Blake's Think Tank

Have ever heard of beer pong?  Ever played it?  I have . . . many times, although not all that much since I left college a while back.  It’s a game where teams of two try and toss ping pong balls into cups of beer.  It’s played on a long table with all sorts of rules.  When I was in college, the game was very popular and, admittedly, quite fun.

But it has its critics.  In this week’s issue of TIME magazine, Meaghan Haire writes about the effort some college campuses are taking to ban the game.  Georgetown, Tufts, Penn, Yale and UMass – Amherst have banned “pong” and all other drinking games for everyone on campus.

It’s popularity led to the creation of a video game for the Nintendo Wii (angry parents at the Connecticut AG got involved and the game changed to “Pong Toss” where you throw into cups of water) and a World Series of Pong, now in its fourth year (played in Vegas . . . where else?).  Binge drinking is on the rise, especially on college campuses, and some have determined that issuing bans is the answer.

Knowing that bans at smaller colleges and universities just push drinking further behind closed doors, I’m not sure the approach serves as a practical solution.  Check out what Choose Responsibility, a non-profit founded by former Middlebury President John McCardell, is doing.  McCardell spoke at the Clinton School of Public Service last year.

In 2000, while I was still in college, I did an interview with Chronicle of Higher Education about beer pong.  A copy of the article is only available with a subscription, but in the abstract I am quoted as saying, “It doesn’t contribute to any sort of binge drinking or ‘dangerous drinking’ – it’s a recreational game.”  Based on the type of game we played then (and it varies from place to place), that was my view.