National Alcohol Awareness Week Comes to Columbia’s Campus

If you have ever spent some time in East Campus on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, your fellow students have probably made sure that you are very aware of alcohol and its effects. But for those of you who have never ventured past the School of International and Public Affairs, the administration has decided to help raise alcohol’s profile.

The week of Oct. 21-27 marks National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week, and Columbia’s alcohol awareness program and Barnard’s Alcohol and Substance Awareness Program are heightening efforts to inform students about the use of alcohol.

The effort at Barnard, led by ASAP director Hilary Colenso, includes posters and pledges that students can sign. Now in their fifth year, these pledges—in multiple choice format—allow students to pick any number of five options, including, “I will learn about the effects of alcohol” to “I choose not to drink between October 21st and October 27th.” Last year, 160 Barnard students signed the pledge.

Posters around Barnard’s campus depict a martini glass with the numbers “0, 1, 2, 3” in the background, prompting students to enjoy moderate drinking. “We really couldn’t use an abstinence-based model,” said Colenso. “We knew if we had a button with a “don’t drink” message we’d only be talking to 15 percent of our students because we know from data that at Barnard, only 15 percent of our students don’t drink.”

Columbia’s Alice! Health Promotion Program is not increasing outreach in particular this week because, “our efforts are really focused year-round on both prevention and intervention” said senior health educator Justin Laird. Barnard and Columbia’s health and alcohol programs are not coordinated, despite the high levels of intermingling in the social lives of students from both campuses. Policies toward drinking are different at each school.

Colenso and her coworkers at ASAP focus on reducing high-risk drinking, using a “harm-reduction” model. “We know that among our own students, 65 percent are drinking zero to three drinks when they party ... so the majority of our students on campus are moderate drinkers,” said Colenso. The zero to three drinks poster campaign is “a way of staying below what is defined as binge drinking” added Colenso.

Laird simply stated that the, “majority of our students drink responsibly or don’t drink at all.” Columbia’s environmental programs, mainly AlcoholEdu for freshman and BASICS, an intervention program, are “really evidence-based” and “follow the NIAAA [National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism] guidelines,” Laird continued.
Colenso highlights that, “Barnard’s a smaller campus, so I think there has been a more kind of hands-on approach to policy violations.”

One commonality that does exist between the two campuses is the requirement that freshmen take AlcoholEdu. An online educational program employed for the second year at Barnard College and third year at CC/SEAS, AlcoholEdu aims to heighten students’ knowledge, especially surrounding high-risk drinking, with factual-based information.

Laird said that “99 percent of this year’s freshman class has participated in AlcoholEdu, which is remarkable and way above any other institution.”
Despite the high percentages that attended the AlcoholEdu lectures, many students question how effective the program really was.

“I think a lot of people are already aware of alcohol on campus, and most people are aware of the repercussions of drinking underage” said Lindsey Kremer, BC ’11. “I learned as much from my high school as I did from AlcoholEdu.”

Caroline Walthall, BC ’11, agreed, saying, “Your own convictions and decisions before it [the course] aren’t going to change over taking the course.”

Colenso recognizes the difficulty in discerning any positive outcome of AlcoholEdu, as “it’s very hard to measure prevention, to know whether you’ve had an impact on somebody’s behavior.” While hearing facts may not affect a student’s choice of what, and how much, to imbibe on a certain night, “one could argue that when you increase people’s awareness around the risks of alcohol use, they’re more inclined to act,” said Colenso. “Instead of putting someone who has passed out to bed, you do call security, you do call CAVA.”

Nora Christiani can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.