In Defense of Drunkenness

Without a delicious abundance of keg beer to wash down our pre-game breakfast this Saturday, my budget-conscious friends and I have decided to bring two trusty alternatives out of retirement. After all, a handle of grandpa’s cough syrup and a case of some beasty brew will rev us up for this year’s beat down of Yale just as well as a few pints from the tap. But even if you decide not to drown a few million brain cells with the rest of us—and you can afford it, you’ve got billions more—I suspect you will be glad to have us there with you. Without our spirit, energy and levity, brewed from The Game’s Bacchanalian tradition, this weekend would not be nearly as much fun for the sober and the sloppy alike.

Unfortunately, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 sees our revelry a bit differently. Commercials blind us to “the real world of drunkenness,” he gently reminds us in his op-ed “Harvard in a Beer-Ad World,” and images of beautiful people with lips pressed against some frothy brew can seduce even the most critically-minded Harvard students. “The reality of heavy drinking,” he warns veteran lushes without a hint of irony, is one in which naïve first-years end up “intubated in an emergency room because their autonomic nervous system has shut down and they can’t breathe.”

Lewis imagines that a grim reaper lurks at the bottom of whatever “particular container” we use to deliver our deadly dose, and with sickle in hand, the agent of death waits to pluck us from the primes of our lives. Four students nearly died in the “chaos” of Harvard-Yale two years ago because of “alcohol poisoning at the ‘life-threatening’ level,” Lewis warns with a flashlight under his chin. Another of our brilliant peers fell off a truck and “could easily have become a quadriplegic.” Everyone was okay in the end, of course, but just imagine what could have happened.

A keg ban this weekend will not prevent such tragedies, Lewis readily admits, but it will surely help, and he is baffled by the fact that so many students have argued to the contrary. HoCo chairs, the Undergraduate Council and The Crimson are so hypnotized by beer advertising, he seems to think, that they actually believe more hard liquor, suspicious punch bowls and inebriated treks across the river can counterbalance the risks of keg culture. They might as well argue against gravity before a committee of physicists. After years of experience policing kegs and seven Harvard-Yale games as Dean of the College, Lewis is a hard man to fool.

In my heart of hearts, I admire Lewis’ good-natured attempts at pedagogy. His efforts to shepherd his young flock to safer pastures, while I disagree with them, do have a certain endearing quality. But after weeks of monotonous give and take on the keg ban, with both sides recycling the same arguments, it’s time someone let him in on our little secret.

No one cares that much about kegs at Harvard-Yale. Really.

We will miss the fabled carousing of past years, to be sure, and we loath being told what we can’t do. But we are not going to stay home—or stay sober—because we must find a new “beer vessel.” Harvard students are pretty creative, and we will find a way to have a great time, trashed if we like, kegs or no kegs.

What frightens us about the ban is its place within a larger threat to our partying pastimes. It breaks the seal on a paternalism otherwise absent from The College’s approach to alcohol, in which upperclass students are trusted to drink as they like without harming each other or marring Harvard’s good name. Parties are not usually broken up unless they are too loud or extend too late into the night, and house functions hosted by University officials often encourage students to enjoy a few drinks, whether they are 19 or 22.

We like that, and we are smart enough to realize that Lewis’ fire-and-brimstone language about the dangers of drunkenness, although pegged to kegs at Harvard-Yale weekend, condemns intoxication regardless of the vessel or the occasion. The keg ban only drops the speed limit from 70 to 65 one weekend a year, to borrow Lewis’ metaphor, but he seems to believe that 70 is deadly all the time and 65 is never much better. It may prove to be a warning shot in a more pivotal battle over the definition of responsible drinking, and we are disturbed that Lewis hasn’t the faintest understanding of where we are coming from.

Most of us do not care about being “in a position to be photographed partying,” although Lewis would do well to look more carefully at the issues of FM that have inspired him. We like being drunk because it’s fun. We like the temporary amnesia it brings when it comes to obligations. And we like that it cures the uniquely Harvardian handicaps we face when it comes to meeting new people and making small talk.

There’s no mystery behind our love of drunkenness, and there’s no reason to crack down on those of us who can handle it. But don’t take my word on it.

Dean Lewis, let me be the first to invite you to join my friends and I in the magic of a drunken but safe Harvard-Yale. No cameras, I promise. After a drink or two—or five—you will see our frustration with a new clarity.

And at that point, it will be much easier to ignore the date on my ID.

Blake Jennelle ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.