Vol. 38, No. 18

1-19-2005
By: Joni Bentz Seal

Students to help implement long-term campaign of task force

With the successful implementation of short-term strategies to curb rowdy disturbances fueled by alcohol consumption — evident by an incident-free Michigan Weekend 2004 — the long-term campaign to further modify the celebratory behavior and drinking culture at Ohio State has become the current focus. This campaign was recommended by the Task Force on Preventing Celebratory Riots, which reported its initial findings in the spring of 2002.

The effort has been given additional momentum by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which has awarded the university a grant of $780,000 to study off-campus parties, student disturbances and the effectiveness of a student engagement model that is based on problem-solving groups guided by pragmatic and democratic principles, said David Andrews, dean of the College of Human Ecology, chair of the task force and principle investigator of the grant.

“The short-term strategies, accomplished mainly through the leadership of Bill Hall, vice president for student affairs, Vernon Baisden, assistant vice president and director of public safety, and the Columbus Division of Police, have been effective in dramatically altering the environment and the behavior around the Ohio State campus on home football game days, and other weekends considered at high risk for destructive behavior,” Andrews said. “But we’ve kept our eye on implementing the longer-term recommendations, changing the climate and getting students engaged in a more meaningful way, not just in issues relating to disturbances, but in building a better sense of community, both on and off campus.”

According to data collected and a qualitative look at student perception performed by the task force, Andrews said there has been a sense of disinvestment in the University District and among students in general — not just those living off campus — that they weren’t participants in previous solutions.

“That’s where we started focusing with this grant, especially in relation to alcohol. We looked at how we could create systems of student engagement to eliminate some of the student disturbances, but also to focus on the riskiest side of alcohol consumption and the problems associated with that,” he said.

Cynthia Buettner, program director in the College of Human Ecology and co-investigator of the grant, said the three-year project funded by NIAAA’s Rapid Response to College Drinking program seeks to test an intervention model proposed by Ohio State.

“The Pragmatic Project outlined in our application recommended using a participatory democracy approach as a way to engage multiple small groups of students, faculty, administrators and community members in exploring particular issues, possible solutions and testable interventions related to problem drinking and campus disturbances,” she said.

Spring quarter, the grant team will form four 12-member workgroups, each led by a facilitating instructor, to address the project issues identified by Andrews and Buettner and in accordance with a four-tiered NIAAA strategy framework. Four additional teams will operate in spring 2006, pursuing either new issues or the expansion of issues addressed in the first round.

“We’ll have facilitators and experts to work with these groups to provide information about what’s working at other places, but the actual process of deciding what to do and implementing it will be student owned,” Buettner said. “Students will be responsible for generating ideas, working through implementation and evaluating them to see if they make a difference, and then going back and making changes if they don’t.”

To ensure the needed time commitment of undergraduate and graduate students in the process, students who participate in the groups will earn academic credit. Buettner said following an academic reward model will make it easier to incorporate the project into the university fabric and will enhance other university goals, such as advancing the service learning model and engaging faculty in newer models of teaching and learning. (Faculty, administrators and students interested in participating in the problem-solving groups should contact Buettner at buettner.16@osu.edu or 292-9885.)

Among the grant team’s activities already underway is the mapping of high and low risk weekends for spring and autumn quarters through 2007; the implementation of an observation team to track the flow of students, the size of the parties, the types of activities and the nature of any disturbances in the neighborhood on those weekends; and the ongoing collection and review of non-project campus activities, such as late-night programming by student affairs, and archival data from the university and city police departments.

“Obviously, all home football games, the first nice weekends of spring and events like Chit Fest will be considered high risk,” Andrews said. “We’re going to track what happens on those weekends compared to those designated as lower-risk weekends and whether these intervention strategies are affecting drinking levels and subsequent disturbances.”

On the Mondays following those designated weekends, 1,300 pre-selected OSU undergraduates will complete a Web-based survey about their activity over the weekend, including how much alcohol they consumed and what they witnessed in terms of parties and other events.

Andrews said it’s important that students lead the effort to identify the best approaches to changing the culture in the neighborhood. For example, he said they will need to address whether alcohol consumption actually increases on high-risk weekends and whether intervention strategies really do lead to change in the types of incidences occurring on those weekends.
As a requirement of the grant, OSU’s team has been paired with researchers at Wake Forest University, who will help evaluate the effectiveness of the various strategies. Since Ohio State will be spending as much of the grant as possible on implementation, Andrews said Wake Forest’s contribution in resources for evaluation and research probably will bring the total value of the grant closer to $1 million.

About eight other campuses are serving as research sites for the Rapid Response program, but most are purely alcohol-related; Ohio State is the only one funded to study student disturbances, Buettner said.

“As far as we can tell, this is the first and possibly the only grant funded by any agency to study riots and student disturbances. We are seen as a leader in this area and one of the only institutions considered to be doing legitimate research on the ties between alcohol consumption and student disturbances.”

She added that the task force has been contacted during the past few years by the majority of disturbance-laden institutions seeking a copy of the task force’s final recommendations and inquiring about solutions.

Andrews said other colleges are often astonished at the dedication of internal funding. “They are surprised to hear that our athletics department stepped up with $200,000 that will be invested in long-term strategies and that student affairs has been a big contributor of resources and staff in what’s been accomplished so far. The fact that we had resources to put toward this effort as well as the commitment by the university as a whole, made a difference,” he said.

That difference is evident in Ohio State’s game-day culture of late, Andrews said, and much of the credit goes to President Karen Holbrook for staying the course in the face of a lot of pressure, both from the internal community and the public. “After initial grumblings, most Buckeye fans and our community neighbors have expressed gratitude for the change to a more civil and good-spirited game experience and a less destructive aftermath,” he said. “That’s a good indication that it was the right thing to do.”

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