University Times

Alcohol would be banned in all Pitt residence halls as early as fall 2001, if a committee of staff, faculty, administrators and student leaders has its way.

The Alcohol Advisory Committee plans to ask Sharon Johnson, who begins work here July 1 as vice provost and dean of students, to propose the idea to Pitt senior administrators.

"This is something that would need to be decided at the highest administrative level," said committee chairperson James Cox, who is associate director of Pitt's Counseling Center.

The committee also includes representatives of student government organizations, campus police, and offices such as Athletics, Governmental Relations, Housing, Judicial Affairs and Student Health.

Currently, Pitt's only alcohol-free dorms are Amos Hall and Towers A and B.

Pitt mails housing contracts to students in March for the following academic year. The latest contracts don't stipulate a dry-dorms policy, so it's too late to ban alcohol beginning in fall 2000.

Most Pitt residence hall students are under age 21. So, legally speaking, an alcohol ban should not affect many students. But national studies show that drinking is heaviest among younger college students, said outgoing Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Robert Gallagher.

At this month's meetings of Faculty Assembly and Senate Council, Gallagher reported on Pitt efforts to curb binge drinking, which researchers define as: a man who has consumed five or more drinks (or a woman who's knocked back four or more) at a sitting in the past two weeks. "Now, a lot of students laugh at that definition because four-to-five drinks is often just a warmup," Gallagher said. "But the researchers chose [that consumption rate] because it's the point that negative effects of alcohol usage begin to show up."

"Frequent binge drinkers" are defined as those who have binged three or more times in the past two weeks.

A recent Harvard School of Public Health study of 15,138 students at 119 colleges and universities (including Pitt) found that 23 percent of the students were frequent binge drinkers, and that they drank 68 percent of alcohol consumed on campus.

"These are the students who put themselves at the most risk for accidents, health problems, psychological problems and academic failure," Gallagher said. "They also are the students who account for most of the violence, vandalism, sexual assaults and other serious problems on campus. We've always known this, but the Harvard study brought into focus the fact that these heavy drinkers negatively affect the lives of many other students."

At high-binge campuses, for example, more than half of the students surveyed said they'd had to babysit drunken fellow students and that their sleep and study had been interrupted by bingers.

Harvard researchers found that 36.6 percent of students were non-binge drinkers, 22.7 percent were frequent binge drinkers, 21 percent were occasional binge drinkers, and 19.2 percent abstained from drinking.

Gallagher said student drinking rates here are about average, based on a survey by Pitt's Student Health office.

In recent years, Pitt has tried various tactics to discourage irresponsible drinking: working with bar owners and campus and local police to enforce laws against underage drinking, sponsoring alcohol-free social events, publishing alcohol education ads in The Pitt News — even sending cards to students on their 21st birthdays, encouraging them to drink responsibly.

"We do a lot of educational work," Gallagher said, "but we also know that lecturing to students about the evils of drinking is not very effective.

"They tend to be influenced more, I believe, by their peers and by faculty and other people whom they admire. We have to find ways of getting these respected members of our community more involved with the issue. We also need to get that large majority of students who don't drink or who drink responsibly to be more outspoken about the ways in which the abuses impact on them."

— Bruce Steele