Date: Fri 24-Apr-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

Powell-UConn-drinking

Full Text:

COMMENTARY: UConn Tries To Control Drinking By Moving The Party To Campus

By Chris Powell

Ever since college began, it has been the first place where many young people

have experienced the freedom of being away from home and on their own. It

always has been that way and always will be. So outrage over the University of

Connecticut's plan to sell beer to students of drinking age at the annual

University Weekend festivities this weekend at the Storrs campus is a bit

naive and maybe even politically opportunistic.

The usual critics complain that the university shouldn't be helping students

get alcohol. But UConn's students have needed no more help getting alcohol

than they have needed getting tobacco or illegal drugs. That was the lesson of

the drunken riot involving hundreds of young people -- many of them UConn

students and many of them not -- at an apartment complex just off campus

during University Weekend last year.

Realizing that the issue may be less whether students are going to drink but

where, the university figures that it may be able to control student behavior

better by moving more of the partying onto campus this year. So there will be

picnic parties on the football practice field. Plenty of food will be sold, a

beer tent will be erected, and the field will be fenced off and heavily

policed, with only UConn students with identification allowed inside. Only

those who are 21 will be allowed to buy beer, at $1.50 per cup.

This way, the university hopes, fewer students will be driving around after

drinking or driving around looking for alcohol.

It may work to some extent; there may be less underage drinking this way even

if beer cups are passed from students 21 and over to students under 21 at the

picnic area, and less drunken driving.

But of course the better part of the fun of drinking alcohol at this age is

the illegitimacy of it. If it is authorized, controlled, and confined enough,

there may not be much of a party atmosphere after all -- especially if there's

rain. And then what was planned as a big party under the gaze of the

university police may become dozens of unsupervised little parties in

dormitory rooms and at nearby homes and apartments, or maybe another big party

-- or riot -- just off campus.

There's probably not much point in arguing here; events this weekend may prove

the university's new approach right or wrong. To be proved right, UConn may

have to do no better than avoid another riot, and the university has enlisted

the help of the landlord of the apartment complex that was so troublesome last

year.

The issue worth arguing may be whether any campuswide social event like

University Weekend is worth the risk of misbehavior that is inevitable with

any large gathering of this age group. For many students college itself is

more or less a perpetual party, and the pursuit of a place for being outside

any supervision is seldom far from the typical student's mind.

Whatever practices UConn follows with social events, the solution here may be

simply to ensure discipline of those who misbehave on campus or engage in

criminal conduct anywhere. Since Connecticut's overwhelmed criminal-justice

system continues to award laughable probations to most criminal offenders and

doesn't even prosecute most drunken drivers, the state will not be in a good

position to complain regardless of what happens at UConn this weekend.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)