Oh, what a difference a week makes: last week I was the darling of The Campus and this week, its villain. I would like to express my gratitude to The Campus for publishing so many articles on the Great Alcohol Debate.
The reason I, along with the Addison County Prevention Project, brought Drs. Searles and Jernigan to campus was to broaden the conversation about the minimum drinking age and the role of alcohol in our lives.
Our culture has a very complicated relationship to alcohol and no one has figured out how to combat the binge-drinking problem on college campuses. I certainly do not claim to have the answer. I do feel the need to respond to Mr. Waters’ piece, however, as I believe he has misrepresented my work on alcohol at Middlebury.
No one from The Campus has ever interviewed me regarding alcohol prevention and education on campus, and if someone had, here is what I would have shared: I arrived at Middlebury in the Fall of 2007, and, almost immediately, was confronted by Nick Garza’s death. This event had a profound effect on me, as I believe it did on many other members of our community, and it shaped my commitment to work as hard as I could to avoid losing another student to alcohol.
I have never taken sides on the MLDA question or “waged a clandestine war on drinking,” but rather have espoused a risk-reduction approach to alcohol abuse at Middlebury.
My office has consistently sent out the message to “Take Care of Yourself, Take Care of Each Other,” and by joining with the Gordie Foundation, has strived to educate students about the risks of binge drinking, the signs of alcohol poisoning and the social injustice and psychological trauma associated with hazing. I have been privileged to work with many thoughtful, intelligent and dedicated faculty, staff and students on several different committees mandated to review and re-write our alcohol policies.
The organizing mission of these groups has always been to minimize the negative consequences (death, injury, sexual assault, emergency medical care, bias crimes, damage to property and disruption in the residence halls) of problematic drinking.
Providing students with information about the pleasures and the risks associated with alcohol so that they may make informed and thoughtful decisions is very consistent with the messages I impart to students about relationships and sexuality.
Asking students to keep themselves and their friends safe at parties or in their dorm rooms isn’t sexy and may seem out of touch, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t try my best to push back against the alcohol industry’s glamorization and idealization of college drinking.
This may make me conservative and un-cool, but I am willing to shoulder that characterization if it means a Middlebury student isn’t one of the six college students nationally who will die tomorrow due to alcohol.
Op-Ed: A response to Mr. Waters
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