Why is it that students find it just as challenging to experience an alternative to drinking on a Friday night as to “hit up” every bar in Madison during their years at UW? It could seem the ALRC has the answer.
Currently, students are presented with woefully few choices when it comes to a Friday night out. Drinking remains the focus of almost all weekend activity on this campus. Anything to divert that focus will alleviate many of the social ills associated with heavily intoxicated students gathered in confined areas.
A proposal introduced by campus-area alders Mike Verveer, District 4, and Austin King, District 8, to repeal Madison’s cabaret law, which requires bars to be licensed for patrons to dance, is noble and well-intentioned. These licenses, which were difficult to obtain from former ALRC chairman Tim Bruer, we hope will be more generously distributed now that the committee is under new leadership. While we certainly believe Madison should be cut “Footloose,” as King termed it, the issues extend further. Some regulations must exist to ensure the safety of dance clubs, as recent tragedies have shown. But there is a difference between safety regulation and responsible granting of dance licenses. We hope the current ALRC will understand this and look to the example of Luther’s Blues, which offers live music with selective admission of underage students.
All involved in Madison and UW’s continuing alcohol debate agree that, if presented with viable alternatives to drinking on Friday and Saturday nights, students will do less “high-risk” binge-drinking. Combining drinking with such alternatives as food service, games, live music and dancing shifts the focus of weekends away from just, as our own Chancellor Wiley recently put it, getting “obliterated.”
We hope the loosening of cabaret restrictions, as well as support for more live music venues, may now find a friendly reception from the new ALRC and city government generally. Perhaps then getting plastered on a Friday night will not be the only event on students’ weekend agendas.
