Bucknell Student Government, along with IFC and Panhellenic Council, sponsored a talk on Monday, November 2 titled “One Too Many: What Will It Take?” focusing on the issue of excessive and dangerous drinking at Bucknell.
The event began with a mock phone call of what it sounds like when a student calls Public Safety for a drinking-related issue. First, the dean on call is notified, and he or she decides, with a doctor at Evangelical Community Hospital, whether to notify the intoxicated student’s parents. The call was not an example of a single incident, but a prototype that has occurred far too often on Bucknell’s campus. Since the beginning of the semester, 53 students have been hospitalized for being dangerously intoxicated by alcohol. These 53 students were represented by student volunteers on stage to tangibly show the number of students who have been transported in such a short period of time. The number remained projected on the screen throughout the presentation as a reminder of the severity of the issue this campus is facing throughout the program. While it can be easy to feel detached from the numbers and statistics, “the hope was that each person in the audience recognized someone who was a symbolic representation of a hospitalized individual,” BSG President Alexandra Rosen said of the exercise, which aimed to remind the audience that the issue is one we should consider on a personal level.
Speakers during the program included Alexandra Rosen, BSG President; Miles Silva, on behalf of IFC; Isabel Blatt, President of Panhellenic Council; and several students who provided different perspectives on the issue of alcohol consumption on our campus. “We made a strategic decision to have panelists who have experienced many different realms of Bucknell life,” Rosen said of the speakers who were chosen to represent Bucknellians in the program. A question-and-answer session followed to give students an opportunity to ask questions and share their opinions on the issue.
One of the most compelling metaphors of the entire presentation was Residential Advisor Jackson Pierce’s comparison of his first-year residents to “sheep going into a slaughterhouse” when he sees them getting ready to go out on a Wednesday night. He described first-years as wide-eyed and eager only to embrace the culture of their new community, only to be met with the “poison” of alcohol that infiltrates the going out scene at our school. Several other speakers reaffirmed that it’s an issue that is only getting worse.
Senior Kortney Marshall’s account of the drastic changes in the drinking culture over her four years at Bucknell echoed a similar sentiment. She recounted that she “almost never heard” people referring to blacking out as a first-year, but that the perception and treatment of the notion of being “blacked out” has changed substantially during her time at Bucknell. It’s a culture that has fostered itself under the guise of being a release from the stress of schoolwork, under the false pretense that it is a facilitator of social interaction and an indication of someone’s ability to have fun. Jokes made about the careless behavior alcohol facilitates are often misconstrued as “funny”. It is through this misconstruing of alcohol’s harmful consequences that makes the binge drinking culture at Bucknell not just acceptable, but encouraged.
The issue must be considered on both the individual and community levels. Students are often under the impression that we are helping our friends have fun by encouraging them to take another shot, or joking about how drunk they were last night. In doing this, we fail to see the impact the aggregate of these behaviors has on our community as a whole.
It is not uncommon to hear people talk about their actions and even themselves more freely when they are talking about being under the influence of alcohol. Is it that as a result of the drinking culture, Bucknellians feel unable to be themselves without a few drinks? On a campus full of intelligent, driven, and capable students, it is hard to think this is the case, but it very well might be. First-year Allison Kohlberg’s statement put it most simply: as much as we don’t like to admit it, “social interactions are hard” and are too often facilitated and encouraged by the acts of binge drinking in order to feel comfortable at dark, sweaty fraternity parties.
It’s not that Bucknellians are not smart enough to understand the potential consequences of alcohol, it is that they are so desensitized to them. Junior Liam Moore pointed out that “at home, just one hospitalization” would be a tragedy, and that is the way it should be treated. This talk facilitated conversations that needed to be had in order to promote permanent change to the way we approach, think about, and drink alcohol. “We hope that students will think twice after this event. We hope that they will think twice in regards to how fast they drink, what they drink, and with whom they drink,” Rosen said. While change is not an easy task, as the statistics presented at the beginning of the program demonstrated, the issue of alcohol overconsumption is one our campus is familiar with. Perhaps it’s easiest to think about change by beginning with the question each speaker prompted the next one with: “why is this important to you?”