University forum addresses high-risk drinking

The open forum in Wu Hall was part of a series of events planned by the Alcohol Coalition Committee (ACC), formed last spring to tackle high-risk drinking on campus.

“One reason for this workshop is that often people don’t know exactly what the policies are,” Wilson College Master Marguerite Browning said. “That includes students, staff and faculty.”

Since its inception, the ACC has held workshops and stakeholder meetings to generate ideas about alcohol education, created a senior exit survey addressing alcohol use on campus and established three working groups and two executive teams. About 30 students and 50 members of the faculty, staff and community were present Friday.

The opening speaker for the workshop, John Baker ’09, recalled his experiences with substance abuse.

“As far back as I can remember, I was fixated with everything about alcohol, going back to the age of 3,” he said. “When I arrived on campus, I just didn’t have a chance.”

He explained that his self-destructive drug habits led to his withdrawal from the University in the spring of his freshman year for counseling. Within 15 minutes of returning as a freshman the following year, he said, he was arrested for possession of cocaine and suspended for a year.

“I went back home and basically felt like I was wasting away before I went to in-patient rehab,” he said. “Listening to people who had similar experiences as I did with drugs and alcohol, something just clicked: My life was on the line.”

Baker, now a sixth-year senior, noted that honest conversations between students and administrators about alcohol will “help prevent people like [him] from making their parents’ lives and their own lives a living hell.”

Friday’s forum was designed to facilitate such conversations and included topics such as pre-gaming and the roles of Public Safety and McCosh. The discussion was not intended to lead to policy, according to the ACC’s website. Participants moved between seven tables at which they could sit at any time during two discussion sessions. In this article, all quotes that are attributed were included at the request of the individuals named.

John Caves ’12, who sat at the table “From the Student’s Perspective” noted that one cause of excessive drinking on campus is the monotony of the social scene.

“In eating clubs, I find that I get bored really quickly, so if you want to have a good time, you kind of have to drink,” he said.

He added, “You don’t get pressured by others, only by yourself.”

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A senior, who admitted to past drinking problems, disagreed, saying that the pressure to drink is external.

“When you take a bunch of socially awkward, really intelligent people, a lot of them think that drinking is the only way to make friends and have a good time,” she said. “I saw many people who never talk in class being really social and putting themselves out there when they were drunk at parties.”

Most students were in agreement during the debate on policy flaws.

“You have to take a quiz in the summer [before freshman year] to show how much you know about alcohol, but after that, the discussion disappears, and no one talks about it,” another freshman said of the Alcohol.edu program, adding that most of his friends skipped the “mandatory” follow-up later in the fall with impunity.

“AlcoholEdu is just stupid,” Michael Weinberg ’11 said. “It needs to be Princeton-specific because we have a unique social scene.”

He supported employing AlcoholEdu’s data-driven approach in a different way.

“We have to change the norms and the perceptions of students about the percentage of students who don’t drink,” Weinberg explained. “If they come on campus thinking everyone drinks, but the data proves otherwise, they might be less likely to drink from the start.”

Kathleen Galeano ’12 said that the best alcohol education is “by students, for students.”

“Information overload is something that students tend to respond negatively to,” she noted. “An alcohol-centered counterpart to ‘Sex on a Saturday Night’ would entertain and inform students without making them feel like they’re being lectured to.”

Josh Miller ’12, who was initially skeptical about the workshop, said he was pleasantly surprised.

He added, “I do drink, so I thought it would be a good idea to bring another perspective to the discussion, but I realize now that my perspective isn’t at all unique.”