Students who checked their email inboxes on Jan. 30 were reminded by Vice President for Student Affairs Michael Whaley that the University is participating in the National College Health Improvement Project’s (NCHIP) learning collaborative on high-risk drinking. The project, in which 31 other colleges are participating, aims to test various strategies to reduce high-risk drinking and then eventually implement strategies that are proven to be more effective. The email defined high-risk drinking as the consumption of four or more drinks for females or five or more drinks for males in a two-hour period.

The team leading the project at the University includes deans, professors, health instructors, and two student representatives from the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA). Attached to the email was an information sheet that included the statistics that prompted the University’s involvement with the initiative.

The project began two years ago in response to the University’s elevated levels of high-risk drinking. Though the reported national average of college students who participate in high-risk drinking is 54 percent, 57 percent of students at Wesleyan report engaging in high-risk drinking. Whaley heads the project.

“I think that Wesleyan has this cultural norm of work hard, play hard,” Whaley said. “I think that Wesleyan in the past has had a misconception that we don’t drink as much on campus as much as other schools do—but the data contradicts this.”

Whaley also made it very clear that his team is working to address a high-risk drinking problem, not drinking in general at the University.

“We have to enforce the 21-year-old drinking age if we want federal funding for financial aid and other things, but this is really focused on the high-risk drinkers, the folks that really put themselves at risk with things like pregaming, and by pregaming I don’t just mean having two beers and going out; I mean like taking six shots and going out,” Whaley said.

Chair of the WSA Finance and Facilities Committee and one of the two student representatives on the University’s NCHIP team Andrew Trexler ’14 highlights this difference as well.

“High-risk drinking is, unfortunately, often conflated with underage drinking, but the two terms are not equivocal,” Trexler wrote in an email to The Argus. “Our efforts are focused on [eliminating] the kinds of drinking that leads to hospitalizations, physical injury, sexual assault, and depression.”

The strategies that the NCHIP team is testing range in scope and form. They include an increased Public Safety presence in first year residential areas, substance-free programming by the WSA on Friday nights, and population-wide screenings that come in the form of the monthly surveys the administration sends the student body. Tanya Purdy, Director of Health Education and a member of the NCHIP team, wrote in an email to The Argus that the variety of these programs is key.

“We are not looking for one magic strategy, it doesn’t exist, research over the past decades has taught us that,” she wrote. “All of these efforts are informed and we know from research that they work as a part of an ecological framework and not as stand alones.”

Whaley explained that the University will try to determine over the next few months whether testing like this can help reduce high-risk drinking on campus.

“We have some anecdotal evidence, but nothing really quantitative yet,” he said. “On a monthly basis we’re tracking, via self-report surveys, the amount of high-risk drinking that different sample sizes of the institution are reporting; the rates this year look a little bit lower to us than the rates we saw last year, but we’re doing a whole host of different tests.”

Administrators are not the only members of the University community working to lower high-risk drinking rates. Some students help organize substance-free events around campus at night. Crystal Rogers ’16, who has helped run a few of these events, wonders what the NCHIP statistics will ultimately reveal about the effectiveness of these events.

“I think the substance-free events are good because they definitely keep people from drinking, but a lot of the people who attend them are people who wouldn’t ordinarily be drinking anyway,” Rogers said.

Students have a range of attitudes towards the necessity of NCHIP’s campaign against high-risk drinking at the University. Rogers noted that although she thinks the University is a relatively safe environment for people who are drinking, certain educational resources such as Alcohol.edu can be helpful.

“Alcohol.edu definitely helped certain people drink more safely,” Rogers said. “It was helpful because I think it taught a lot of people about drink sizes.”

Brett Klapper ’16 also feels that programs to combat high-risk drinking are positive but shares Rogers’ optimism about the situation at the University.

“I have been pleasantly surprised at the lack of extremely sick people [from consuming alcohol] I see at Wesleyan,” Klapper said.

Though the effectiveness of the NCHIP program is still to be determined, some students feel its goal is worth striving for.

“The NCHIP team faces a stubborn enemy; a collectively-imagined identity as forceful as college drinking culture is difficult to disrupt or combat in a meaningful way, a way that does not rely upon draconian force,” Trexler said. “Still, the right thing to do is try.”