BINGE NIGHTS: THE EMERGENCY ON CAMPUS

By MICHAEL WINERIP

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- Getting in to see John Casteen III is no easy
matter. As president of the University of Virginia, one of the nation's
premier colleges, he is often on the road, raising money for a $750 million
capital fund drive that does not end until the year 2000. When he is on
campus, he is tightly scheduled. Early in the morning, appointments begin
to back up in the elegant waiting room outside his Madison Hall office.
Alumni, faculty, undergraduates, doctoral candidates, state legislators,
bankers, the student reporter from The Cavalier Daily Q -- they all want a
few minutes.

But one afternoon in early December, the busy president abruptly canceled
his appointments and drove two hours from the Charlottesville campus to
Reston in northern Virginia, to visit the parents of Leslie Baltz, an
honors student in the Class of '98.

Casteen makes these visits once or twice a year, though he is never sure if
the parents will want to see him, given the circumstances. That previous
weekend, Ms. Baltz, a 21-year-old senior who was on the dean's list every
semester, was drinking heavily. There are some who believe she was doing
her "fourth-year fifth," the longstanding practice of University of
Virginia seniors to consume a fifth of liquor for the last home football
game.

Seeing how drunk she was that Saturday afternoon, her girlfriends left her
on a couch upstairs at one of their apartments, then went to the game
against Virginia Tech. When the friends returned at 9:30 that evening, they
opened the apartment door and there was Ms. Baltz at the foot of the
stairs, unconscious, face up, her legs slanting up the stairway. The
friends called 911, and she was rushed to the university medical center.

This is not a rare occurrence. Every weekend, between 3 and 10 University
of Virginia students arrive in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning or
an alcohol-related injury. That same day, another student had such severe
poisoning from bingeing on bourbon at a tailgating party that he stopped
breathing and was placed on a respirator in the same intensive care unit as
Leslie Baltz.

A blood sample showed Ms. Baltz's alcohol level was .27 -- more than three
times the state limit for intoxication. From the internal injuries to her
brain, authorities surmised that the honors student had risen from the
upstairs couch at some point, then fallen down the apartment stairs, head
first.

"Generally speaking, the families don't want to see me, but some do,"
Casteen said. "One comes into the family's life as an invader. You go in
the family's home, and what you're dealing with is their awareness it will
never be the same again. A child who was a treasure, who was precious, and
you see the physical leavings are all over the family's lives. All the
remnants of their achievements in grade school, their clothing, their
awards, their photographs -- sometimes an automobile -- they're all there.
A family is dealing with that lost child and you know that it will never be
the same.

"In my family," continued Casteen, the father of two teen-agers, "the way
we deal with grief or joy is through religious practices, but that's not
part of what we can do; this is a public institution. The culture is very
secular. What I can say is, I feel sorrow. I offer whatever help. Mostly
what I do is listen, often for a couple of hours."

On Nov. 30, Leslie Baltz became the fifth Virginia college student to die
in a month's time in alcohol-related accidents. Three -- from Virginia
Tech, Virginia Commonwealth and Radford University -- were killed in drunk
driving crashes. Another, an 18-year-old Virginia Tech freshman who was
sleeping off a night of heavy partying, rolled off her bed, out her dorm
window and fell eight stories. This string of death followed the much
publicized drinking deaths earlier in 1997 at MIT and Louisiana State
University, and numerous less publicized ones at Fordham University;
Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y.; Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.;
St. Mary's University in Winona, Minn.; the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst; Pennsylvania State University; the State University College at
Cortland, N.Y.

Virginia officials were spurred to take action: they convened a daunting
number of task force committees and subcommittees on ways to curb binge
drinking by students. State Attorney General Richard Cullen led the way,
assembling a 38-member task force that includes 14 of Virginia's college
presidents.

But while there is no shortage of alcohol task forces across America --
like tombstones, they tend to appear wherever a student dies -- there is a
noticeable shortage of solutions. It is not even clear whether more college
students are dying from alcohol these days, or if it's a matter of the
media paying more attention to the issue lately because of a few
sensational cases. Several public health experts say they know of no
long-term national statistics on college alcohol fatalities.

Indeed, in some respects it appears that a substantial number of today's
students have a more conservative attitude toward alcohol than the previous
generation.

In 1980, 9.5 percent of college students nationwide said they abstained
from alcohol; by 1996, 17 percent did, according to an annual survey by
Professor Lloyd Johnston of the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

In 1980, 6.5 percent reported drinking daily; today, 3.2 percent do. Even
the number of binge drinkers may be declining: in 1980, 44 percent reported
binge drinking; today, 38 percent do.

At the University of Virginia, which has a reputation as a hard-working,
hard-partying school (one of the unofficial mascots is the wahoo, a
tropical fish that can drink twice its weight), the administration appears
to have made some headway. During the 1980s, it got rid of Easters, the
massive, weekend-long drunken fraternity block party that was held on Rugby
Road each spring and attracted wahoos from all over the East Coast.

As Chris Jeffries, the head of the Inter-Fraternity Council, put it: "I
really do believe it's calmed down some. You don't see kegs flying through
the windows any more."

The university has a substance abuse center, a program to train bartenders
how to keep drinking under control, classes in alcohol abuse, an alcohol
awareness week, a free taxi program so drunken students don't have to
drive, nonalcoholic social events and student alcohol patrols.

Each year, Virginia runs national conferences to teach other universities
how to handle substance abuse in their athletic programs. Indeed, a 1996
report, "Promising Practices: Campus Alcohol Strategies," by David
Anderson, an associate research professor at George Mason University in
Fairfax, Va., singles out the University of Virginia as having one of the
dozen best campus programs in the country.

Still, Ms. Baltz died in November, and Lumsford McGowan died in a drinking
accident the year before, and Brian Cook the year before that.

What university officials here and across the country fear they are seeing
is a substantial number of students who drink excessively and dangerously,
and don't seem reachable. The most recent survey at the University of
Virginia reports that of students who drink, 25 percent were binge drinking
three or more times in the previous two weeks.

"It's one thing to drink a little to get buzzed," said Cheryl Battles, a
senior, "but I'm amazed at how many people here drink to get wasted -- 'Oh
man, you were bombed last night, you were hysterical, you were throwing up
all over the place.' "

Dr. James Turner, head of the university's student health services, said
that while the number of drinkers may be down, "we're seeing more serious
problems in our emergency room." He said a generation ago, a significant
number of students wanting to get high used marijuana, while today it is
mainly alcohol.

"Now, please don't make it sound like I'm endorsing marijuana," he said.
"I'm not. But the problems of marijuana are different. They're not as
severe. You don't have the violent behavior; you don't have the sexual
aggression; you don't have the poisoning."

As part of their training, upper-class students who are chosen to supervise
dorms as resident assistants are taught how to keep very drunk students
alive. "We have an ER doctor teach them how to lie the drunk students on
their side and hold their heads up, so they don't choke on their own
vomit," Turner said.

When adults hear that 3 to 10 drunken students at one of the finest
universities in America wind up in the emergency room each weekend, they
are shocked, but it does not make much of an impression on the young.

"We have 18,000 students on campus," Turner said. "If 40 percent are
bingeing, that's thousands and thousands, so to them, the risk is low.
Fear-based education -- getting up in their faces and saying, 'You're going
to die" -- isn't going to work. They don't believe it."

When it comes to alcohol, educators have found that every solution is
accompanied by a fresh set of problems. To control drinking on campus,
Louisiana State University banned liquor at fraternities and campus events.
Then, in August, 20-year-old Benjamin Wynne drank himself to death at an
off-campus fraternity party at a local bar. Suddenly, LSU officials found
themselves wondering if it might be better to allow drinking on campus
again, so they would at least have some say in regulating it.

The 21-year-old drinking age is a major headache for college
administrators. In the mid-1980s, the federal government threatened to cut
off highway funds to any state that did not raise the drinking age from 18
to 21; by 1988, all 50 states had complied. That policy has measurable
benefits: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that
the older drinking age saves the lives of 800 18- to 20-year-olds each
year.

On the other hand, a drinking age of 21 makes it very hard for
administrators to teach students to drink moderately, when three-quarters
of the campus is not supposed to be drinking at all. At colleges across
America, the legal drinking age may be a joke, but it is not a joke that
university administrations can participate in.

At the University of Virginia, the most recent health survey indicated that
over 75 percent of under-age students drank, and over half of the under-age
students had been intoxicated in the previous two weeks. Turner said 70
percent of the drunken students they see in the emergency room are under
age.

As a parent, University of Iowa president Mary Sue Coleman let her son,
Jonathan, now 26, drink at home when he was under age.

"We didn't want him to think alcohol was a totally forbidden substance,"
she said. "We'd have a glass of wine or beer with dinner. Always in
moderation."

Would President Coleman say this to her 18,000 undergraduates at Iowa? "Oh
no," she said. "I'm not going to tell students I expect you to drink if
you're under 21. I don't want them to get the message that we're winking at
state law."

Students mock the hypocrisy of their elders, as administrators try to
figure out where to draw the line on alcohol. At Iowa and Virginia, the
campus police do not enforce drinking rules at tailgate parties before
football games, but are aggressive about limiting alcohol in the stadiums.

"The students see all our efforts to control the flow of liquor into the
stadium," Casteen said, "which seems comical in light of all the tailgate
drinking in the parking lots. They see a place where we control things and
where we don't."

The students also see pervasive, often dangerous under-age drinking at the
private, off-campus fraternities being ignored by the administration, but
what they rarely see these days is a responsible professor or administrator
taking a casual drink at a social event.

"We don't have sherries," Casteen says. "It's orange juice and bottled water."

One of the last vestiges of a social drink together, the architecture
department's Friday afternoon beer gathering with students, was ended in
1995.

Robert Canevari, the dean of students at the University of Virginia, said
when the drinking age was 18, his staff would keep beer in the office
refrigerator and on Fridays, and at the end of the work day, sit with
students and have a drink. Now, he said: "I try to avoid all occasions
where undergrads have alcohol. I don't want to see it."

Casteen added: "I'm not the funniest character in town. But I don't even
joke about drinking any more."

In forming the statewide task force, Attorney General Cullen, a Republican,
had suggested exploring whether it would make sense to lower the drinking
age.

"It's worth at least asking if more problems aren't being created by the
forbidden-fruit mentality," he said.

But before he could even fax assignments to all his subcommittees,
newspapers across the state were carrying articles quoting outraged
legislators who were dead set against any change in the drinking age. A
headline in The Cavalier Daily summed up the prospects succinctly: "Not
gonna happen."

The university formed its own task force after the Baltz death, and one of
its focuses is the fraternities, which even fraternity brothers acknowledge
are the biggest source of under-age binge drinking. For years, the college
has generally taken a hands-off approach, reasoning that fraternities are
private, off-campus residences. [continued in Part 2]