Our discussion of college drinking may overemphasize "college." For the
most part, we are talking about drinking by males in their late teens and
early twenties.  How different has this been outside the ranks of college
students among the so-called "lower" classes, especially young adult males
outside family restraints?  I am thinking, for instance, of young
soldiers.  To the best of my knowledge, a minority of people always have
done a disproportionate amount of the drinking of the total population.  At
least implicitly, most historical alcohol studies have been shaped by
gender analysis, sometimes by class analysis, much less often with a focus
on age.  In my own research on England, all the observers that I have
encountered take for granted that the drink problem was essentially a
problem of working class males. In this case I haven't noticed emphasis on
the youthfulness of the drinkers, whatever may have been the facts about
alcohol consumption.

At 01:33 PM 2/13/2004 -1000, you wrote:
>Hurrah for those who are inserting valid drinking experiences and
>observations into this question. I hope some more of the observers will be
>added to the scene as "college drinking" is studied. My fraternity magazine
>(still coming to this old alum)is filled with concerns about drinking, binge
>drinking, and alcoholism in fraternities. Do these things make it into the
>reviews?
>
>To me, the problem is similar to the surveys of the effectiveness of
>religion (and the goofy word "spirituality") in the alcoholism/addiction/12
>Step/Recovery Communities. How many people are reporting from the trenches
>on the numbers of those who believe in God, who got well through reliance on
>the Creator, and who are "religious," not spiritual. If you don't include
>the experiences of those of us - like Dr. Bob - who offered a "God or not"
>option, are the surveys much more than reports from those who don't work
>with drunks, who don't understand how healing is effected, or who just don't
>like church, Bible, ministers, priests, and Jesus to interfere with
>scientific surveys?
>
>Oh well, the facts are slowly coming out. About real college drinking then
>(1940 onward) and now. Even the old alums are still having tailgate parties
>after football, bringing packaged martinis to the game for therapeutic
>purposes, and drinking at every turn. Some of us even made it to AA and even
>to God. But not most.
>
>Dick B.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Alcohol and Temperance History Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>On Behalf Of Jon Miller
>Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 7:32 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: history of drinking at college - "high" or "plastered"
>
>Ron, I've been thinking about the following quote the last few days.
>I was an undergraduate in the late 80s and early 90s, there was no
>careful perception of a hierarchy of intoxicated states. Granted, I
>worked at a rowdy town-n-gown bar (the Deer Park Tavern) in a typical
>east-coast university town (Newark, Delaware), so my experience was
>not limited to settings that were strictly populated by college
>students. Still, students would talk of getting a "buzz" or being
>"buzzed," but the goal when drinking was most often drunkenness, for
>which there was a long catalog of slang terms. I'm interested that
>this old Fortune article would report that college students drank
>only to get a little drunk, or "high," and that it would cause a
>"particular commotion" to proceed to "plastered." I wonder if this
>difference corresponds with social class - colleges and universities
>today are much more middle-class than they were before WWII. Is that
>why the drinking is to excess these days? I have heard from people
>like Peter Nathan that studies show that first-generation college
>students tend to drink more often and to greater excess than students
>whose parents attended college. On the other hand, do colleges drink
>more today because of the way alcoholic beverages are marketed to
>them? My overall impression of anti-drinking campaigns on campus is
>that it tends to blame beer advertising first. I imagine it must be
>some combination of the two. But if there remains, say, a drinking
>culture of drinking only to get a little "high" in colleges that
>attract only upper-class, second-, third-, fourth-generation college
>students, then that would weaken the argument that marketing has a
>whole lot to do with it. Jon
>
>
> >p. 102, col. 2:  "Between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty the campus subsides
> >into sleep.  A few independent drunks, who care little for the Friday or
> >Saturday night tradition, come roaring in at three, but the average
> >undergraduate doesn't get tight until classes and study are over for the
> >week.  Weekends are not so frequent as they used to be, the obvious reason
> >being that money has not been plentiful.  But one does not have to go far
> >away from college to drink.  The stages of college inebriation are ranked
> >as follows:  high, tight, looping, stinking, plastered, out.  Some would
> >put tight after looping.  But regardless of the grading of intermediate
> >philological degrees of drunkenness, most of the drinking undergraduates
> >think high is the desirable state of glow for a weekday night and even for
> >the ordinary weekend.  At spring house parties and at the football games
> >the student can proceed to the tight and looping (or looping and tight)
> >stages without causing any particular commotion."