Good luck to James Madison University in its newly announced campaign to clamp down on drinking among students.
This problem has challenged some of the best minds on many campuses for many years. And they have found it resistant to their best efforts.
But JMU really has no choice but to tackle it, in response to the alcohol-fueled debacle that was Springfest last semester. This huge off-campus party got out of control, with 42 students injured and 30 arrested. True, most of the 8,000 partygoers managed not to get in trouble, but the behavior problems were the same ones that play out, on a smaller scale, on this and most campuses week in and week out.
Other schools have had their own wake-up-calls. Christopher Newport University was rocked in 2008 when a student was killed in a car crash caused by another student, who was charged with drunken driving. At other schools, alcohol has derailed educations and contributed to injuries, sexual assaults and deaths.
So, more power to JMU for making the effort.
The question is: What can colleges do?
Since it's their specialty, education comes to mind. But can this problem be solved by "educating" students about alcohol and its effects, about peer pressure? Is there really a student who doesn't know all that? Is it likely that by the end of their first month on campus they haven't seen enough falling-down, throwing-up dorm-mates, enough wretched mornings-after and terrible decisions the night before, to have learned the lessons of alcohol?
And they keep on drinking.
No, the problem isn't education, but culture. When you have rituals like the "fourth-year fifth," a disaster of a tradition at U.Va., you know that alcohol has permeated expectations, habits and social norms for many students. That's why JMU is focusing on culture, along with stricter enforcement of alcohol laws and more patrolling of off-campus party sites. It won't be easy, because some students say that JMU's "party culture" is part of its appeal.
Alcohol has long been part of college life. What's different today is that students engage in more binge drinking: consuming so much so quickly that they become exceedingly drunk, with all the threats to safety and judgment that creates.
Another change is the number of students who live off campus. The dangers of drinking are compounded by the dangers of driving.
Here are some tactics that colleges have used with some success, and that would make sense on any campus:
•Train resident advisors in dorms to detect and intervene when alcohol becomes a problem.
•Offer "no questions asked" services that pick up students who have been drinking off campus and get them home safely. Better to indulge a drunken student five miles from campus than let him get behind the wheel.
•And even if education isn't the whole answer, keep impressing on new students — and returning ones — the risks and realities of alcohol.
JMU is joining Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University and some other schools in informing parents whenever their children are caught violating alcohol rules. That makes sense. Parents hold the power of the purse, if no other, over many students. But how many parents are merrily in denial? Colleges should enlist them and show them how to use their influence toward constructive ends.
Recruiting parents as partners, changing cultures, keeping students safe: These have to be part of colleges' response.
As a new semester soon begins, and another class of beginning students leaves home for life on campus, JMU's campaign to change the drinking culture is a reminder that the leadership of every college has a role in the same cause.
