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RECENT STUDIES ON THE PREVALENCE OF DRINKING AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS TAR ALL COLLEGE TIPPLERS WITH THE SAME HYPERBOLIC BRUSH. BUT THEY DON'T BEGIN TO ADDRESS THE REAL ISSUE.

College students drink too much. I was hung over for three days after my 21st birthday. In college, two weeks did not go by when I didn't have, at least once, four drinks in a single night. My name is Sarah Rose, and I was among the 39 percent of college women who qualify as binge drinkers.

A new report from researchers at Harvard shows that the problem of binge drinking on campuses isn't becoming any less of a problem. While indignant 19-year-olds insist the drinking itself isn't an issue (to this day I don't regret the exotic dancer and her Hong Kong triad boyfriend who treated me to my three days of shame), all admit that the resultant behavior from drinking is. I didn't get behind a wheel, force anyone to have sex, flunk classes or, as one freshman at MIT did this fall, die from alcohol poisoning. But with the geometric way in which bad decisions get worse under the influence, I could have. That's what keeps college administrators up at night.

Binge drinking is considered by those whose job it is to consider these things to be the single greatest public health hazard on campuses today. By serving up big numbers, researchers scare the public: 50 percent of students are bingeing. Half! But what proportion go well beyond the four drinks for women, five for men, to drink themselves doggy-eyed and sleep on the fraternity cat? Every alcohol poisoning case involves binge drinking, but not all binge drinkers get alcohol poisoning. (Otherwise, we'd have a lot more dead college students out there.) My guess is that when you isolate the extreme cases -- say, the girls who drink seven and boys who tip back eight -- you find the frightening and expected correlation with the excesses: the deaths, the rapes, the abused property. There are essentially two communities being talked about, the functional bingers and the fearsome ones. Couldn't a study separate the two? And if it could, wouldn't smaller and more telling numbers lessen the attention binge drinking gets?

When I binged, I had my two gin and tonics and two beers, maybe every other week. Thursday night at a sports bar, a scorpion bowl and that Cantonese dive with the year-round Christmas lights. But I suffered when I was sloppy drunk, and I restricted it to that most holy and singular of holidays, my 21st birthday.

I had a roommate once who spent all weekend howling at the toilet. We collected phone calls informing us of her past evening's derring-do: topless on the bar, tongue-deep in a blond, exhausting the expense account of some hapless stranger. She never had an inkling the next day. There simply is a difference between my discrete every-other weakness and her appointment with the bottle. The study, as reported in the New York Times, does nothing to distinguish between our very different behavior. She has no degree, but like the large majority of college students, I graduated. Pathological bingers need professional help, but there are many easy solutions for the more moderate deviants.

Higher-ups whose job it is to maintain the university's institutional memory furrow their brows, swallow the findings whole and take a paternal, almost punitive approach, instituting three-strikes policies, printing birth dates on student IDs and giving endless orientation lectures about the consequences. The message is "Don't," but rarely do we hear the proactive "Manage your drinking responsibly when you do ... as you inevitably will."

Carleton, a remote Midwestern liberal arts school, tried the more moderate approach of offering free cups -- typical of those used at beer parties -- printed with slogans aimed against the connection between drink and violence against women: "100 percent of the rapes on this campus occurred under the influence of alcohol"; "Only yes means yes."

Plainly policies that address the compos mentis of almost-adults will work better than severe loco parentis. But having to comply with state liquor laws binds the wrists of understanding administrators who would like to make the campus a safe haven for experiments in adulthood.

But the best strategy against destructive boozing is probably a campus culture (and therefore a student culture) that puts a premium on intellectual endeavors. At the University of Chicago, a "grind school" where I'm getting my master's degree, there are few whoop-banging binge bashes because the workload and emphasis on performance is so high. Let students police themselves by encouraging excellence. If we were smart enough to get in, we're smart enough to figure out what our maximum tolerance-to-performance ratio is.

At my alma mater, an estimated half of the students performed some sort of community service. One in two of us were coordinating after-school activities for kids or tutoring illiterates, and it wasn't long before the realities of alcohol abuse became undeniably clear. Opening up the campus to the outside world rather than cloaking it in a comfy haze of institutional security expanded our consciousness of consequences.

Some drink for lack of anything better to do; colleges are often miles from the real world or so big they constitute a world unto themselves. Break the boredom-barroom link with university-sponsored alternative Friday and Saturday nights, alcohol-free concerts and performances, anything at all interesting enough to keep people out of the dorms and away from the kegs.

What about peer pressure? Well, what about peer counseling? Trained students supervised by professionals can staff phone lines and drop-in centers to buttress the flagging resolve of a tender young party goer.

Most of all, it would be nice if someone looked at the sum of the collegiate experience and asked why drinking is so very much, in the Freudian sense, a cigar.
SALON | Nov. 11, 1998

Sarah Rose is working toward her M.A. from the University of Chicago in social thought.