A night earlier, an FSU student was hospitalized, and earlier this semester another nearly died from drinking Everclear, a grain alcohol illegal in a dozen states. She was saved by a quick-thinking fellow student, a resident assistant who recognized trouble signs after friends dropped the woman off at the dorm.
But tonight, at least, Grove won't be calling Frostburg State president Jonathan Gibralter to inform him of a student fatality.
This may be what winning looks like in the battle against binge-drinking on college campuses. "I don't have any arrogance about this," said Gibralter, whose efforts against binge drinking have attracted attention beyond Frostburg's 5,200-student campus in western Maryland. "I don't feel I have the answers. All I can say is we're trying the best we can. We may be only one party away from a disaster."
Last summer, presidents of more than 100 colleges, including prominent schools like Duke and Ohio State, prompted a heated national debate by calling on lawmakers to rethink the national drinking age of 21. The group, the Amethyst Initiative, argued current laws only encourage binge drinking by driving it into the shadows.
But beneath that debate was another contentious one about whether colleges and their presidents are doing enough to combat alcohol problems. Some who signed on to the Amethyst Initiative insist they have hit a wall. But critics, like the antidrunken driving group MADD, accused those presidents of "waving the white flag." They said the presidents only want to spare themselves the inconvenience and unpopularity that comes with a serious crackdown.
Gibralter, a quiet, mustachioed man who arrived at Frostburg in 2006, isn't surrendering. Instead, he is pushing a "zero tolerance" policy at an institution with a hard-earned party school reputation.
And overall, he may be making modest progress. But the lessons from Frostburg don't fit neatly into categories of "cracking down" versus "giving in." Gibralter has made compromises, like supporting a "safe ride" program he initially opposed for fear it would encourage drinking, and he hasn't gone so far as to ban alcohol from campus.
