The impact of alcohol in college students’ lives

Back in 2024, I stood in the Founders Room in front of 45 to 50 alumni and talked about the history of beer. I’ll admit the crowd was there partly for the ending: five beers I had brewed myself, an IPA, a Saison, a Raspberry Ale, a Stout and one experimental batch. But something happened that afternoon that I want to think about with you. People who hadn’t seen each other in years were pouring for one another, trading opinions and telling stories. The beer was the occasion for something larger.

I don’t want to give you the underage sermon or the moderation sermon. You’ve heard them. I want to ask a different question: what is alcohol doing in college life, ritually?

Let me start where I started that afternoon, with the Sumerians. They were among the first civilizations to brew barley beer, and there is even earlier evidence of brewing among the Natufians. The Sumerians drank beer daily, as hydration, as food and in worship. They had a goddess of beer, Ninkasi, and a hymn to her that doubles as a recipe, walking through the preparation of the grain and the bappir bread. By today’s standards their beer would give us the “ick.” It was chunky like soup, and they drank it through a straw to avoid the solids. But notice what they had: a language, a song and a story that surrounded the drinking.

Each of us lives by rituals, whether or not we notice. Every morning I grind coffee beans and make a pot, sometimes in a French press, sometimes drip. I hear the grinder, smell the coffee and hold the warm cup. That is more than preference. It shapes my attention and desire, and it orients me toward a philosophy book I like to pair with it. It is a small liturgy of rehearsal and performance, and it shapes who I am.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, a French theologian who studies sacraments and symbols, argues that ritual is how we become who we are, through bodies, shared actions and repetition. He never wrote about alcohol, so what follows is my application of his ideas. But look at a college weekend through his lens. It has its own time and space (the party, the tailgate), its initiations (the first-year rites, the 21st birthday), its exchanges (buying rounds, passing the bottle) and its body language of belonging (shared laughter, sitting in a circle). Something symbolic is happening.

Chauvet might ask what kind of ritual it is. If alcohol is only a tool, a way to quiet inhibition, gain confidence or forget, then it is being used and not received. A gift, by contrast, asks for care. A tool, however, asks for nothing. He would also ask whether the ritual points beyond itself. Drinking that only reinforces the in-group, with no story or larger horizon behind it, closes in on itself.

Here’s where Lacan, whom we discussed last week, helps. For Lacan, desire is never fully satisfied by any object, and that gap is part of being human. Ritual can help us live with the gap. Drinking that tries to erase it, the loneliness or the anxiety about who we are, will keep needing more.

So return with me to the Founders Room. Those alumni were drinking inside a story: the history of brewing, a shared past and a person who had spent weeks making the beer and wanted to literally give it away. Ninkasi’s hymn did the same for the Sumerians. It put the drink inside a craft and a community with a memory.

I’ll close with a question. Students are improvising rites of belonging and passage all the time. What would it look like to give those rites a story worth telling? And what do you think is missing from the ones you see?