Despite long odds, college president takes a stand against binge-drinking

Debate rages over whether schools are doing enough

Customers left a store with a case of beer in hand, in Frostburg, Md., home of Frostburg State University. Students say the town of 8,000 year-round residents offers few other social options. (Jason Turner/ Associated Press)

FROSTBURG, Md. - It's dime draft night every Thursday at the Diamond Lounge on Main Street, and a dozen or so glassy-eyed students are milling around outside as Lieutenant Kevin Grove's patrol car passes by.

He hangs a right on Bowery Street, the main drag for off-campus social life at Frostburg State University. A few students are walking - some stumbling - up the hill. On porches and through windows, they are visibly holding bottles. But Grove keeps driving. He is looking for fights, accidents, and vandalism.

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.

The focus is saving lives, not eliminating underage drinking, and the trick is to engage students without alienating them - while planting seeds of caution in their minds.

Nationally, more than 40 percent of college students report at least one symptom of alcohol abuse or dependence. One study has estimated more than 500,000 full-time students at four-year colleges suffer injuries each year related in some way to drinking, and about 1,700 die.

At FSU, survey figures from 2006 and 2007 show the proportion of students engaged in high-risk drinking - just under half - is about on par with that of comparable institutions.

But a number of factors, including geography, have given Frostburg its heavy-drinking reputation. Students say the town of 8,000 year-round residents offers few other social options, and several bars sell cheap alcohol near campus. Most students live off-campus in houses on or near Bowery Street, many with cramped basements that students crowd into for parties. And there have been problems with unrecognized fraternities that are outside the reach of the Greek system.

It was just a month after Gibralter arrived two years ago that a student member of one such fraternity punched out a 45-year-old town resident after a party. The victim suffered life-threatening injuries.

Gibralter held a town hall campus meeting, and told students things were about to change. Students responded that the university had no right to interfere in their lives off-campus.

But Gibralter reminded them it did - it just hadn't been enforcing those rules.