As a Vice President of a Greek chapter, one of my responsibilities is making sure everyone is safe at our registered parties. As a chapter, we take many precautions to prevent binge drinking, including banning hard alcohol, monitoring guests’ alcohol consumption and many more. Our next step to promoting safety at registered parties should be the use of kegs, and we hope kegs will begin to be utilized all across campus.
Permitting kegs to be at parties is a great first step in improving and maintaining safe drinking at parties, and we thank President McCoy, IFC, and the entire University for making this step. Stereotypically, kegs are associated with wild parties and over consumption, but this is simply not true.
Kegs are the safest way to drink at parties; it slows down consumption and puts the hosts more in control of the pace in which the party consumes alcohol. I’ve been at a party and seen one person holding a beer in each hand, and one in each of their back pockets. That is a strong foundation for overconsumption. With kegs, consumption slows down because one beer can be distributed at a time instead of reaching in and pulling out two or three instantly.
On average, it takes six seconds to pour a beer from a keg. This means that it would take over three minutes of continuous pouring to go through an entire case of beer, not to mention the extra time it takes in between pours. If beer is only offered in cans or bottles, a case can be gone in under a minute with people just reaching in and pulling out a beverage. Slowing down the distribution rate can help reduce overconsumption. Students will be able to drink the same amount, just spread out over longer periods of time, giving the body more time to process.
The process of getting kegs is somewhat complex at the moment. The process for us involves talking to our housing corps, chapter advisor, and in some cases getting approval from our nationals, and this is the process every time you want to have a keg. I commend the University for taking a step in the right direction, and I am curious to see how many events have registered kegs at them this school year.
I know several houses plan to just continue buying cases of beer because the process of registering a keg is lengthy, and for some houses, impossible. Houses have troubles with insurance, housing corp, or even nationals.
IFC and the University have helped us get on the right track to fixing the overconsumption problem we have; I just hope we can continue to refine and perfect the policies so that we can benefit from this as a campus.