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.”