COLUMN: In support of moderation

From Karen Pasternack's, "Effective Immediately," Fall '98 From Karen Pasternack's, "Effective Immediately," Fall '98 Garrett Bozylinsky. Lorraine Hanna. Leslie Baltz. Ryan Bommer. Melinda Somers. Scott Krueger. Meaghan Duggan. Benjamin Wynne. Eight bright students who were on the verge of exciting futures. Eight students who went to classes and hung out with their friends. Eight individuals who should have danced on the uncharted ground of 1998, instead of lying 10 feet below it. These drinking binges became the sensationalized college headlines of 1997 and are rapidly infiltrating the freshly published pages of 1998. On January 4, The New York Times education section featured a piece entitled "Binge Nights, The Emergency on Campus." The article concentrated mostly on the death of Baltz, a senior at the University of Virginia. But it also addressed the need to solve the drinking problem that is leaving its mark on colleges across the country. The Penn community is not immune to these statistics. This year alone we have experienced numerous incidences of alcohol-related assaults and hospitalizations. But perhaps we have been focusing on the wrong solution to this problem. After all, drinking is woven into the language of Penn tradition. Singing a "toast" to dear old Penn is hardly a reference to burned bread. The bottom line is that precious time and money is wasted every year in efforts to stop underage drinking. But instead of helping the situation, these preventative measures seem to create a forbidden fruit mentality that only serves to drive drinking by minors. For example, last spring 33 students were cited by the Liquor Control Enforcement Bureau for underage drinking at the Palladium. Maybe changing the drinking age all together is too much of an extreme action. After all, the 21-year-old drinking statute does prevent an annual total of 800 drunk driving casualties. According to the Times article, however, the current drinking age is giving as much of a headache to college administrators as to the students themselves. Well, if Judith Rodin is walking around with a constant migraine, why not try to soothe the pain by changing Penn's alcohol policy? Right now, the policy states that "The University of Pennsylvania permits the lawful keeping and consumption, in moderation, of alcoholic beverages on its property or property under its control by persons of legal drinking age (21 years or older)." But if drinking is such a problem at Penn, then why shouldn't we have an appropriate code that enables students to learn responsible drinking rather than dare them to defy the restrictive rules? Before I was 21, older friends of mine said the excitement of drinking waned once it was legal. But my experiences as an overseas student really spawned my rethinking about the excessive underage drinking that goes on at Penn. At my college in London, pubs were as common in our dorms and class buildings as coed bathrooms are in the Quad. Alcohol seemed to hold less power in this place where it could flow as naturally as juice. Drinking did occur, but people seemed to take a less abusive attitude toward it. Just because America has created a prohibitionist society of underage drinkers doesn't mean that colleges shouldn't reinvent their own alcohol-related rules as an experimental procedure. At nearby Haverford College, students are not subjected to the 21-year old drinking statute of Pennsylvania. Their honor code does not restrict drinking to certain ages or places on their campus. A friend who is a senior at Haverford expressed that in her four years at the school she has witnessed very few incidents of binge drinking, which she attributes to the fact that there is no challenge to defy. Penn's city location would make such a policy more complicated, and local high school students would likely flock to campus. But University students could be required to present their PennCards before being allowed to drink. I'm not suggesting that "Beer Guzzling 101" should be offered as a freshman seminar. But the fact remains that many students will always choose to drink. If people are going to develop into responsible drinkers, initiatives might as well come from the institution where they are supposedly growing as individuals. The sooner we can make a move on this, the less likely we are to add the name of a Penn student to that tragic list. Let moderation be the word of '98, leaving prohibition in the past.