Examining Miami’s Drinking Culture
The reality of college students’ favorite pastime
Evan Stefanik
Hannah Potts
Patrick Murray sips his tequila lime soda. It splashes onto his T-shirt as he sways from the bar toward the sea of lights and smiles.
He savors the moment before he goes to find his friends, bobbing to the pop song blaring from the speakers. With blurry vision, he moves onward to the beat and forgets all his worries.
In the morning, he remembers them with a rush of nausea.
College students across the country experience a cycle with alcohol. Although the negative aspects of partying may poison their spirit, they come back to it for the people.
Murray, a Miami University senior software engineering major, joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity his first year because he wanted the social opportunities it gave his father. Four years later, he finishes 10 to 12 drinks each of the three to four days of the week he goes out with his best friends. He hopes for a grand finale alongside his fellow seniors.
“When most of us think of social events, we think of drinking first,” Murray said. “There’s not an insane amount to do here without drinking, and it’s fun to have all your friends in one place.”
Oxford, Ohio, is a rural area, but it boasts many clubs and bars around High Street. Several bars will admit anyone over 18, so most underage students flood there when looking for fun. To someone passing by, the high concentration of students appears to signal that everybody at Miami drinks.
Alcohol activates reward areas in the brain, creating a drive to constantly replenish it and, therefore, qualifying it as a depressant.
Assistant professor of psychology Allison Farrell believes students choose it to override the negative effects of their other medications or mental illnesses, as well as to cope with external factors. Farrell noted that Miami students have reported more loneliness and isolation since 2020.
“Without a social network, students turned to drinking,” Farrell said. “Though evidence shows it’s not particularly helpful in stopping stressors over time or helping in the moment.”
According to 2020 reports from AlcoholEdu, an online, two-hour course required for all incoming first-year Miami students, nearly half binged on alcohol within a surveyed 30 days. Despite the suspension of house parties and bars that year, drinking prevailed.
This followed statistics from the program in 2016, which said 50% of students at Miami reported frequenting nightclubs, compared to the 11% national average.
Farrell attributes these increases to the social contagion of partying, which encourages students to play up a casual personality and seem cooler. She also believes that students struggle to conceptualize how much alcohol the people around them are consuming.
“There’s lots of evidence that college students tend to overestimate the extent that others use alcohol,” Farrell said. “They overestimate the norms.”
Joshua Schoeler, an Oxford local for a decade and a cook at Paesano’s Pasta House and Patterson’s Cafe, learned that lesson in 2009 as a sociology undergraduate here.
“If you didn’t go out, you felt like you were missing out,” Schoeler said. “Every night’s like a Saturday night.”
Schoeler never graduated. All of his nights except Mondays ended in blackouts, leading him to skip assignments and sleep through class. His academics lagged behind. He used alcohol to manage other worsening circumstances in his life.
“Drinking was my cure-all mask,” Schoeler said. “It can be the perfect elixir to loosen people up, but it can also be deadly.”
As Schoeler sees it, drinking into self-imbalance can quickly morph into a bad habit that slopes on after college.
“I graduated with a lot of people who have alcohol problems just because it’s what we grew up going through,” Schoeler said. “Seeing careers fall apart is shocking. Drinking carries on all the way through your 20s. In your first job, you’ll be drinking every weekend.”
Lauren Evans Toben, the director of the psychology clinic at Miami, has facilitated substance abuse evaluations throughout her time at Miami and has found that students cite alcohol as making them more outgoing.
“The benefits of alcohol shouldn’t be ignored, but they can be overgeneralized and simplified, and there are costs,” Toben said. “You can have a fun night out without binge drinking.”
Toben has significant concerns about alcohol abuse on Miami’s campus, partly because her older clients often mention alcoholism in their therapeutic discussions.
“People lose sight of how frequently and intensely they drink and how many consequences there are,” Toben said. “They usually don’t think it’s a big deal.”
Toben deems the drinking lifestyle as a threat when students can no longer regulate their own choices. Farrell recommends students ask for guidance if they start encountering persistent withdrawal symptoms like shakes, chills and poor moods despite building a tolerance.
“You’re not supposed to know exactly what to do,” Toben said. “Students should start by asking themselves questions like: How many consequences have I had because of my substance use? What goals did I lose sight of?”
Students who violate the university code of conduct rules on alcohol by drinking in dorms or supplying alcohol to roommates under 21 must participate in an AlcoholEdu course as an educational intervention. In the course, they learn about blood alcohol content, metabolism and pacing methods. The program has a very low recidivism rate, meaning students’ drinking habits usually improve after completing it.
Miami encourages a harm-reduction policy on alcohol rather than promoting abstinence. That decision was sourced from the 2015 founding of the Alcohol Task Force, now called Miami Oxford Substance Abuse and Information Committee (MOSAIC), to combat high-risk substance use.
One of MOSAIC’s former invited community members, a 1981 business management alumnus and devoted Oxford resident, Michael Rudolph, opposed the push for abstinence that routinely surfaced within the task force. He also fought to secure beer sales at Yager Stadium for football games, saying students would instead tailgate in the parking lot when the bleachers prohibited alcohol.
“If you were to stop alcohol here and enforce abstinence, you would cause a riot,” Rudolph said. “It’s hard to avoid when living in Oxford, and I don’t really want to.”
Rudolph became a financial advisor for Eagle Strategies LLC even amid his college fun. As a member of the Glee Club, he got drunk at least twice a week and spent almost every Saturday Uptown. He misses grilling hotdogs and hamburgers at house parties and pouring himself bourbon-and-Cokes.
At 64-years-old, Rudolph cracks a cold one whenever he returns home from work and drinks wine with his friends on Wednesday and Friday nights. He feels that the drinking culture he grew up with has majorly transformed over the years.
“Now, it’s about rushing to drink as much as you can and the kegs and the games,” Rudolph said. “There’s stronger alcohol but less socialization.”
Federal law during Rudolph’s time in college permitted him to drink at 18, but beers consisted of a weaker 3.2% alcohol content. He figures that fostered responsibility in him as a student.
“You had to drink more than a few beers to feel a buzz,” Rudolph said. “I think you got more full than you did hammered.”
He recalls professors scheduling exams on Green Beer Day without controversy. Bars felt more intimate. Friends took pride in their grades, and parents cared more about their students’ academic achievement.
Rudolph and his friends even routinely plopped their notebooks onto high-top tables and studied together in bars, drinks in hand.
Director of Student Wellness Rebecca Baudry Young sees students validate their drinking by pursuing alcohol as a reward for their schoolwork.
“The semester is a marathon, but what we see instead is students sprinting through a work hard, play hard mindset,” Young said. “That's where we might get into some behaviors that are not going to be very conducive to the time when you should be resting.”
Young suggests that students with mental health issues in particular refuse all alcohol because it can exacerbate their substance use into a dependency. If haphazard drinking continues, it can inflict lifelong dangers like liver disease and more.
If peer pressure ever influences a student, Young implores them to initiate a conversation with their friends about it, no matter how awkward. Some approaches feel more comfortable than others, so Young suggests students might also try Miami resources like confidential hotlines, therapists at student counseling services, wellness studio programming and HAWKS Peer Health Educators.
The Haven at College, an off-campus outpatient center, supports students living with alcoholism and other conflicts. It hosts weekly recovery meetings and provides housing at Miami Preserve. For students looking for sober activities, Miami Activities and Planning (MAP) coordinates “Late Night Miami” programming events throughout the semester.
Like many college students who go out, Rudolph had his share of trial and error as a student before easing into his customs as a drinker, but it delivered him an important lesson. To thrive, Rudolph advocates moderation above all.
“I respect students’ ability to have fun, but think about what doing it badly would do to your family name,” Rudolph said. “You can either control or kill your success.”
