I'd like to offer this:  Michael Moffat, an anthropologist, published a
book in the late 1980s entitled _Coming of Age in New Jersey_, an
ethnography of Rutgers undergraduates.  He has a chapter on the history of
college culture, and a chapter on college drinking.  He found that for
these students, partying meant drinking, and drinking and partying were
closely associated with sexuality.  He noted that foreign students were
often surprised at the emphasis on alcohol.

When I was an undergrad at Ohio State, the big drinking night was
Thursday. There were several bars on the south end of campus known to be
disgusting.  They were places where students drank to get drunk, and the
places would end up a mess.  These bars catered to that kind of drinking,
with specials on buckets of beer.  This was during the laste 1980s, and I
was already 25 when I started college, so I wasn't much interested in that
sort of thing (I had experienced it in the Army with stump juice parties).

I have one piece of evidence to support the idea of drinking to
drunkenness:   Students I have known have told me that the quality of the
beer is not important (in part its because they don't have a lot of
money).  A keg of Milwaukee's Beast is just as intoxicating as a keg of
Sam Adams, and funnier because it's so bad.

I have been trying to learn about drinking among the students I teach now.
This is a small (1000 students), residential, Catholic school and many of
our students are socially pretty conservative.  Over 70% live in the
residence halls.  Atchison is very small, about 10,000 people, and it is
like living in a fish bowl.  There are no frats or sororities.  For
students who do drink, Tuesdays are the big night, apparently.  A local
bar offers 1 dollar pitchers.

Maria



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Maria G. Swora, Ph.D. MPH