practice toward its noble goal of creating a healthier and more spontaneous Street, and campus-wide, social environment.

But it's a step in the right direction.