I am currently a senior at Emory University and though I have spent four years on this campus, I barely recognize the school that I had fallen in love with. There have been many dining changes, such as the revamping of Cox Hall and the addition of both Dunkin' Donuts and Highland Bakery. There have been significant faculty changes, such as the recent hiring of the decorated Erika James as the Goizueta Business School's new dean.
However, the change that's been an absolute misstep has been the so-called cracking down on the social scene. While I believe it is necessary to monitor the student body in their extracurricular activities, it can be said that Emory is taking the absolute incorrect approach in doing so.
The grievance in this situation is the ban on beer pong. For those who don't know, Emory has banned all drinking games on campus, including beer pong. Some might view this as a joke, but this is a serious matter that, if rectified properly, could help realign the student body with the administration, thus forging a better ground for collaboration on future efforts such as student safety.
Emory's ban on drinking games comes from the right place: to prevent students from recklessly ingesting alcohol in short amounts of time. However, the fundamental principles of beer pong do not allow for this to occur. This is a game of skill and accuracy, both of which decline as the player becomes further inebriated. Once a player loses, they must wait along the sidelines for the next available game, thus preventing excessive binge drinking. Additionally, space is needed for this game, and in a group situation, playing beer pong could potentially take up most to all of the space in a given area. Thus, the participants are less inclined to take part in other drinking activities, and more inclined to wait their turn to play, allowing the body to try to keep up with the alcohol ingestion.
The other perspective to look at here is what students are doing instead of playing beer pong, the staple of college life at universities throughout the country. Instead of spending hours drinking beer, which has the lowest alcohol content among popular alcoholic beverages in this demographic, students have resorted to buying handles of liquor and hard alcohol, which they mix into drinks and ingest as quickly as possible.
With beer, drinkers will "get full," which essentially acts as a meter for how much they have drank that evening. Because the volume of liquid consumed is smaller, many new drinkers are unaware of their tolerance levels. These students become more intoxicated than they can even comprehend, which leads to a visible increase in Emergency Medical Service (EMS) calls campus-wide.
As a senior, I believe that this is unacceptable. College is a place to have fun and learn more about oneself through play and experimentation, but this sort of risky behavior, which clearly puts lives at risk, needs to be rebuffed. I'm not saying that college kids are going to stop drinking hard alcohol if beer pong is once again allowed on campus, but having the option and the ability to find a balance in one's social activities will certainly create a safer environment than we currently have here on campus.
The Emory Wheel's editorial board wrote in their Sept. 11, 2014 staff editorial "Greek Life Walkthroughs Reasonable" that these walkthroughs are necessary and appropriately strict. I believe that, because Emory has used their walkthroughs as a policing force instead of a way to work with their students, they are effectively rendering these walkthroughs useless. The "parent-child" relationship the article refers to is a farce. The school is unjustly taking away privileges in a power grab to remind members of Greek Life that they are at the school's mercy.
The staff editorial mentions how activity will be brought off-campus, where the school has no jurisdiction and very little means of monitoring behavior. Additionally, the editorial notes how this could lead to drunk driving. The editorial is absolutely correct in this regard. However, if these walkthroughs were used to help the fraternities, potentially by working with executive members to identify those in the house who have possibly had too much to drink either before or after entering or by identifying situations where serious harm could be incurred, the fraternities would feel more comfortable using their houses more often.
The tradeoff here is allowing kids to play beer pong in their house so that they stay in their house and thus the school can more effectively monitor and prevent risky behavior. Walkthroughs can be effective, but using it as a way to prevent beer pong is absolutely unnecessary.
A truth of college life is that students are going to drink. They will find ways to obtain alcohol. As an administration, there is really only one way to deal with this absolute truth: to work alongside the student body and be aware of what is happening. Drinking games are, for many, a part of the college experience. Beer pong is part of the college experience for many students. But from an administrative perspective, beer pong provides a relatively safer way for college students to ingest alcohol, as opposed to sneaking around, solely drinking bottles of much harder alcohol that can cause serious damage.
Emory has the opportunity to become more in touch with their student body while also taking steps in the right direction to make the University a safer place. Thus, I come to the administration with the plea to take advantage of this valuable opportunity for the well being of its student body. Please bring back beer pong.
- Jayson Patel is a Goizueta Business School senior from Livingston, New Jersey.
