Notre Dame and the Politics of Alcohol

By Colman McCarthy

SOUTH BEND, IN.—On returning to the University of Notre Dame from spring break in El Salvador, Maria Ochsner felt her emotions swing between chagrin and disgust. Large numbers of her schoolmates were staging demonstrations to protest the school’s new alcohol policy: a ban on hard liquor in residence halls.

While some 600 alcohol-deprived students chanted and vented at a gathering on the quad, others among the irate took to the pages of the campus newspaper to fume. One student denounced the “middle-aged celibate white men” who run Notre Dame . They “have totally lost touch with the student body and…reality.” Another: administrators see students as “uncouth youngsters that [sic] must be monitored and controlled in every way.”

Maria Ochsner wasn’t buying: “I had just spent a week in El Salvador surrounded by poverty and injustice. I came back to campus. What are students rallying against? They can’t drink hard alcohol in their rooms. It was a disgrace.”

By chance, I was visiting Notre Dame days after the ban was announced. The student groups that invited me had close ties to the school’s well-regard peace studies program and the Center for Social Concern, both of them the soul of Notre Dame. Like Maria Ochsner, they had a deep awareness that in a world mired in militarism, hunger, poverty and violence, an overheated protest about a ban on booze signals a dive into triviality.

Much praise to Notre Dame’s administrators for acting. But not total praise. Beer and wine are still allowed in dorms, which means the ABCs of higher education—abusing, boozing, cruising—will continue.

George Hacker, director of the alcohol policy project at Washington’s Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that Notre Dame has “taken a half-step. Beer is a much larger problem on college campuses than hard liquor. It is the drug of choice. It’s cheaper, more available, more used in binge drinking, and is consumed in more hazardous amounts.”

The half-step might be only a quarter-step. If the Holy Cross priests who run Notre Dame are serious about the dangers of alcohol—the most destructive drug in America and with a negative economic cost of $180 billion—then they should announce that alcohol will no longer be consumed in their residences. Nor will it be allowed at the University Club where the faculty dines, or the Morris Inn—the campus hotel—or at the tailgating parties on football weekends when thirsty alums pour in.

Without these restrictions, students are getting a mixed message from the Holy Cross clergy: the hard stuff is poison for you but it’s fine for us and everyone else. Plus a second mixed message: whiskey, gin and vodka are out but keep guzzling your Buds.

While a total ban on alcohol seems, at first, extreme, officials at the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention in Newton, Mass., report that many schools have taken such stands, and are glad they did. They point to the University of Rhode Island as a national example for enlightened thinking and bold action. Since adopting a no-alcohol policy ten years ago—including no campus drinking for the faculty—applications have increased, alumni giving has risen, trustees are pleased and students with higher SATs are enrolling. When I spoke at the university last year—the school has a stellar peace studies program—students repeatedly told me how pleased they were not to have to put up with drunken roommates and puking jerks.

Due to imprecise reporting, or refusals to report, the exact number of alcohol-related deaths on U.S. campuses is not known. In the general population, it is around 100,000 annually. Despite Notre Dame’s rapid decline in recent years as a football power, its top ranking as a drinking school remains secure. Administrators report that alcohol abuse is so pervasive that “a third of Notre Dame students report missing classes because of drinking.”

The solution won’t be found in tepid moves to eliminate hard liquor. The school’s administrators have convictions but not much courage to back them up. With the beer and wine still flowing, the university might as well put in its admissions brochures for prospective students: come to Notre Dame, swallow one for the Gipper. Then another. And another. And another.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace. His email is colman1@earthlink.net