Alcohol 101 Popular Class On Campuses

It’s Friday night - party time.

The Wheel, a cramped old wood bar that’s barely more than booths, a bartop and bathrooms, is jamming with young people. Smoke and music swirl together.

Already, at just 10 p.m., a crush of University of Kansas fraternity and sorority faithful - boys in baseball caps, pretty girls with Grace Kelly features - are word-slurring drunk.

“I’ve had a least eight beers here,” 20-year-old Danny Lowry, a University of Kansas junior shouts above the din and swarm of students, pressed body-to-body in front of the bar. “And this is just a pre-party!”

Soon, he says, he’ll take off for “The Kappa Cotillion” a sorority-fraternity function at an off-campus party haven called the School House.

“But I don’t know where it is,” Lowry says with a laugh. “Because I’ve been drunk every time I’m there.”

Nearby a young man drinks from a full pitcher of beer, no cup, the entire plastic pitcher tipping toward his mouth.

Senior Kara Knickerbocker, who turned 21 in August, boasts that she’s already had “a couple of shots, four beers and a couple of rum-and-Cokes.”

Junior Matt Smith, 20, says he began drinking about 1:30 in the afternoon and so far has had 10 or 15 beers.

“Not enough!” he shouts.

College and drinking. Alcohol and higher education. In some regard the two have probably been linked since Plato and Socrates shared their first bottle of wine.

Yet one of the biggest stories to sweep across America’s college campuses has been the announcement last month by the fraternities and sororities at the University of Colorado, Boulder - voted as one of Playboy magazine’s Top 10 party schools - that alcohol no longer would be allowed at any of their on-campus functions.

“It was time to bite the bullet and turn away from drinking,” said Brian Phillips, president of CU’s Interfraternity Council.

That “sober” declaration - coupled with a movement on many college campuses to designate at least a few dormitories “alcohol-free,” plus the fact that since 1983 more than 700 of America’s 3,000 colleges have started their own chapters of Students Against Driving Drunk - has caused some to wonder whether today’s college students are gradually embracing a new temperance.

Polls, in fact, show that among college students awareness regarding the dangers of alcohol has never been higher. Many students, such as KU freshman Stephanie Payne, 18, insist that when she and her friends drink, “we take care of each other. No one will drive.”

Many others, including 20-year-old junior Julianne Leeland, say although they’ve enjoyed wild times, their boozing days are over.

“I got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore,” says Leeland, chatting with her friends in the bar. “And it’s not like I need it to be social.”

Signs of a true upswing in sobriety?

Students say: You must be high.

“Everyone says that no one does it anymore, that it’s not that bad,” Knickerbocker says of college drinking, in general, and underage drinking in particular. “But it is. Everybody does it, on the weekends and during the week.”

“It’s so true,” says 19-year-old sophomore Robin Reed. But then she said, joking, “I won’t tell you. I plead the 5th Amendment” when asked how much she’s had to drink this night.

Indeed, on this night at this one bar - where full-size garbage cans crested with hundreds of empty beer cans and bottles - it was difficult to find any students who were actually 21 years old. Many students had great fun showing a reporter their borrowed or fake identification cards - laminated covers peeled back, pictures replaced, birth dates changed.

“This is a real ID. It just isn’t me,” says 20-year-old junior Matthew Vanauken, who concedes he’s well on his way to getting blasted.

“This is what a lot of people do,” he says.

Often, students say, they don’t even need IDs because many off-campus bars, dependent on student business, never check. Which, of course, is nothing new.

But what is new, what has college administrators and alcohol use experts increasingly concerned, is how many students now consider getting “trashed,” getting “sloshed,” getting totally drunk to be a regular part of the college experience.

Nineteen-year-old sophomore Toby Jones, who deems drinking to be “a very important” part of college social life, but also says “I don’t go out to get sick or anything,” estimates that she and her friends go drinking four or five nights a week.