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."