Culture faces environmental, systemic issues
This story is Part 1 of a three-day series on USC’s drinking culture. This story discusses current alcohol-related problems. Tomorrow’s will address administration’s plans and reactions. Friday’s story will look at how USC’s policies compare to other schools.
Discussing USC’s culture of alcohol use last September, Alisa Cooney said she was “grateful.”
The director of student conduct felt lucky, she wrote in an email, that no students had died or been injured.
The intervening months, though, have seen two incidents that Cooney described last Friday as both “tragic and tragically avoidable.”
Early on the morning of Jan. 18, Brian McGrath, a third-year history student, lost control of his car on George Rogers Boulevard and crashed into the Farm Bureau Insurance building, killing McGrath, a second USC student, a former student and a fourth passenger. McGrath’s blood alcohol content, according to Richland County Coroner Gary Watts, was .157, which is above the legal limit of .08.
Later in the semester, early on Feb. 4, friends found Zachary Robinson, a third-year civil engineering student, overdosed on alcohol and a painkiller. They rushed him to the hospital, but he was later pronounced dead.
“We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if there weren’t some serious consequences for irresponsible drinking on campus,” said Capt. Eric Grabksi of the USC Division of Law Enforcement and Safety. “We’re not talking about people who are drinking responsibly — that’s not the problem. The problem is that we’ve had deaths related to irresponsible alcohol usage. We’ve had assaults; we’ve had people victimized.”
The pair of fatal accidents this semester in particular, according to Maggie Leitch, coordinator for the office of Substance Abuse Prevention and Education, has placed an increased emphasis on sobering up the culture at USC.
“It’s put, I think, a fire under some staff and administrators (who have said), ‘OK, we really need to do something now,’” she said.
‘We have a systemic problem’
Many of the issues in the alcohol culture, as surveys conducted by AlcoholEdu show, begin before students move in.
The online education program, which incoming freshman classes have been required to take for the past two years, asks incoming freshmen about their drinking habits in the summer before and about two weeks after they arrive on campus.
“What we’re finding is that the students that are coming in as freshmen have higher rates of alcohol use ... than even (at) sister institutions across the country,” Cooney said. “We know that we have a systemic problem.”
Last summer, 29 percent of the current freshman class were “high-risk drinkers,” meaning they had engaged in binge drinking in the two weeks before they took the survey. Elsewhere, that statistic stood at 22 percent among schools using the system, which, Leitch noted, may be skewed toward smaller colleges.
Among those students, a relatively high percentage has also been called “problematic,” which means they had a double binge — eight or more drinks in a night for women and 10 or more for men — in the previous two weeks.
Ten percent of this year’s freshmen were categorized as such, the same rate among first-year students in 2010, Leitch said. The national average, according to AlcoholEdu, was 6 percent.
So far this academic year, 106 students have been hospitalized, compared to a total of 115 from last year, Cooney said, though some of that trend has been driven by an increased attentiveness to intoxicated students by their friends.
“It has increased every year,” she wrote in an email response. “That is also, we believe, a result of people reporting concern for fellow students.”
‘Heavily grounded in tradition’
Once students do get to campus, however, Cooney and Leitch said, they find an environment conducive to excessive drinking.
The campus is in walking distance from Five Points, they noted,
where a vibrant bar scene and many of drink specials regularly draw students in. The perception that drinking is commonplace in school, Greek Life and athletics — and its tailgating — often dominate much of the university’s atmosphere and attitudes toward drinking, Leitch added.
“I’d say we are heavily grounded in tradition,” Leitch said. “That is where our alcohol (culture) spins from. I’d say that’s the biggest thing, whether it’s football (or) whether it’s going to baseball soon.”
Shortly after they arrived on campus, AlcoholEdu asked freshmen where they consumed alcohol most often; 15 percent of them said it was at athletic events, five times the national average of 3 percent.
The survey’s timing, Leitch said, included three home football games, but the rate represented an increase from the year prior, when USC was just three times higher than the rest of the country.
But as the university community remains rooted in traditions, the administration appears increasingly focused on reshaping the culture of alcohol use.
“I think it’s been a culmination of things that are happening right now,” Leitch said. “Trends across the country, trends here on campus, potentially some of the deaths. But I think it’s gotten people to really have that light bulb moment — now is the time.”