PrintWe’ve all had one of those nights. You’re at a party, having a beer or a mixed drink. Later, you do a shot with an old friend from your freshman floor, then you have another beer—maybe two—you don’t really remember. You spot that girl in your CC class who always makes intelligent comments, and you decide to tell her that. Someone offers to get you another drink. You stumble over, inhibition-free, to a guy who just walked into the room—then it hits. You spend the next two or three hours hunched over a toilet, the seat creating a circular indentation around your face, watching your day’s diet be expelled and thinking: “Why do people do this to themselves?”
Surprisingly enough, some don’t.
It’s a normal Saturday night in Claremont 21. Duygu Yilmaz, a CC sophomore, invites me into her cozy and brightly lit suite to chat with her and a few of her roommates. They are all sitting around the kitchen table wearing pajamas and typing away on laptops. Not a wild weekend, but the setting doesn’t seem boring either—the suite gives off a vibe of wholesome comfort. “We’re not antisocial, but we’re not crazy. We have pretty high morals in our suite,” Yilmaz says.
While there’s huge hype in the media about the binge-drinking culture that characterizes college, non-drinkers seem to fly under the radar. Some of them socialize with students who do drink. Coke-filled red cups in hand, they are the designated sensible ones who hold their friends’ hair and look for lost cellphone batteries at the end of the night. Other teetotallers prefer to socialize primarily with like-minded students in social groups based around an aversion to substances. Despite their absence from the media spotlight, non-drinkers are associated with a slew of negative adjectives, like “boring” and “antisocial”—especially among college students.
Starting from the first week of NSOP, many groups of college friends are united by alcohol-fueled experiences. Alcohol has the ability to bring people together, whether it’s igniting the beginning sparks of lifelong friendships or inspiring imbibers to engage in sloppy, ill-advised hook-ups.
For students who don’t drink, though, alcohol can have a divisive effect. “I enjoy myself just fine, but the people around me don’t seem to enjoy themselves when I’m not drinking, which I don’t understand,” relates Chuck Roberts, a sophomore in CC. “I’m not trying to make a moral judgment. I just say ‘no, thank you.’”
Not all students who abstain from drinking have the same live-and-let-live attitude as Roberts, though. “When my friends get drunk, I wish they wouldn’t because I think it is to cover up insecurity. I just don’t approve of that lifestyle,” says Barnard sophomore Joy Harrison.
Any John Jay or Carman veteran can attest to the self-selecting nature of freshman year social groups, which are all-too-frequently based on common drugs of choice—or lack thereof.
“Last year, I lived on a floor with 50 percent heavy drinkers, and they would spend most of their waking hours on vodka and other things they weren’t supposed to have because they weren’t 21. I think we [the non-drinkers] eventually decided we just couldn’t be friends with them,” explains Janelle Mills, a sophomore in SEAS. From the outside perspective of students who don’t drink, alcohol-based social connections can seem artificial. “When you form a bond with someone who’s completely sober and sane, you trust them more in the future,” Mills continues.
“I don’t consciously seek out people who don’t drink; it just happens to be that way,” says Yilmaz. This furthers the divide between the two groups: “Since my friends don’t drink, it would be weird for me to—a kind of reverse peer pressure.”
While students generally fall into social scenes that feel comfortable to them—drinking or non-drinking—tension can arise when campus groups bring people from different social groups together. One student who wished to remain anonymous describes a conference he attended with a campus club: “There were only drinking parties, so I couldn’t go. Instead I was just sitting alone in my room.”
Alcohol has always divided as much as it has united, both on and off college campuses, and across cultures, drawing lines and perpetuating stereotypes. Alcoholism was used to condemn the “immoral” Irish immigrants in the 1920s by temperance advocates, while in China, alcohol is traditionally a staple of business negotiations and refraining from drinking is considered to be a sign of untrustworthiness.
In fact, these culturally varying attitudes affect the judgments of students studying abroad. Roberts describes his experience in England, saying, “You start [drinking] when you’re 14 or 15 in England, trying to get into bars. That’s the only social outlet—it’s fueled by alcohol. It was certainly not a societal set-up that was beneficial; it looked dangerous. Little tiny kids should not be drinking.” This stands in stark contrast to the prevailing (and self-serving) opinion that most under-21 college students hold: that the drinking age should be lowered.
While religion and politics are verboten dinner party conversation topics for a reason, it is hard to turn down a glass of wine without inviting preconceptions. At Columbia, this tension is only emphasized by the diversity of experiences—both cultural and otherwise—students bring to the table.
As long as sugar continues to ferment into ethanol, some abstainers will judge and drinkers will choose to cloud their judgment. Some students choose to look past this in their social interactions. As Roberts concludes, “I don’t consider it [whether a person drinks] to be a major aspect of anyone’s personality.” We can only hope drinkers will return the favor.