Fort Collins – Officials at Colorado State University acknowledge they can’t eliminate alcohol use among their students.
Still, campus leaders hope to shift the college experience away from dollar beer nights and Jell-O shots.
And the university will intervene with counseling and treatment when drinking habits start damaging grades and a student’s health.
“Among certain groups of students, abuse of alcohol has gotten to the point where it is actually life-threatening,” said Linda Kuk, CSU’s vice president of student affairs.
In essence, a sweeping set of initiatives announced last week aims to turn student drinking from an obsession to an afterthought, say architects of the plan.
Everything from a “social norms” campaign emphasizing the consequences of binge drinking to a student-led group focusing on preventing alcohol poisoning will be introduced this fall. Other programs for substance-abuse treatment will be expanded, as well as outreach efforts for neighborhoods overwhelmed by student partying.
The school’s Greek system also is part of the reforms. CSU will create graduate assistantships to staff fraternity houses and monitor behavior, similar to what hall directors do in campus dorms.
“We believe these actions are a major step toward realistically yet effectively addressing the problem of alcohol abuse at Colorado State and on campuses throughout the nation,” CSU president Larry Penley said.
The moves Penley unveiled last week were based on recommendations from an alcohol task force formed after the September death of sophomore Samantha Spady.
Spady died from alcohol poisoning, and her body was found in a now-disbanded CSU fraternity. Her death followed two nights of alcohol-fueled riots near campus.
Those incidents sparked an outcry among parents, lawmakers, alumni and school officials that the university wasn’t doing enough to prevent dangerous alcohol abuse among its students.
Many CSU officials and experts concede such a cultural shift among students will take years, even decades, to pull off. After all, college is traditionally where young adults experiment, often with drugs and booze.
“Alcohol use among (American college) students goes all the way back to 1636, with the creation of Harvard,” Kuk said.
Mike Feeley, a former state legislator and member of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, served on CSU’s alcohol task force and opposed lifting the ban on beer sales at the school’s Hughes Stadium, which Penley did last week. Feeley had argued that drastic steps such as the beer ban were needed to change the atmosphere at football games away from alcohol consumption.
The campus reforms will take years to truly take hold, Feeley said.
“I sort of liken it to seat belts and smoking. It’s taken us 30 years or so, but the culture around those issues has slowly changed.”
Perhaps an even greater obstacle will be funding, Feeley said.
The state legislature is watching every penny that goes into higher-education funding. Penley says a shift of resources from other areas at the university will be needed to underwrite many of the changes.
“Penley’s job is to make difficult choices with limited funds, and this will be a similar situation,” Feeley said.
If the reforms are fully implemented, students who experienced the pain of Spady’s death will be the first ones to buy into them, said outgoing student body vice president Ben Goldstein.
“A lot of students last year lost a best friend, and for them to balk at these attempts at the university is just unrealistic.”
Staff writer Monte Whaley can be reached at 303-726-8674 or mwhaley@denverpost.com.
