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PACE national director speaks on campus
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by James Davison
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
The national program director of “A Matter of Degree,” which includes the University of Wisconsin Policy Alternatives Community Education (PACE) project, met with various undergraduate classes Tuesday to speak about issues surrounding the alcohol industry.
Dr. Richard Yoast, also the director of the American Medical Association Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse, said the project is designed to reduce the harmful effects drinking has on students and surrounding communities.
The project is active at eight other universities around the country.
“One of the goals is to reduce the levels of binge-drinking,” Yoast said. “Most problems [involving] drinking are directly related to [the amount] people drink. This is because heavier drinkers [individually] cause a lot more problems.”
According to Jonathan Zarov, UW communications manager for PACE and University Health Services, PACE was made possible because of a grant given to UW as a part of the nationwide program.
“We are much more concerned with the damages drinking has on the community,” Zarov said, adding that PACE’s primary long-term goal is to combat the violence, vandalism, sexual assault and academic failure caused by high-risk drinking.
Yoast said one of the things every program immediately had to do was to show there would be participation from the community.
“This is a big change from the way the university has traditionally dealt with a lot of problems,” Yoast said. “Many things (involving drinking) aren’t controlled by students but still influence them. Alcohol is not produced or promoted on campus; most of that comes from the community.”
Yoast added efforts must be combined between the two communities.
Yoast said UW’s PACE program has taken somewhat different approaches to the project than other schools around the country because it is working more generally with culture and values and because of its higher levels of student and administration participation.
PACE’s current location in the UHS building is also a symbol of the project’s goal of keeping close to students.
According to Zarov, PACE mainly attempts to change various policies that involve drinking. The organization most recently attempted to limit drink specials in Madison bars.
To do this, Zarov said PACE is currently working on four initiatives. Those are limiting access to cheap alcohol, changing student expectations toward drinking, fixing problems created by house parties and improving parental involvement.
“The key difference between what you might expect is that there really is a policy focus instead of just brochures to students,” Zarov said. “We don’t think that works very well.”
According to Yoast, the national program was started in 1996 after Harvard started creating national surveys looking at the impact of student drinking.
“We had never had that kind of information before. It opened a lot of eyes in terms of the nature of the problems,” Yoast said. “We had been talking a lot about tobacco and illicit drugs, but the drug most widely used that causes the most problems is alcohol, and we hadn’t talked about that before.”
Some of PACE’s current policy initiatives have created some controversy, which Yoast said is a result of “people not used to having their thinking challenged.”
“Students have been trained to think about drinking as a right,” Yoast said. “This project wants to change how we think about alcohol.”
