We here at UW-Madison often get caught up in thinking we’re unique. This is especially true in the wake of lavish praise by punditry as diverse as Sports Illustrated, the Princeton Review and ESPN talking heads about our legendary status for rabid partying.
A front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago examined the woes of Florida State policymakers with regard to student drinking. The article brought further, almost negative, national attention to an issue that hits close to home.
This past summer, I met a pair of senior editors from Florida State’s newspaper, the FSView, during a conference in Washington, D.C. After a few minutes of conversation, we were surprised at the many broad similarities of our respective schools. But the piece in the Wall Street Journal emphasized these parallels to the point of irony. One could interchange the acronyms “FSU” and “UW” while doing little to effectively change the accuracy, even the legibility, of the piece.
For example, let’s take this liberty with the lead of Bryan Gruley’s Oct. 14 piece:
“[Madison, Wis.] — Determined to shed its party-school image, [the University of Wisconsin- Madison] four years ago created a coalition to curb student alcohol abuse. The [PACE Project] mapped an ambitious plan: outlaw “ladies drink free” nights and other discount specials, prohibit anyone under 21 years old from entering bars and stiffen penalties for serving underage drinkers.”
Sounds suspiciously like copy from a Madison paper, with a few nuances left out. To its credit, PACE has never specifically targeted underage drinkers in bars and licensed taverns. But this may be neglect out of necessity, not ambivalence.
The second paragraph of the piece, however, is where the southerners’ story differs. It states that “The local alcohol industry, invited to cooperate, instead used its money and own reform group in favor of more moderate efforts.”
Should this statement apply to Madison’s drinking culture, we might all be on our way to enjoying two dollar pitchers at the Plaza this weekend. The third paragraph brings Florida State back in line with Madison.
“On the other side was [Susan Crowley], the aggressive campus substance-abuse activist the university brought in to run the partnership. [She] had the backing of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which frequently battles alcohol interests over college drinking policies.”
The similarities only grow as Gruley goes on to describe the campus social scene at Florida State: a litany of bars and pubs intensely competing with one another, large house parties stocked with underagers, and beer-soaked football contests that take over the entirety of the city, which is also the state capital (Tallahassee).
Yet, for all of the complaining, whining, protesting and editorializing we expend on this campus over PACE’s attempts to damage the freedoms we believe are owed to us as independent adults, the Florida State example proves one thing: we could have it worse. In the midst of a university-sanctioned crackdown on house parties, Tallahassee police have been engaged in sting operations to curb underage drinking in off-campus house parties. Thankfully, this attitude has not been met with wide acceptance among university policymakers in Madison. But this does not brush it off of the horizon of possibility.
Florida State’s anointed dean of anti-drinking, Daniel Skiles, also RWJ-sponsored and armed with briefcases full of statistics from the Harvard School of Public Health and their unrealistic expectations for what constitutes “high-risk binge-drinking,” has declared war on Florida State’s culture. Over the past several years he has done so to such a degree that the university is now wary of his zeal. The nationally endowed Johnson Foundation avidly supports public-policy regulation of underage drinking and general restrictions on any measures deemed causal to over-consumption, and university administrators in Florida fear he and his organization may have crossed the line.
Police crackdowns, students led from parties in handcuffs, regulated drinking establishments: this is what the RWJ Foundation supports, and this is what we would have to fear if they, in the form of the PACE project, were to get their proverbial act together on this campus.
Despite this coordinated effort by moneyed, legitimized interests, the Florida State students have found an ally in the fight: the local brewing industry. Representatives from Annheuser-Busch stepped up to the plate several years ago, first to fund and promote social-norms campaigns designed to bolster the idea that not everyone must drink in order to have a good time and based on the premise that prohibitive bans are inherently ineffective.
This was met with contention from the RWJ representatives but was eventually endorsed by FSU’s chancellor, Sandy D’Alemberte. The resulting fissure and continued insistence on regulation led D’Alemberte to a greater and greater rift with the RWJ-funded partnership as their views were characterized by FSU’s provost as “vaguely prohibitionist.”
We should only hope that if our own version of RWJ’s anti-drinking crusaders become ever more damaging to the rights of students, our own chancellor would take the students’ side in the issue. But with the prospect of further house-party regulation on the horizon, this sentiment may prove little more than a hope.
Eric B. Cullen ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and political science. He is Editor in Chief of the Badger Herald.
