A Freshman Drinking Problem

Before coming to college, Elizabeth rarely drank alcohol, save a few sips at a party. Her first night at Harvard, that changed.

Elizabeth remembers hunting for something to do with her roommates the first day of freshman year. They ended up following a large group of students into a dorm room where, she says, everyone was drinking.

“And that was my very first shot of vodka,” she recalls.

The situation described by Elizabeth, who, like the other students in this story, was granted anonymity by The Crimson so that her name would not be associated with underage drinking, is not unusual at Harvard. According to Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67, survey data collected by the Freshman Dean’s Office through alcohol.edu, an online alcohol prevention course completed by incoming freshmen, has found that 70 percent of undergraduates do not identify as drinkers before arriving in Cambridge. By the time they graduate, that percentage flips, with 77 percent of Harvard students saying they choose to drink, according to the Drug and Alcohol Peer Advisors.

Students say the freedom of being away from home and expectations that everyone parties in college contribute to a freshman drinking culture that tends towards dangerous habits like binge drinking, generally defined as four drinks for women and five drinks for men in two hours or less.

When College administrators embarked on a review of the undergraduate alcohol policy in 2011, binge drinking was among the problems they sought to address. The new policy, released in March 2012 and approved by the faculty that November, banned “[a]ctivities that promote high-risk drinking, such as excessive and/or rapid consumption of alcohol, particularly of a competitive nature.”

Still, the College’s new alcohol policy has targeted upperclassman drinking in the Houses, and the status quo for freshmen remains: after the rule change, as before, all alcohol is banned from the Yard.

Limited by the fact that administrators cannot police an illegal activity like underage drinking, many say Harvard has yet to find a solution to the freshman drinking problem.

A FRESHMAN PROBLEM

Although the number of alcohol-related visits to University Health Services has decreased for all class years since 2011, over 50 percent of those visits are by freshmen, according to UHS spokesperson Lindsey Baker.

Both students and administrators said they have observed a significant drinking culture among first-year students, the majority of whom come to Harvard relatively inexperienced with alcohol. Freshman students said they take advantage of the newfound freedom of living without parental supervision to experiment.

Dingman said he thinks some students may “rush to catch up” on the drinking they avoided in high school when they come to campus freshman fall. Although the majority of undergraduates may not identify as drinkers when they enroll, survey data collected by UHS indicates that students overestimate the percentage of their peers who consume alcohol.

Being presented with the opportunity to drink, often for the first time, can push freshmen over the edge. Elizabeth, an athlete, described binge drinking as “very common” at bonding events for student groups like sports teams and alcohol use more broadly as a dominant part of the social scene at Harvard.

“Every party was all about drinking,” she said of her freshman year. “Most freshmen learned how to drink.”

Because freshmen who choose to drink often want to hide it from their proctors, said Dingman, they might resort to hard alcohol “that you can conceal” and consume “in a rapid fire way.”

Anna, a member of the class of 2016 who said she drank almost every weekend this past year, said she believes some freshmen feel pressured to “load up on hard alcohol” before going out, for fear that they will not be able to find a drink after leaving their rooms. She pointed to February’s freshman formal as an example of an event where students pre-gamed “really hard.”

“A lot of freshmen are inexperienced drinkers when they come here, and sadly the culture here tends to be shots,” Crimson Yard freshmen resident dean Catherine R. Shapiro said. “The problem with that is that they hit your system so fast that students can end up putting themselves in situations that are pretty scary.”

AN UPPERCLASSMAN POLICY

When in 2011 the College decided to review its policy governing student drinking habits, it held a series of meetings throughout the dorms to solicit student feedback on existing rules. These meetings were sparsely attended—only six students went to the discussion designated for freshmen, four of whom were representatives from the Undergraduate Council.

Despite poor turnout, someone brought up the idea that unsafe drinking habits form during freshman year at almost every meeting.

When a committee drafted a revised policy just a few months later, it introduced new regulations that banned high-risk drinking games while also reversing a rule created in spring 2011 that had banned mixed drinks from House formals.

But those changes were specific to upperclassmen. Despite the repeated articulation of a freshman problem, the alcohol policy did not include guidelines governing the Yard.

“The new policy wasn’t really new for the Yard at all,” Dingman said. “I was part of lots of conversations about it, but it really impacted the Houses more—almost entirely.”

According to Rakesh Khurana, Cabot House Master and chair of the alcohol policy committee, the policy was drafted with the understanding that the nature of alcohol use differed between upperclassmen and freshmen. Rather than try to create a “one size fits all” policy, Khurana said, the committee wanted to address the fact that freshmen and upperclassmen face different sets of issues when it comes to alcohol consumption. Administrators never intended to ignore freshmen, Khurana said.

“There are people who are old enough to drink in the upperclass Houses. That creates a very different type of situation,” he said.

The FDO plays the largest role in addressing alcohol use in the Yard. Its approach, Dingman said, focuses on education, rather than discipline. For example, the College this past year developed a new, Harvard-specific alcohol education program for incoming freshmen. “Harvard Proof” will be used for the first time with the class of 2017.

But administrators and students both said that while Harvard can focus on education, it is limited in the ways it can address alcohol use in the freshman class because of the legal drinking age of 21.

Anna said that while in an ideal world Harvard would find steps to encourage healthier drinking habits among freshmen, such as serving alcohol at freshman formal to discourage pre-gaming, she recognizes that the majority of freshmen are under 21, preventing the College from condoning alcohol use in the first-year class.

“They’re sort of limited in their power,” she said. “I think part of the problem is just the national laws that prevent Harvard from creating a safer environment.”

—Laya Anasu and Hana N. Rouse contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Madeline R. Conway can be reached at mconway@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @MadelineRConway.