The following is an OP-ED piece a colleague and I have written for a local Philly newspaper...I share it here FYI

Back to the Future: What’s New in Response to College Drinking
By Robert J. Chapman, PhD & Stephen F. Gambescia, PhD
Drexel University—Philadelphia, PA
College of Nursing & Health Professions

With the approach of Labor Day and its symbolic close of summer comes another annual event that hearkens the change of seasons: Back to the classroom. In colleges & universities across the country administrators are acutely aware of the perennial issue of student drinking, given its potentially adverse academic and public health consequences, not to mention being in the midst of our current economic recession, the fiscal impact—retaining students through graduation naturally makes for sound fiscal policy.

Alcohol and collegiate life have been social contemporaries since Thomas Jefferson noticed its affects on good student form at the University of Virginia and butlers distributed wine and beer to students at Yale and Harvard, which were easily dispensed from the “Buttery,” adjacent to the Commons and an integral part of colonial collegiate life. But the convivial drinking of collegians in centuries past has been replaced by the ubiquitous consumption of contemporary students, approximately 25% of which are described as “frequent” (2 or more times in a 2-week period) “binge” drinkers (having 5 or more standard drinks in an outing, 4 or more for women).
So pervasive is collegiate drinking that colleges have attempted to control consumption. One particular approach that has been effective is called, “environmental management.” Included are five strategies:

1. Offer alcohol-free social, extracurricular, and public service options
2. Create a health-promoting normative environment
3. Restrict the marketing and promotion of alcoholic beverages both on and off
campus
4. Limit alcohol availability
5. Increase enforcement of laws and policies

In short, these steps to influence the campus environment have resulted in changes in collegiate drinking; most good, but some give pause for reflection. Although campus drinking has been reduced, “frequent binge drinkers” have tended to move off-campus to avoid increased enforcement of alcohol policies. This shift increases certain other high-risk and dangerous student practices; namely, drinking and driving as well as drinking in unsupervised and clandestine locations where excessive consumption is encouraged and alcohol poisoning is not monitored. Both of these consequences may serve to alienate residents of the community in which such drinking occurs thus straining any historic “town-gown” tensions.

As college personnel have become aware of this shift in student drinking behavior, they have changed their strategies. Most effective in encouraging a proactive response is the use of campus-community coalitions. Such partnerships of administrative and student groups “on-campus” with residents, businesses, law enforcement, and public health groups “off-campus” have resulted in significant change in curbing student off-campus drinking – see http://tinyurl.com/qsdz62.

In addition to such coalitions, campus officials that hold students responsible for their behavior off-campus and subject them to the same consequences as if the drinking was done on-campus often direct these students to participate in brief motivational screening – see http://tinyurl.com/lohw6p. Other strategies are being piloted to address these issues, but like a medication that accomplishes its primary objective but necessitating a second prescription to assuage side effects, environmental management strategies have contributed significantly to affecting collegiate drinking.
With the return of students and the adverse consequences of drinking done by some of their number, new and innovative strategies have been implemented by colleges and universities to act on rather than react to this perennial vestige of collegiate life. Although alcohol and its consumption will remain regular parts of contemporary campus life, these inventive strategies will likely result in changed student behavior.

Seeing What You Expect to See

Stephen King once said in an interview, "Belief is the wellspring of myth and imagination." When I came to this quote while reading a book on brief therapy, in particular the sections on constructivism and narrative therapy, I could not help but think of the way contemporary collegians look at alcohol as a substance and drinking it as a behavior.

Alcohol and its consumption have become significant icons of collegiate life and a mythology surrounding drinking has evolved that is so entrenched in the minds of students entering college--not to mention their parents who recall its role from their college days--as to resist even the latest efforts to address the misperceptions many hold regarding it.

Alcohol and drinking have meaning because we ascribe that meaning to these icons of contemporary collegiate life. Michael Hoyt in (Some Stories are Better than Others: Doing what Works in Brief Therapy and Managed Care (2000) suggests that the essence of being human is that we are "meaning makers" and by our very nature cannot not participate in explaining, by whatever means, that which we experience. This is an apt explanation of how meaning is ascribed to alcohol and drinking...those who are aware of these aspects of college life maintain that awareness in the context of the meaning they have attributed to them. Unfortunately, the meaning we ascribe to an event in order to explain and understand it is does not guarantee its accuracy, hence the role of myth in explaining all manner of natural events and phenomenon.

For example, when I understand that alcohol is a prerequisite of "having a good time," it quickly becomes synonymous with having that good time. In fact, the mention of alcohol is no longer required because the party itself has become imbued with the meaning that alcohol will be present and those attending will be consuming it. Interestingly, the noun becomes a verb, which itself is a euphemism for drinking, that is to say, "to party" mean to drink.

Although this meaning is not isolated to collegiate life--many in high school have already become familiar with alcohol and understand its importance in a successful social life--it changes as students progress through successive terms in their collegiate experience. The meaning attributed to alcohol as a substance and drinking as a behavior "change." Where first-year students expect and then seek out the collegiate "keg party" with its obligatory "drinking games" and related "drunken comportment," the lure of this type of past time lessens.

In research that I have conducted the meaning ascribed to alcohol and drinking changed significantly as students progressed from their first-year to their later years in college--see my second monograph on collegiate drinking for an in depth look at this phenomenon - http://www.community.rowancas.org/Monographs/Monograph_510.pdf. It would appear that the meaning students ascribe to these collegiate icons changes as the result of experiences they have with them, either personally or vicariously--or more likely both. Whether this is a result of developmental movement from adolescence to young adult with the accompanying development of one's ability to reason with the further physiological development of the prefrontal cortex of the brain or whether it is learned through progressive experiences where drunken comportment becomes less attractive, the point remains, the behavior of many (most?) collegians who choose to drink in a high-risk fashion changes.

What is of interest to me, as a professional interested in issues of prevention and intervention, is how this naturally occurring process can be better understood and then incorporated into contemporary approaches to preventing untoward consequences associated with drinking. It stands to reason that if collegiate drinkers "mature out" of their high-risk approaches and this happens because the meaning hey ascribe to alcohol as a substance and drinking as a behavior have changed, then if we can understand this process we can likely hasten this process.

I suspect this is the next chapter that will need to be written in the handbook on preventing high-risk and dangerous drinking.