A five-year-old boy runs around the small pond, pointing excitedly into the water. “Look at the fish, Daddy!” he says, while standing precariously on the rocks lining the pond. Lying discreetly beside him, almost hidden by the grass, is a brass plaque dedicating the water memorial to a Georgetown student from his friends and family. In February 2000, David Schick (MSB ‘01) died after suffering from injuries in an alcohol-related brawl that took place in the parking lot behind Lauinger Library. Schick had been walking home from Champions bar when he became involved in the fight and was sent to the hospital after receiving serious wounds to his head.
Three years later, most people’s memories, if they have any at all, rest on the memorial that was erected next to White Gravenor in memory of Schick’s death. Most students at the University now never knew Schick and most do not know of the details surrounding his death. Three years later, has Georgetown learned anything from the death of Dave Schick?
This semester, Georgetown students have an opportunity to take advantage of free access to a personalized Internet assessment of high-risk drinking behavior called MyStudentBody.com a website created with the support of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Upon logging onto the website, each person is prompted to create a personal profile based on age, gender, race, year in school and level of alcohol consumption. With this confidential profile, each user can track his or her own alcohol consumption level per week and compare it to national averages.
Other tools available on the website include a blood alcohol calculator, a calorie calculator, a budget calculator, a profile of alcohol laws by state and “Anatomy 101,” which describes the effects that alcohol has on different parts of the body. The website is a great resource for students. And to top it off, it’s not preachy.
Since Schick’s death, several University-sponsored groups have been created to focus on campus drinking culture. One such group, sponsored by Health Education Services, was created this semester with the goal of showing Georgetown students the positive social norms that the Georgetown community has around health issues, particularly alcohol. The group recently took a survey that found that an estimated 97 percent of Georgetown students would walk a friend home if they knew that he or she was inebriated.
So, perhaps students have learned after all. If they haven’t, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission will make sure that they do. In the past year, the majority of bars in the surrounding Georgetown area have limited their customers to the over-21 crowd at all times. Although a flash of a fake ID and a bat of the eyelashes used to be all that was needed to get into a bar three years ago, there is now an Intellicheck ID-scanning machine.
Angry neighbors used Schick’s death as the ultimate excuse for putting the heat on area bars to more heavily monitor their crowds for underage drinking. The pressure has also been put on the Metropolitan Police Department to perform bar sweeps more regularly and to patrol areas of high student concentration. Since Schick’s death, the infamous Block Party has also been cancelled?most likely never to be revived again.
Until neighbors stop hearing about drunken fights on campus, and until they stop being woken up by students screaming on their way home from parties, they will not stop taking efforts to crack down on underage drinking.
The majority of Georgetown students are responsible when they drink. Now all they have to do is prove it.
