<p>No I don’t believe that college administrators’ views on free speech, immigration, ROTC, and racial discrimination play much of a role in the problem of campus binge drinking.</p>
<p>There are at least four or five different strategies that colleges have used in an attempt to reduce or contain problem drinking. These include bans on alcohol, social norms marketing, shifting the drinking off campus, and so on and so forth. I’m sure we can find examples where each of these approaches has worked and examples where each of them hasn’t. It’s a difficult problem for a school where the campus culture has already become alcohol-soaked.</p>
<p>At some point, I guess a college would be forced to ban alcohol in dorms and begin aggressive security sweeps to sanction offenders. I don’t think that would be the preferred approach in an ideal world, but if you are sending hundreds of kids to the emergency room each year and seeing an unacceptable level of alcohol fueled mayhem, what choice do you have?</p>
<p>If you are seeing alcohol fueled mayhem then start suspending and expelling the perps. I’ve got no problem with that. If the behavior is bad enough then call the cops and have them locked up.</p>
<p>I looked at a few colleges and the stats can be a major joke.
In particular a few small colleges -under 2000 students-with more alcohol violations than major universities and larger lac? </p>
<p>It makes it very hard to tell if the larger school is well on the way to keeping underage drinking rates down, turning a blind eye. high stats at smaller school-is it coming under control, way out of control or has super strict policy.</p>
<p>“Mini” – I guess “litany” is equivalent to “one,” since this is the only “complaint” you’ve managed to dig up this academic year. With your research capabilities, I’m sure we would have seen more – if others from the past five months actually existed.</p>
<p>It could be that you delight so much in the old statistics that you fail to realize that changes can, and do, occur.</p>
<p>Drinking was definitely not a problem at Oberlin. Granted, I graduated in the late 70s, but about the only time I had hard liquor was when someone produced a bottle for my birthday. The campus also had a place that served 3.2 beer which I found impossible to drink enough get a minor buzz much less drunk on. I also never saw anyone doing drugs! There was way more drinking and drugs at my public high school than Oberlin!</p>