A drinking problem in the College

Students, by virtue of the brief time that they spend in school, sometimes have a short-sighted view of things. Reactions to the tumultuous Yale weekend are a cast in point.

Students upended from their lifestyles, such as the twice-harrassed Eliot residents (bomb scare and fire alarm) or the brawl-marred Leverett and Lowell House members, sensed their predicaments to be strictly Yale-weekend related.

But administrators contacted this week offered a different interpretation of events.

The new mood, and cause for many of the recent brouhahas, is drinking, they say. Students are getting drunk more often, particularly on weekends, and especially on football weekends.

Those weekends are now past us, but the drinking seems to be here to stay, says Whitlock. He says he remembers intense student drinking in the 50s, but nothing on the order that he has seen lately.

Whitlock, who took over as master of Dudley House and inherited the masters apartment at 53 Dunster Street this year (which has a yard that many students have mistaken as a recycling center for beer cans) says he has never seen so much drinking at Harvard parties.

It happened a little last year, but nothing like this year, he says. The drinking in the 50s was accompanied by an occasional roughhouse--somebody might break a window, Whitlock recalls.

But the drinking this year has brought with it a few characteristics that Whitlock says he is seeing for the first time--particularly the phenomenon of noise. "The decibel levels of the yelling and screaming is alarming," he says. "I'm hearing animal screams."

Perhaps most interesting, Whitlock says, is that women are drinking as much as men. "Once in a while that happened in the 50s, but nothing like this."

"You would never see girls drinking liquor straight out of the bottle while walking down the street," Whitlock says.

The College officially recognized this trend this week when Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, set up guidelines requiring students to present I.D. cards at future dances, or to be accompanied by Harvard students.

He has also asked that House committees limit advertising for dances to the University.

Some masters reacted skeptically to the guidelines, nothing that such rules are difficult to enforce.

If things do not work out, however, some administrators have mentioned the possibility of offering stipends to House committees--with the catch that a House loses its stipend if it throws a mixer.