College president fights campus binge-drinking

FROSTBURG, Md. — It's dime draft night every Thursday at the Diamond Lounge on Main Street, and a dozen or so glassy-eyed students are milling around outside as Lt. Kevin Grove's patrol car passes by.

He hangs a right on Bowery Street, the main drag for off-campus social life at Frostburg State University. A few students are walking — some stumbling — up the hill. On porches and through windows, they are visibly holding bottles. But Grove keeps driving. He's looking for fights, accidents and vandalism.

A night earlier, an FSU student was hospitalized, and earlier this semester another nearly died from drinking Everclear, a grain alcohol illegal in a dozen states. She was saved by a quick-thinking fellow student, a resident assistant who recognized trouble signs after friends dropped the woman off at the dorm.

But tonight, at least, Grove won't be calling Frostburg State President Jonathan Gibralter to inform him of a student fatality.

This may be what winning looks like in the battle against destructive binge-drinking on college campuses.

"I don't have any arrogance about this," said Gibralter, whose anti-binge-drinking efforts have attracted attention beyond Frostburg's 5,200-student campus in far-western Maryland. "I don't feel I have the answers. All I can say is we're trying the best we can. We may be only one party away from a disaster."

Last summer, presidents of more than 100 colleges, including prominent schools like Duke and Ohio State, prompted a heated national debate by calling on lawmakers to rethink the national drinking age of 21. The group, called the Amethyst Initiative, argued current laws only encourage binge-drinking by driving it into the shadows.

But beneath that debate was another contentious one about whether colleges and their presidents are really doing enough to combat alcohol problems. Some who signed on to the Amethyst Initiative insist they've hit a wall. But critics, like the anti-drunken driving group MADD, accused those presidents of "waving the white flag." They said the presidents only want to spare themselves the inconvenience and unpopularity that comes with a serious crackdown.

Gibralter, a quiet, mustachioed man who arrived at Frostburg in 2006, isn't surrendering. Instead, he's pushing a "zero tolerance" policy at an institution with a hard-earned party school reputation. He believes a president's attitude makes a big difference, and thinks other presidents should do more. In early September, he was honored at an American Council on Education meeting for his leadership on the issue.