Owen B. Jennings goes to Dartmouth and he belongs to the same frat house where they filmed Animal House. A couple of years ago, Jennings was diagnosed with liver disease. So he can’t drink. That makes Jennings a pretty unusual guy on a modern college campus.
He shares these sobering reflections:
[I]n college, drinking is the default. It is assumed that I drink, for no other reason than that I am an average 19-year-old American male. Not drinking is seen as weird.
At Dartmouth, and at every other college campus I have been to, the consumption of alcoholic beverages is common. But the word “consumption” is an understatement. I’m not talking about the casual sipping of a few beers. Here, alcohol consumption means the rapid and repeated gulping and guzzling of beer after beer after beer. Often, students will drink upwards of 15 or 20 beers. On any given night, a frat brother or a sorority sister will spend hours vomiting. Sometimes a classmate will wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And often, these people wake up unable to remember anything that happened the night before … My generation has adopted drinking as a social cure-all. It’s a way to celebrate winning that big game, and a way to sorrow over a lost girlfriend or a bad grade. It’s a way to fit in, and — if you can drink enough — it’s a way to stand out.
