NYU Program Aims To Combat Underage Drinking

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The New York Sun

New York University is rolling out a “responsibility campaign” that aims to promote safety and combat underage drinking.

The pilot program, to be announced Monday at a meeting of Community Board #3, seeks to involve neighborhood residents, lawmakers, and students in a community-wide initiative, its organizers said. Although the program is in its infancy, school officials said it is an attempt to smooth relations between residents and students, and draws largely from safety concerns.

School officials said the initiative is not a reaction to the recent high-profile deaths of young people who had been out drinking, but that the reduction of underage drinking is a high priority. “As a university, we feel particularly that we have to make sure our students are safe and that they are acting in ways that will improve their safety,” the vice president of NYU’s office of government and community affairs, Alicia Hurley, said.

Although Dr. Hurley said the program is still in formation, it comes at a time when city lawmakers are cracking down on nightlife security following the murders of graduate student Imette St. Guillen and 18-year-old Jennifer Moore. The City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, has placed nightlife security high on her agenda; she will convene a nightlife summit later this month. A spokesman for the speaker’s office, Anthony Hogrebe, said local colleges will be invited to that summit. “We feel that they have a stake in this to a degree,” he said.

Indeed, while heavy drinking among college students is well documented, students in New York City pose a particular challenge to those looking to stymie underage drinking and binge drinking.

“You can create a really strong relationship with bars around your campus, but so the students hop a subway or a bus and they start moving to a different bar,” a counselor at St. John’s University and the co-chairwoman of the New York City Alcohol and Other Drug Consortium, Ruth DeRosa, said.

According to researchers, college students are drinking as much as ever, and some in even greater excess. Binge drinking was highest among young adults according to the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That study also found that among 18- to 22-year-olds, those enrolled in full-time colleges were more likely to drink than those who were not.

Some schools, like Fordham University, have strengthened their commitment to alcohol education and safety. Fordham gives students a “Passport” guide listing non-alcoholic activities in New York City, and freshmen attend core programming sessions to learn about alcohol and safety. Peer educators facilitate those sessions because their advice resonates best among freshmen, the director of alcohol and other drug education program at Fordham, Edward Wahesh, said. NYU ranked no. 18 in a list of top party schools in the Princeton Review’s 2003 Best Colleges Ranking. In the 2007 edition released last month, NYU ranked no. 8 in the “Reefer Madness” category that gauges marijuana use.

Asked about the new “responsibility campaign,” the student council president for NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, Meredith Dolgin, said prevention is the best tactic. “People are still going to drink, and that’s a fact of college,” she said.

So far, the initiative has won preliminary support from some community members and representatives of the city’s nightlife industry, who said the community should share responsibility for nightlife safety.

“It’s unfair to put the onus solely on the clubs for what is an epidemic of underage drinking,” a spokesman for the New York City Nightlife Association, Richard Lipsky, said. The association’s attorney, Robert Bookman, said: “It would be a great idea … but it needs to be more than wishful thinking.”


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