Legends, Urban Myths, and Collegiate Drinking
Legends, actual and urban, are fascinating. They capture both the interest and the admiration of those who hear them and then the listener feels compelled to pass them along. For instance, Ernest Hemingway purportedly wrote the world’s shortest story on a bet while lunching with friends at the Algonquin Hotel’s famed “round table.” Hemingway bet his lunch mates that he could write a complete short story, including a distinct beginning, middle, and end, in just 6-words. No one present agreed and so accepted the bet. Hemingway took out a pen and on a table napkin wrote, “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn”; he won the bet.

Although frequently cited and repeated online ad nauseam—Hemingway and baby shoes yields 17,500 Google hits—there is no actual evidence that this event ever took place…or if it did, that Hemingway was the original author of the baby shoes story. A variation on this theme is Garrison Keeler’s 1997 quip in which he includes all five elements of humor—religion, money, family relationships, sex, and mystery—in one cogent sentence: “God,” said the banker’s daughter, “I’m pregnant! I wonder who it was?”

As mildly entertaining as this introduction may be, what does it have to do with collegiate drinking? The connection lies in the almost irresistible obsession we humans have to repeat a provocative or “sexy” sound bite and elevate it to the status of legend. This has happened with the term “binge drinking” as it relates to college and university students. Coined in December of 1994 in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Health and Behavioral Consequences of Binge Drinking in College: A National Survey of Students at 140 Campuses,” this term referred to “…five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more for women at least once during the 2 weeks preceding the survey” (see http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas/Documents/54/).

This post does not question the “risk of harm” or “dangerous nature” of consuming 4+/5+ drinks “in a row,” but it does raise question regarding the utility of calling such consumption a binge (see details of this concern in my essay on this at http://www.robertchapman.net/essays/about.htm). The point of this blog post is to cite the transition of this term from a “sexy sound bite” that captured the attention of the media in the mid 1990s, became the rally cry of parents and student affairs professionals to “do something” regarding collegiate drinking through the mid 2000s and is now firmly ensconced in the lexicon of all who refer to the use of alcohol by anyone, irrespective of age, academic status, or problems associate with alcohol use, when consuming 4+/5+ drinks in a row (1).

Where a “binge” was once a quasi-clinical term that referred to drinking similar to Ray Milland’s in the 1945 classic film, The Lost Weekend, Jack Lemmon’s and Lee Remick’s drinking in the 1962 classic, Days of Wine and Roses, or the more recent Nicholas Cage portrayal of an alcohol dependent drinker in the 1995 Leaving Las Vegas, it is now used to reference any drinker’s consumption of 4+ drinks if a woman or 5+ if a man…and we wonder why college students consider the warnings of adults regarding their behavior to be spurious.
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(1) The NIAAA redefined a “binge” about 5 years ago (see http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh283/111-120.htm) to inclued a peak blood alcohol level of .08 when consuming in a 2-hour period. Although an improvement, this still does not address a number of the issues raised in my essay on this cited above.

Collegiate Drinking and GPA - A Negative Correlation, But Not a Slam Dunk

The negative correlation between “number of drinks consumed per week” and “grade point average” is well know, but somewhat deceiving. Although it is clear that this correlation exists, we cannot infer that drinking more will result in lower grades—or the inverse, that drinking less will increase grades. Although both outcomes are possible—even likely—we have to be careful when looking at academic probation as being a potential access point to engage high risk drinkers.

This is not to suggest that such screening not be done—personally, if we could afford it, I would recommend screening all students if not providing them with the chance to complete BASICS (brief alcohol screening and intervention for college students). What I do suggest, however, is that this screening not result in an automatic assumption that drinking is: (1) the reason for the academic difficulties if the student indicates use or (2) that reducing drinking for high-risk and dangerous drinkers is all that needs be done to enhance academic performance.

Just as faculty and administrators who neglect to consider alcohol or other drug use as a mitigating factor in academic or other collegiate life problems may seem naïve if not truculent if they refuse to do so, those of us who know collegiate drinking is a major public health problem for contemporary collegians need to be careful that we are not so myopic as to view reducing it as the panacea for all contemporary student problems. As with so many things in life, reality exists somewhere between the extremes.

Knowing as we do, however, that the negative correlation between collegiate drinking and grade point averages is a strong as it is suggests that remedial efforts to address such risk factors are warranted. Just as we know that certain collegiate sub-populations are at higher risk—first-year students, athletes, Greek-letter associations—so do we now know that there are other high-risk populations on campus, e.g., those in academic distress. And just as we know that all first-year students, athletes, and Greeks are not high-risk and dangerous drinkers, so do we need to be mindful that neither are all students in academic distress.

That said, any S-BIRT (Screening-Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment) that can be done with any higher risk population, e.g., academic probation, is warranted.

Robert