A Daily Iowan investigation involving a study of alcohol statistics, student behavior, nearly a dozen hours riding along with ambulances, and more than 20 interviews found that UI students are getting substantially more intoxicated than in recent years, commonly imbibing dangerously high and sometimes lethal levels.There are some definite similarities between alcohol usage at Iowa and Cornell. Iowa students go to bars, while Cornellians go to fraternity parties, but the outcome is the same: each weekend night, hundreds of students who are not of legal age are given alcohol and get drunk. I'm sure Iowa City bar owners know that some of their patrons are underage, and Cornell fraternities rely on freshmen to boost party attendance.
During my freshman year in Donlon, we were yelled at a few times because our number of alcohol emergencies was much higher than it was the previous year. This isn't necessarily a reflection of higher rates of alcohol abuse; our RAs may have been more likely to call an ambulance for drunk residents, and Cornell did a lot of publicity about the medical amnesty program. My own roommate came back quite drunk one night and our RA called for the paramedics; looking back, he wasn't in any sort of life-threatening danger, and the EMTs didn't see any need to take him to the hospital.
The DI article has some data to back up their observation of higher rates of alcohol use:
In a university survey this year, male students reported consuming an average of nine drinks during the last time they partied, up from seven in 2007. Females reported an average of six, one more than two years ago. Drinking that much within two hours constitutes binge drinking.I've always felt like the definition of binge drinking was a little off; I wouldn't consider a female friend to be binge drinking if she had six drinks over two hours. Still, it seems like alcohol has become a more serious problem at IU.
One interesting point raised in the article was that alcohol emergencies on Thursday nights and Friday mornings declined 25 percent during the year after the school started an initiative to hold more classes on Fridays. I think a similar initiative at Cornell would fall flat; most freshmen don't seem to drink too much on Thursdays, since the vast majority of fraternity parties are on Fridays and Saturdays. Upperclassmen would complain about the scheduling change and would still find ways to avoid Friday classes.
Looking through the Sun archives finds an article from 2007 in which the administration makes clear that Cornell does not plan to increase the number of Friday classes. It doesn't look like the Sun has done any sort of comprehensive look at alcohol use on campus recently...
I always seemed to have class on Fridays and am shocked in graduate school to see how there are so few classes on Fridays (and, especially for grad students, very few classes offered on Thursdays). If I were taking a fourth graduate seminar instead of a language, I would likely only have class three days a week! When I asked my program administrator why, she said, "On Fridays, professors don't want to teach and students don't want to go." Oh, these Yalies. -- Nate '07
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on the major. This is my third consecutive semester without Friday classes, but my engineering friends will probably never have a free Friday. The upper-level liberal arts classes tend to meet twice a week for 75 minutes (or even once a week for 2 hours), so you end up with a lot of holes in the schedule.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that "professors don't want to teach" on Fridays. At Cornell most of the professors clear out by mid-day on Friday, but I didn't think it was common for professors to expect a four-day work week.
I dunno. I was a history major, so I didn't have Friday lab, and yet I always had class on Friday. Usually, it was a discussion section, though it sometimes was a class.
ReplyDeleteRather than try to not have class on Friday, I took James Maas's advise and made sure to never have class before 11:15 for my last three semesters. It did wonders for my grades. Thanks to two years in the working world, I can "handle" 10:30 classes now.- Nate '07