On 22 November 1994, the New York Times published a column by Christopher Buckley in its OpEd section entitled, "Bombed in New Haven". In it, Buckley shared his concern, and frustration, regarding the intoxicated condition of the audience when he presented a speech at the 1994 Yale University Daily News banquet. He noted that the banquet was held off-campus, a change of venue from when he had attended Yale, and he was told by students that the relocation was necessitated by a current university policy which bans drinking on campus for those under twenty-one. He went on to remark that when he rose to deliver his invited address, admittedly towards the end of the evening, the only students in the audience who remained silent while he spoke were those who had passed-out as the result of their advanced state of intoxication.

On 6 December 1994, the Philadelphia Inquirer carried a column written by Brenda Coleman of the AssociatedPress. In her article entitled, "Study assails binge drinking at colleges," Ms. Coleman reported on the recently published findings of Henry Wechsler, director of the Alcohol Studies Program at the Harvard School of Public Health, in the December 7th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (1994). In the article, Dr. Wechsler and his associates had reported that nearly half of the collegians on U.S. college and university campuses (44%) are binge drinkers (i.e., consuming 5 or more drinks in a row for males, 4 or more in a row for females).

With such articles as examples, it would appear that collegiate life, including the expectations of entering firstyear students and the recollections of those who have already graduated, will undoubtedly involve some consideration of alcohol. This opinion is supported by Beck (1983) and others (e.g., Gonzales, 1986; Wechsler, 1994).

Drinking by college students has become such a reality in our culture as to be viewed by many as a `rite of passage' from adolescence to early adulthood for those who enter college (Eigen, 1991; Temple, 1988). Particularly susceptible to the siren's call of alcohol is the incoming firstyear student. Raised in a controlled environment and subject to parental scrutiny, students arrive on campus anxiously awaiting the freedom college affords but was heretofore only imagined (Prendergast, 1994). While many have experimented with alcohol during their middle or high school years, this was usually tempered by the realization that parents were often close at hand. Arnold & Kuh (1992) suggested that there is no group in this country that drinks more frequently than do college students.

As a result, Student Life and Student Affairs professionals have had to address the issues of alcohol use and abuse as factors of `every day life' on our college and university campuses. Most frequently, the abuse of alcohol involves consumption to the point of intoxication with a resulting impairment of judgment and physical ability. Generally, this leads to little more than becoming ill and experiencing the aftereffects of heavy drinking commonly referred to as the `hangover.' Yet even a single incident of intoxication can result in devastating experiences for the student who drinks too much.

Posted at either end of the bridge traversing the Chippewa River, which divides the campus at the University of WisconsinEau Claire, is the following sign: "The Chippewa River is both beautiful and treacherous. It has taken the lives of a number of students who attempted to swim across it. Its deceiving nature and the involvement of alcohol have proven to be a deadly combination. Don't make the same mistake" (Arnold & Kuh, 1992, p.1). Accidents resulting from impaired judgment or physical coordination, sexually transmitted diseases contracted because of unprotected sex when intoxicated, date rape and other forms of sexual violence resulting from an intoxicant's assault (or the choices made as the result of an intoxicated victim's impaired judgment), are only a sampling of the type of problems which can be realized by the inebriated college student. Suffice it to say that `getting drunk is never safe,' regardless of the intoxicating substance.

What is it about alcohol that seems to motivate students to drink? What do students find so attractive about alcohol that they will choose to drink when they may merely tolerate, if not initially dislike, the taste of alcoholic beverages? What is it about a student's experience in college that may result in a particular vulnerability to alcohol's seductive effect? This study concerned itself with such questions by way of considering the stories of contemporary college students, between the ages of eighteen and twentytwo, who drank. These students were matriculated undergraduates in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences or Business at a small, urban, Catholic university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The study's major focus was an investigation of meaning placed by participants on alcohol and the role its consumption played in their undergraduate collegiate experience. A secondary area of interest, which surfaced while analyzing these transcripts, was the fascination these students held for alcohol and the sometimes extraordinary lengths to which they would go in order to ignore or accommodate the consequences of its use. In short, this investigation concerned itself with the individual attitudes, values, and beliefs of students who drank.

Two main groups of questions motivated this research from its inception. First, what meaning do students come to place on alcohol and how do they develop the rather pronounced views the literature implies they hold regarding drinking? Embedded in this question is a sub-area of interest: to what extent are their views the product of personal experiences, or do student interactions with peers and the collegiate environment shape these individual perspectives? The literature on the subject of alcohol and collegiate life is unclear, at best, regarding this issue. We can predict which students are likely to drink during their college years (Anderson, 1988; Prendergast, 1994; Saltz & Elandt, 1986). We can postulate which students tend to consume the most when they drink (Anderson, 1988). We can explain their behavior when they drink (e.g. Arnold and Kuh, 1992). What we are unable to do by reviewing the literature on this subject is understand either the meaning students place on alcohol and its consumption or how they come to establish this meaning. Consequently, we are unable to understand what these data can tell us about alcohol's importance or significance for contemporary collegians.

A second research question results from a consideration of the consistency of these perspectives across the four years of an undergraduate education. Is the meaning placed by firstyear students on alcohol and drinking the same as that of graduating seniors? If not, what are the sources of this change and the impetus for its evolution through the four years of an undergraduate experience?

It is my belief that interaction with the environment in which one lives and the social intercourse borne of such interactions determine the way we view alcohol and incorporate it into our lives. In essence, we learn when to drink, how to drink, what to drink, and how to act while drinking via our interactions with peers and observation of their consideration of alcohol and drinking behaviors. This, while specific in its attention to alcohol and drinking, serves as an example of what Berger and Luckmann (1966) refer to as the "social construction of reality," or the individual determination of what reality means by virtue of our social experiences. Fromme, Marlatt, Baer, & Kivlahan (1994) take this a step farther when they suggest that alcohol skill training programs, involving the collegian and his or her social peer group, can result in effective interventions with young adult drinkers.

It has been my professional observation that the early symptoms of alcohol dependence, at least in this culture, often appear during the period between a drinker's late teens and early twenties. This, then, is an additional reason for investigating the perspectives of an undergraduate population in an effort to understand the meaning they convey on alcohol and its consumption. Consequently, I have chosen undergraduate collegians as the object of this investigation.

My observations regarding this age group have resulted from having listened to literally thousands of alcohol dependent individuals tell their stories. Whether in the confines of individual or group counseling sessions or when attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have been consistently exposed to "life stories" which have fixed the onset of a pattern of dependent drinking as occurring during a chronological period in an individual's life roughly analogous to than of the typical undergraduate. Dupont (1988) echoes this position in his consideration of treating chemical dependency in college students.

While embarking on this research project with no predetermined expectation of what students would share, I did bring these years of continuous experience in the field of alcohol and other drug services to this investigation. It was fully expected that the individual perspectives of students would neither surprise nor astound me. Yet I realized both. The level of alcohol use reported by subjects was as expected as was the extent to which intoxication would be a regular part of the students' approach to socializing. What was totally unexpected was the extent to which students were aware of alcohol's negative impact on their collegiate experience and the steps taken to counter these deleterious consequences of the decision to drink. Likewise, I found the way students look at underage drinking in general and the meaning they place on false identification to be particularly interesting.

Because of my stated interest in the meaning placed bycollegians on alcohol and its consumption, it was logical to seek out and listen to the stories of individuals from an undergraduate collegiate population in an attempt to better understand their perspectives on "when we drink." As a result, material in this manuscript follows from the study of eighteen to twentytwo year old undergraduates. These students shared their personal stories of the role alcohol played in their collegiate lives. They spoke of their prearrival expectations and the origins of those beliefs. They addressed the impact of interacting with one another, experiencing the consequences of drinking, and learning from their older peers as the semesters passed. These data were collected via individual personal interviews which utilized a semistructured interview format and were conducted between April of 1992 and April of 1993. More will be said about the subjects and the nature of the interviews and data analysis in Chapter II.

In the literature reviewed for this study there werenumerous considerations of student demographics, surveyed opinions, and their correlation with collegiate drinking. These studies considered one explanation or another for the fascination students hold for alcohol. But few if any of these studies, Emery, Ritter-Randolph, Strozier, & McDermott (1993) one notable exception, attempted to look beyond these data in an attempt to understand exactly what students thought about alcohol and collegiate drinking. There were studies which investigated the correlation between alcohol and academics (c.f. Eigen, 1991), and between gender, racial, and socioeconomic variables and the propensity to drink (Anderson, 1988; Prendergast, 1994). There were studies which attempted to identify high risk students and propose ways to targeted them with primary prevention programming (Duran & Brooklyn, 1988). Such studies appeared with regularity in the literatures of higher education, student development, and counseling (c.f. Prendergast, 1994; Saltz & Elandt, 1986). But these studies tell us nothing of the real life experiences of contemporary collegians. As pointed out by Rubin (1976) in reasoning for the use of a qualitative methodology in her investigation of workingclass families, the absence of real life experience in probability statistics does not allow us to understand the "flesh and blood women and men who make up the numbers" (p.14).

In its final report to the Pennsylvania Association ofColleges and Universities, the Presidential Task Force onSubstance Use Issues on Pennsylvania College and UniversityCampuses (1992) echoed Anderson's (1988) contention thatalcohol is the contemporary collegian's number one drug ofchoice. Prendergast (1994) reports that not only is alcohol the collegiate drug of choice, but marijuana, the closest competitor, is a distant second. In Johnston, O'Malley, & Bachman's (1991) consideration of psychoactive substance experimentation and use by college students, they suggest that all psychoactive drug use (other than alcohol) combined pales to insignificance when compared with the alcohol consumed by college students. This, coupled with the plethora of documented incidents reporting the correlation between alcohol intoxication and campus crime, economic/health/social consequences (Arnold & Kuh, 1992; Eigen, 1991; Engs & Hansen 1988), and frequency of underage drinking on campus (c.f. Wechsler & Isaac, 1991) suggest that America's institutions of higher education have a drinking problem of epidemic proportion (Goodwin, 1989; Hirschorn, 1987). In studies sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (c.f. Eigen 1991), findings suggested that for drugs other than alcohol, trends indicated a decrease in collegiate use between the years 1985 and 1989. During this same period, however, not only did alcohol use not decrease, it increased slightly, thus adding to the realization that alcohol is the drug of choice for most students on American college campuses. Wechsler & Issac (1992) reported that between the years of 1977 and 1989, the number of males who reported drinking with the expressed purpose of becoming intoxicated doubled from 20% to 40% of respondents. For women, the number tripled from a reported 10% of female respondents in 1977 to 30% of those womenparticipating in the 1989 survey.

These data translate into a recognition that traditionally aged, i.e. eighteen to twenty-two year old matriculated collegians in America consume alcohol more frequently (74.5 % at least monthly verses 71% for non college) and in greater quantities (41% consume 5 or more drinks at one sitting verses 34% for those not in college) than their non collegiate counterparts (Johnston, O'Malley, & Bachman, 1991). These same authors projected that for 1992, only 11% of this same college population would refrain from consuming alcohol. As if to proclaim this a prophetic statement, Prendergast (1994) reported that 90% of collegians report drinking at least once per year with 74% indicating that they drink "...at least occasionally" (p. 110). These projections translate into a significant number of students consuming a sizeable quantity of alcohol with regularity.

None of this information will come as a surprise tothose familiar with Collegiate Life or Student Affairs issues at American institutions of higher education. What may be of interest, however, is the extent to which this propensity to imbibe may be related to such issues as campus violence, daterape, vandalism, and the frequently cited concerns of American college and university faculty and administrators regarding academic performance, especially for firstyear students (Anderson, 1988; Eigen, 1991; Prendergast, 1994). Problems ranging from absenteeism, poor academic performance, fights, and property damage to automobile injuries, deaths, and reduced productivity have been reported as related to the abuse of alcohol by college students (Engs & Hansen, 1988; Gonzales & Broughton, 1986). Frequently, this penchant to use alcohol is attributed to the attitudes and behaviors developed by incoming firstyear students in high school (Anderson, 1988; Eigen, 1991; Wechsler & Isaac, 1991). Humphrey & Friedman (1986) note that the age of first drink and frequency of intoxication are the strongest predictors of undergraduate intoxication. However, in a 1980 paper, Bachman & O'Malley suggested that the frequency of heavy drinking (defined as five or more drinks consumed in one outing) done by students in high school is significantly less than that of firstyear college students. This apparent discrepancy can possibly be explained as either the result of modeling related to a campus drinking culture and peer pressure (Anderson, 1988) or relaxed or removed parental supervision (Eigen, 1991). As a matter of fact, in a Louis Harris telephone survey conducted for the New York State Research Institute on Alcoholism in 1986 (c.f. Eigen, 1991), students living on campus were found to engage in heavy drinking at slightly more than twice the rate of students living at home (23% verses 11%).

While living at home does not suggest that parentalsupervision in and of itself curtails the frequency of heavydrinking, it does suggest that factors inherent to the campus community may well influence both the frequency and style of alcohol consumption by residential students. Eigen (1991) suggests that additional mitigating circumstances exist on campuses which may perpetuate the use of alcohol: the consolidation of males and females, frequently in the same residences, of a traditional risk taking age; transition issues; economic factors; preponderance of alcohol oriented advertising in campus publications; the campus advertising efforts of brewers. All these are representative of such circumstances and serve as examples.

If alcohol is the drug of choice on campus, then beeris the form of that drug most frequently consumed by collegestudents. It is postulated by Eigen (1991) that beer inexcess of a quantity contained in four (4) billion twelve(12) oz. cans is consumed by students on American college and university campuses each year. If we assume a conservative value for that beer of $.50 per can, $2 billion is being spent annually by this country's undergraduate students in order to purchase beer, an amount, he notes, which exceeds all student spending on all academic books at America's institutions of higher education.

Such preoccupation with the consumption of alcohol during the collegiate years is not a new phenomenon. Hanson (1975) reported on collegiate drinking trends during the decades of the mid1960's through 1975. He found that while motivation for drinking had changed during the decades being investigated, the consumption of alcohol had remained a consistent part of the collegiate experience. In a separate review of the literature spanning the period between the years of 1953 and 1984, Brennan, Walfish, & AuBuchon (1986) reported finding drinking as a regular collegiate experience for undergraduates. They went on to investigate the precipitating factors of student drinking and, like Hanson (1976) before them, documented a shift in student motivations for drinking. What is of interest in both of these literature reviews is the consistent extent to which drinking was found to be a significant factor of the undergraduate experience. And Prendergast (1994), when reviewing the literature since 1980, came to the conclusion that, "...students still ignore the dangers of frequent, heavy alcohol use; even more students consider abusive drinking patterns normative" (p. 111).

In a 1993 study by Emery, RitterRandolph, Strozier, &McDermott of collegiate alcohol use, focus group interviews were employed to identify salient issues concerning college students' alcohol abuse. Of the 17 female and 9 male students interviewed, all spoke of the pressure on undergraduates to drink. These findings are similar to those reported throughout the literature of higher education during the past forty years.

Whether collegiate drinking is a function of a student's development, the influence of the collegiate environment, the social interaction with peers, or some combination of the three, a consistent history of collegiate drinking and documentation of the college student's fascination with alcohol is available in the literature for our consideration. It is this phenomenon and the perspectives of current collegians who drink which is of interest in this investigation.

Rites of Passage

To recapitulate, alcohol's presence on American campuses is neither new nor surprising. Its consumption, both in frequency of occasions and amount ingested per drinking event, suggests that alcohol is a significant factor that influences the experiences of many students during their college years. So frequent an occurrence and threatening to success is collegiate drinking that authors of `how to succeed in college' manuals devote entire sections to alcohol related issues (e.g., Friday, 1988; Gardner & Jeweler, 1985; Rowh, 1989; Walter & Seibert, 1993).

Perhaps the most significant factors influencing the use of alcohol by collegians is the belief that drinking is a collegiate rite of passage (Eigen, 1991; Temple, 1988) and can be accomplished with impunity (Dupont, 1988). These beliefs coupled with almost universal student support for the use of alcohol as relaxant and social lubricant (Anderson, 1988), finds the campus culture of American colleges supportive of, if not insistent on, drinking.

So pervasive is this collegiate support of drinking that Fondacaro & Heller (1983) found that social networkcharacteristics such as amount of social contact or network size could be used to predict student alcohol use. Goodwin(1990) examined college student reasons for drinking. Mostfrequently, students listed wanting to release emotional tension and meet new people as significant factors in their decisions to drink. This view of alcohol as `social lubricant' was stated frequently by the students who were interviewed in this study.

In considering the attributes of those students who choose not to drink, Klein (1990) reports that abhorrence to the taste, a desire to maintain control of one's faculties at all times, a fear of alcohol's negative impact on schoolwork, and/or dislike for the physical effects of alcohol were the most frequently cited reasons for abstinence. Yet, nondrinking students represent but a small fraction of matriculated collegians (c.f. Eigen, 1991; Johnson et al., 1991; Prendergast, 1994; Wechsler & Isaac, 1991; Wechsler, 1994). With the majority of college students reporting at least occasional drinking, the reasons given for use and the factors which influence those reasons are of great interest. The examination of and inquiry into student understanding of alcohol and its use, at least on one American college campus, was the central issue in this study. Conclusion This study concerns itself with the personal perspectives of undergraduate college students who drink. In so doing, several research questions were considered as a methodology was selected and research design formulated. These questions were as follows: 1. What meaning do students place on alcohol as an object and drinking as an event prior to and during their collegiate experience? 2. How do students establish and convey this meaning? 3. Is the meaning placed on alcohol and drinking by first-year students consistent through the four years of an undergraduate education? 4. If not, how does the meaning for these staples of collegiate life change, i.e., what is the origin and impetus for this evolution? 5. To what extent are student views the product of personal experience, or do social interactions with peers and the collective environment shape these individual perspectives?

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