Community without peril

While different students have different things to say about drinking, one theme has emerged from these students' many and often divergent views: Drinking at Princeton has everything to do with community - just as it does on campuses across the country.

This drinking-community nexus manifests itself in various ways. At one of the workshops, some students talked about drinking - including very heavy drinking - as a way for groups to bond. In that context, some students compared the shared suffering resulting from excessive drinking to the shared suffering of early-season sports practices. Another student described being handed a beer early in his freshman year at Princeton and recognizing that he was being tested to see whether he was cool enough to belong to a particular group. Other students talked about alcohol as a social lubricant that lowers inhibitions and makes it easier to strike up a conversation with someone who might otherwise seem intimidating. For them, alcohol represented a harmless catalyst to the creation and expansion of social networks.

While these ways of characterizing the uses of alcohol differ from one another, they all ascribe a central role to drinking in the creation and maintenance of communities and community at Princeton. There is nothing especially surprising about that. Alcohol is connected to community in a wide variety of contexts, as evidenced by the fact that drinking figures in significant cultural and religious events in many different traditions.

All of this would be of merely academic interest but for the fact that some of the drinking that emerges in the Princeton community is of the high-risk variety. This pattern does not distinguish Princeton from most other campus communities in the United States, and I know of no reason to suppose that Princeton has a more serious problem with high-risk drinking than most other colleges. But that many American campuses share a high-risk drinking problem does not mean that high-risk drinking is inevitable. Instead, it means that many campus communities are built in part on a self-destructive foundation. And once we have seen that drinking is connected with building community, we might reasonably ask whether there are ways to build strong communities that neither rely on nor foster high-risk drinking.

As it happens, Princeton is not the first institution to grapple with this question. Colleges and universities as diverse as Emory, Colgate, St. Lawrence, Georgetown, Barnard and Syracuse have all begun projects aimed at making their communities healthier by building on existing community strengths and tapping untapped collective resources.

That, of course, is how it must happen. Communities cannot be rebuilt from the ground up. While we can learn from others' experiences, Princeton's history, traditions and circumstance are unique, and it would be a mistake to think we could import a mechanism from elsewhere and install it here.

Instead, the goal must be to think collectively about the University's distinctive resources and how they can be mobilized most effectively to build on what is best about this community. These resources include the residential colleges, relatively young institutions in the context of Princeton's long history, whose potential benefits for Princeton students are still being explored. They also include the eating clubs, athletic teams, service organizations, academic department, and other places where students choose to come together based on shared interests and goals. Student leaders in these diverse contexts will need to step forward and show how their organizations can play a role in developing the best possible Princeton.

When we talk about high-risk drinking, we often forget what the risks are: immediate health and safety threats to the drinker, substantial increases in the frequency of drunk driving, substantial increases in the incidence of rape and unsafe sex, and long-term increases in the incidence of alcoholism, to name just a few. Some communities experience far more high-risk drinking than others. Reducing the incidence of high-risk drinking in our community is a goal all of us should share. An event this afternoon creates an opportunity to work toward that goal. "Would Increasing Social Capital Decrease High-Risk Drinking?" - bringing together scholars and campus leaders experienced in designing, implementing and evaluating institutions and programs aimed at creating the conditions for strong residential communities on college and university campuses - will be held today in Friend 006, beginning at 1:30 p.m. and running until 4:30.