Drinking culture takes center stage at meeting

Dozens of students, staff and administrators grappled last night with the question of alcohol abuse on campus, discussing why it is so prevalent and how things might be changed.

At a town-hall meeting focused on what has become a hot-button topic this semester, participants voiced broad concern for students' safety and perceptions of drinking norms.

"I think we're all on the same side, which is student safety, reasonable lifestyle and not having anybody get hurt and die," Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman, who organized the meeting, said during the discussion. He emphasized the need for cooperation among students and administrators in order to stem the trend toward dangerous drinking at Tufts.

Convened as part of the dean of arts and sciences' semesterly series of town-hall meetings, the gathering took place at the Remis Sculpture Court in the Aidekman Arts Center and attracted dozens of attendees, who filtered in and out. About 50 were present at its peak.

Reitman outlined several major alcohol-related episodes that occurred recently at Tufts. He spoke about the overwhelming number of medical incidents that emergency services responded to at last year's Spring Fling, seniors getting kicked out of a Senior Pub Night in September and the failure of this semester's I-Cruise to leave the dock due to student drunkenness.

In May, Reitman chartered the Alcohol Task Force to review the university's alcohol regulations and offer recommendations to a policy-setting steering committee on alcohol. The task force began meeting this fall and is hoping to release a draft of its recommendations soon.

"This is our issue, this is our problem," said Reitman, who sits on the steering committee. "We have to work together on it, so we're willing to listen to suggestions for changes to policy."

Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg stated that dangerous drinking and hospitalization have been on the rise at the university in the past few years.

Michelle Bowdler, the senior director of Health and Wellness Service, attributed this to evolving mentalities. "There's been a culture change over the last three to five years that's actually one of the things that we're so worried about," she said.

Bowdler added that recent surveys have shown that over half of Tufts students binge drink, a significant percentage that she hopes will drop. She said most schools in the Northeast similar to Tufts have lower percentages.

Both students and administrators at the meeting emphasized the creation of more programming and venues to provide alternatives to the campus drinking culture — but they voiced varying levels of confidence in the ability of such programming to achieve the cultural change that many were calling for.

Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senator Sam Wallis spoke about the possibility of using Hotung Café as alternative event space.

"One of the things we're talking about … is turning Hotung into a late-night diner where you build a culture around the food rather than the booze, so to speak," said Wallis, a junior.

Freshman Maya Grodman is one of the students who has spearheaded the recent creation of Another Option, a student group exploring alcohol-free social choices. "We're just one example of students who are trying to take initiatives to provide other activities than drinking," she said.

But Junior Class Council President Lindsey Rosenbluth expressed doubts that alternative programming would deter students who already drink excessively from doing so.

"I think [alternative programming is] a lot of fun on a student-activities or a social-life level, but I don't know that it would counteract the drinking at all," she said.

TCU Senator Bruce Ratain, a junior who is a member of the Alcohol Task Force, thought that popular student groups should hold their events later in the evening to attract students away from drinking. Office for Campus Life Director Joe Golia agreed.

"We changed a few rules where on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night you can't start in Hotung before eight o'clock," said Golia, whose office manages the daily operations of the campus center, which houses Hotung Café. "We encourage every group to start as late as possible."

Golia, however, noted that programming is not the underlying solution to the campus drinking culture.

"It's not ultimately the answer," he said. "It is a part of it, and I will agree, but I have never been at a place where there is more programming than Tufts."

Students at the town-hall meeting pointed to "pregaming" as one of the greatest source of dangerous drinking. They noted the often-clandestine activity occurs before events that serve alcohol as well as those that do not.

"We really need to concentrate a lot on pregaming," sophomore Jake Schiller said. "I think that's the underlying cause of a lot of the dangerous situations."

Participants also discussed the importance of peer influence and the need to create alcohol-education programs in which students can share their own experiences with dangerous binge drinking. Many said that these programs were especially needed during freshman orientation.

TCU President Brandon Rattiner, a senior and the only member of both the Alcohol Task Force and the steering committee, said that the group of students who party hard on a weekly basis is smaller than many freshmen realize, and that this misperception leads more freshmen to drink every year.