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Colgate’s reputation as a
"party school" is getting more play. The Princeton
Review has ranked Colgate as the number 9 party
school in the country. U.S. News and World
Report’s current guide to "America’s
Best Colleges" has an article about alcohol on
campus. Major attention is given to Colgate. The article,
complete with a picture of a Colgate fraternity, begins
with a description of a keg party and a girl vomiting. A
Colgate student is quoted: "If you don’t like
to party, you won’t like Colgate."
To be fair, many have pointed out that Colgate is
probably not unusual in this regard. Binge drinking is
common on most college campuses.
During our Bicentennial Celebration, someone asked me
what I thought Colgate’s founders would have thought
of all this? No answer was needed.
In his book, Further Along the Road Less Traveled,
M. Scott Peck refers to addiction as "the sacred
disease." He points out that it occurred to the
psychiatrist, Carl Jung, "that it was perhaps no
accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic
drinks as spirits, and that perhaps alcoholics were
people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than
others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual
disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition."
Peck writes: "[Addicts] are people who want, who
yearn, to go back to Eden--who want to reach Paradise,
reach Heaven, reach home--more than most. They are
desperate to regain that lost warm, fuzzy sense of
oneness with the rest of nature we used to have in the
Garden of Eden..."
Could it be that so many of our young are having a
problem with alcohol because we (parents and churches)
have neglected their spiritual needs?
 1996 C.
David Hess
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