Editor’s Note: Emera Riley is a music columnist for The Daily Orange. This story was done independently of her work as a columnist and was completed as part of a collaboration between The D.O. and the Department of Newspaper and Online Journalism at Syracuse University.

In the opening scene of the 1978 movie “Animal House,” two freshmen stumble upon a party filled with binging, gyrating students. They soon get sucked in, join the fraternity at the center of all the shenanigans and spiral out of control along with the rest of Delta Tau Chi.

Some things have changed since John Belushi played a seventh-­year undergrad with a 0.0 grade point average. For starters, states like New York raised the drinking age from 18 to 21 in the mid­ 1980s in an effort to curb drunk driving, making it illegal for the vast majority of undergraduate college students to drink.

But how much have things really changed?

Makana Chock, an associate professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in Syracuse University, said colleges have managed to buck the trend of the rest of the country when it comes to drinking.

“Overall, in the U.S., alcohol consumption has been dropping dramatically in the last 30 years,” Chock said. “What’s interesting is the sort of exception to that, which is on a college campus.”

“The cultural norm used to be that we drink a lot,” she continued. “If you go way back in time, people drank beer and wine because the water was bad. It was safer drinking beer.”

Anne Osborne, also an associate professor at Newhouse, noted that drinking is deeply embedded in human culture.

“People have been gathering and enjoying food and drink together since the dawn of time,” Osborne said.

Even though the adult norm has changed and drinking in the general population has declined, Chock said colleges have a way of creating their own norms.

“It’s a group norm that’s emerged. It’s fairly long standard. This isn’t something that’s recent,” Chock said of the link between college and partying. “It’s been around for a long time.”

Brian Borsari, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California at ­San Francisco and an SU alumnus, attributes the norm of drinking on college campuses to the fact that students rely on other students to learn what is socially acceptable.

“It’s seen in our culture as four years … to sow your wild oats and to party and to hang out with peers,” Borsari said. “It’s either through selection, where you are a drinker and want to hang out with peers who drink as well. Or it’s socialization. You socialize in college, and alcohol is present so you’re exposed to it that way.”

Borsari’s studies have found that four out of five college students drink. This is in part because alcohol is so easy to attain on a college campus, he said.

“College campuses are really insulated from (legal) drinking ages. Beer and alcohol are really easy accessed on campus,” he said. “Older students … buy it for younger students.”

But while college is the place to drink, not every college campus is the same.

“Obviously there’s huge variability in campuses to the degree of how much or how little drinking is available, is supported, is approved of, is disapproved of,” Borsari said. “So, you get variability across the country either by region or by size of the school, but it’s really meshed with the college environment.”

In 2009, an SU anti-­binge drinking campaign called “The Stupid Drink” allowed Chock to study SU students’ perception of booze.

Chock found that not only do students believe that their friends are drinking more than them, but that their friends are more likely to accept them drinking.

Borsari also found that students seem to overestimate the amount that others are drinking.

“Norms can be insidious, where you’re looking at this information you’re kind of making these conclusions that might not be based on the actual approval or drinking of those around you,” he said.

Shruti Marathe, a freshman television, radio and film major at SU, added that it’s “very common” for people to always be drinking in college.

“It’s almost just normal to be intoxicated on a weekend night,” Marathe said.

Chock said perceived norms such as that one are particularly powerful for young adults.

“Young adults haven’t necessarily worked out the rules. (So they) look to other sources. They can be interpersonal — that’s most influential,” she said. “What your friends are doing, what your peers are doing, but media can have an influence, too. If you look to shows that depict drinking, that appears to be cool and acceptable.”

And Osborne said those portrayals in entertainment media can be problematic.

“We tend to see far more positive representations of drinking, or at least light-hearted representations of drinking, than we see the negative consequences of drinking in our media,” Osborne said.

Borsari said that news media portrayals go in the other direction, creating a different problem, saying that the media covers parties and the incidents and tragedies that occur as a result from drinking.

Osborne said some of the reasons students drink in college likely stems from students struggling to find an identity away from home.

“For college students, college is an enormous upheaval in a student’s life. It’s also a really significant coming of age. You’re defining your own identity, you’re separating from your family and really coming into defining who you want to be,” she said.

Chock added that peer pressure plays a role in drinking.

“If you don’t drink, or if you decide you don’t want to drink as much, there’s a lot of social pressure to,” Chock said.

Many, but not all, students eventually outgrow excessive drinking, Borsari said.

As for removing drinking from college campuses, the norms seem to be too deeply imbedded. Unless there’s a shift in behavior, college students will continue to drink, he said.

“People won’t be bragging about how sober they were the night before, or how little they drank or how they went to bed early,” Borsari said. “They’re going to talk about usually heavy drinking episodes.”

Editor’s Note: Over the past month, The Daily Orange has collaborated with the Department of Newspaper and Online Journalism at Syracuse University on a series of stories relating to alcohol culture on the SU campus. Multiple stories will appear in The D.O. in the coming days.

Published on April 6, 2016 at 12:29 am