JUST as the University of Virginia will always outrank Maryland by leaps and bounds, if we were to rank the concerns of college administrators, they would remain fairly constant over time. While their immediate worry in this era of declining state aid is to keep tuition low, their agenda will also always include drinking and diversity.
Seeing as how soaring deficits are piling on to their preoccupations, what better way to solve their other concerns than by tying drinking and diversity together, as a study in this month's American Journal of Public Health tried to do. Not only was the study, "Watering Down the Drinks: The Moderating Effect of College Demographics on Alcohol Use," too clever by half, but the danger is that administrators will be all too happy to give credence to this specious report. Compounding that danger is the temptation to use minorities as merely a means to end an unrelated problem.
The report's key finding was that the more racial minorities there are on college campuses, the less drinking there is. Moreover, the researchers found that not only was the overall drinking level lower (which could be attributed to minorities' lower tendency to drink), but the greater presence of minorities also had a positive effect on reducing white students' drinking.
Although the authors inserted a disclaimer that theirs was a correlational study, that did not stop them from waxing wildly on its implications. "The results strongly suggest that significant moderating effects accrue from the large-scale presence of lower-risk subgroups [minorities] on the binge drinking of the high-risk subgroups [whites]," they wrote. In the report's abstract, they also made this ambitious policy proposal: "Student-body composition and demographic diversity should be examined by colleges wishing to reduce their binge drinking problems." In other words, if administrators want to stop alcohol abuse, they should increase minority enrollment.
Predictably, the Washington Post went blindly along with the report, running the suggestive headline, "Less Diversity, More Booze?" (Oct. 31, 2003), and giving the soapbox to an academic who was all too willing to draw a causal connection. "[A] diverse student body positively
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