COLLOQUY

By BEN GOSE

If a student hits a fraternity party at 9 p.m. and returns to his room five hours -- and five beers -- later, is he a responsible drinker or a pathological case study?

It all depends on whom you ask.

For more than a decade, health educators have told college students that they can consume alcohol safely by limiting themselves to one drink -- defined as a shot of liquor, a glass of wine, or a bottle of beer -- per hour. But for the past few years, they have also told students that having five or more drinks in one night constitutes a "binge."

Five or more drinks (four or more for women, who tend to weigh less and metabolize alcohol less efficiently) came to define

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Should colleges ban alcohol from their campuses, even for students who are of legal drinking age? (The responses) Graph: Binge drinking at Northern Illinois U.: Perception and reality FOR SUBSCRIBERS: The Students section from this week's Chronicle.

a binge three years ago, when researchers at Harvard University conducted one of the most thorough examinations of college drinking. The widely publicized study found that 44 per cent of students on 140 campuses were binge drinkers.

But that definition of "binge" never caught on with students, many of whom view five beers as "just warming up."

Now some health educators, too, are questioning the definition. Michael P. Haines, coordinator of health- enhancement services at Northern Illinois University, says his studies suggest a much stronger correlation between violent behavior and higher levels of drinking -- eight for a man and six for a woman. "Science is buckling under to morality and funding," he says.

Mr. Haines and Henry Wechsler, the lead author of the Harvard study, are among the most prominent college-drinking experts in the country, but they disagree strongly over how colleges should combat dangerous drinking.

Dr. Wechsler argues that binge drinking is so rampant that colleges need to take steps to cut off the flow of alcohol. Mr. Haines says that dangerous drinking is far less prevalent than most students believe, and that educating students about their misperceptions is the best way to get them to cut back on consumption.

The spat between the two comes at a time when institutions are desperately searching for an approach that works -- already this year, at least five college students have died in alcohol-related accidents.

"We can no longer trust the people doing this kind of drinking to give it up by themselves," says Dr. Wechsler.

But Mr. Haines says Dr. Wechsler's data -- characterized by a low threshold for binge drinking -- have established binging as a bogus "norm" -- and one that other students will try to live up to.

"The vast majority of students don't harm themselves or others as part of their drinking behavior, and that's the best-kept secret in the country," Mr. Haines says.

Instead of bemoaning drinking, he says, colleges should take every opportunity to point out that Animal House is not reality -- and that the percentage of their classmates who get blasted on weekends is, in fact, low. This "social marketing," he says, works wonders on freshmen, who are well known as conformists.

Mr. Haines points to his own campus

Ralph-Finn Hestoft, SABA, for The Chronicle Michael P. Haines: "The vast majority of students don't harm themselves or others as part of their drinking behavior, and that's the best kept secret in the country."

as evidence that the approach works. In 1989, 45 per cent of the undergraduates at Northern Illinois said they had consumed five or more drinks the last time they "partied." But when asked what proportion of their classmates drank heavily, students pegged the proportion who drank five or more at 70 per cent. "As long as that information is secret, it supports imaginary peer pressure to live up to a heavier drinking norm than is real," he says.

So he began putting ads in the student newspaper that featured this message: "Most students (55 per cent) drink five or fewer drinks when they party." He ran the message next to pictures of smiling students, such as an attractive couple walking hand-in-hand across the campus.

And he drove the message home with cash. Campus health workers began making surprise visits to campus cafeterias, where they would give a dollar to the first student who could identify the proportion of classmates who had had five or fewer drinks at their last party. Students who put up a poster in their dormitory room with the same message would earn $5 if a health official stopped by and saw it.

By 1995, students' perception of the degree of campus drinking had dropped by more than a third from the 1989 figure. Now they believed that just 43 per cent of their classmates had five or more drinks at a party.

What's more, students' actual drinking also fell by more than a third. Only 28 per cent said they'd had five or more on their last night out. Both figures have remained roughly the same for the past two years. "If you start where students are at and tell them the truth, you will reduce heavy drinking," Mr. Haines says.

Jamie Holloway, a junior at Northern Illinois, calls the ads "eye-catching" and says she was surprised to find that the actual percentage of binge drinkers was so low. Although bars around the campus are still "packed" on Friday nights, she says, she observes few freshmen becoming wildly drunk. The health office is "getting the group that they're going for," she says.

Other institutions are starting to pay attention. Mr. Haines has worked as a consultant with 30 to 40 colleges, and many of them, including California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Montana State University, and the University of Arizona, have tried his approach.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education published a booklet on Mr. Haines's work, "A Social Norms Approach to Preventing Binge Drinking at Colleges and Universities." The department now awards some grants to combat binge drinking only to colleges that are willing to try the approach.

"It's the hot thing," says Jim Grizzell, a health educator at C.S.U.-Pomona, which received a $180,000 grant from the department.

"This approach tries to take advantage of peer pressure in a positive way," says H. Wesley Perkins, a professor of sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, whose work on drinking norms had persuaded Mr. Haines to try his experiment.

One reason the strategy is catching on is that little else has worked.

Since the 1980s, colleges have bombarded students with messages that note the health risks associated with heavy drinking and drunk driving. Jeff Linkenbach, director of student-health promotion at Montana State, says that approach is like "preaching chastity in a brothel."

"Students are more influenced by what they perceive as normal than by what they perceive as healthy," he says.

Dr. Linkenbach is working on a campaign with the state's highway-safety office that will be used by every college in Montana. The central message: "Most (64 per cent) of Montana college students have 4 or fewer drinks each week."

More recently, colleges and national fraternities have tried to combat binge drinking by shutting off the supply of alcohol. For example, after one student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst died in separate alcohol-related incidents this fall, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education voted last week to ban alcohol at all 29 public colleges in the state.

This fall, four institutions -- Florida Southern College, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, the University of Northern Colorado, and Villanova University -- are experimenting with a program that requires all fraternity houses on their campuses to go dry.

The program, called "Select 2000," was created by national fraternity leaders and college administrators. But fraternity presidents on at least one campus, Southern Illinois, have refused to give up their booze.

And there's debate over whether the bans are good policy -- even if they work. Alcohol is banned at most fraternity parties at Louisiana State University, but that didn't stop the brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon from heading to a nearby bar in August. By the time a night of heavy drinking had ended, a dozen students had passed out on a floor and one, Benjamin Wynne, was dead. His blood-alcohol level was .588, almost six times the state's legal limit for driving.

In an editorial that noted the incident, The Wall Street Journal called for a lowering of the drinking age nationally from 21 to 19. "Zero tolerance for college drinking sounds great on paper, but it reinforces the mystique of college drinking," it said.

The "social norms" model, on the other hand, can point to some modest success stories. The University of Arizona has also seen declines in heavy drinking since it began using the strategy.

In a 1995 survey of undergraduate and graduate students, 60 per cent said they believed their classmates had consumed six drinks or more the last time they partied. In reality, only a third of Arizona's students reported drinking that much on their most recent night out.

Last year, the college began running ads in The Arizona Daily Wildcat revealing that "64 per cent of students have four drinks or fewer when they party."

This spring, the college saw a drop in binge drinking among its undergraduates, who had been drinking more heavily than the graduate students. The proportion of undergraduates who reported having five or more drinks at their last party dropped to 36 per cent from 43 per cent. "The campaign is one of the driving forces behind our declines," says Koreen Johannessen, director of health promotion at Arizona.

But some other colleges haven't seen much benefit from the strategy. At C.S.U.-Pomona, Mr. Grizzell, the health educator, began putting up posters along popular campus walkways in 1995-96. The posters cited statistics that officials elsewhere would love to see: "72 per cent of students drink 0 or 1 alcoholic drinks per week."

In the two years of the campaign, the proportion of students at Pomona who have five or more drinks when they go out has remained steady at 18 per cent. "Since we have so few students who binge drink already, I don't think we could have expected a big change," Mr. Grizzell says.

Mark Fulop, a health educator at San Diego State University, says the social-norms strategy is a "promising" one that his campus is considering. But it might not do much good with fraternity members, he fears. The Harvard study found that more than 80 per cent of fraternity members nationwide reported having five or more drinks in one sitting in the previous two weeks. "They don't perceive themselves as part of the campus tribe, but as part of the Greek tribe," says Mr. Fulop. "It's going to be more difficult to get them to move to a campuswide norm."

Mr. Haines of Northern Illinois concedes that fraternity members might not be among those who drink more moderately after hearing about drinking norms. "Who in their right minds would voluntarily join a place that has a reputation of heavy drinking, sexual assaults, and fights unless they want that behavior?" he says.

Mr. Haines says some college officials end up calling him despite their antipathy for condoning moderate drinking among minors. They usually start the conversation this way, he says: "We give up. We've tried everything else and nothing works."

But Dr. Wechsler thinks Mr. Haines needs more data -- and more common sense -- before proclaiming victory. "If he would stand back and look at how campuses are ringed by bars, he would widen his view of the problem.

"It ain't that easy. This is a problem that has been around since Colonial days, and if it could be fixed by one easy measure, it would be fixed already."

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