The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which has long been a dry campus, unveiled an innovative new program Wednesday designed to reduce alcohol consumption among its students.
The school’s new “Alcohol Unawareness Program,” Chancellor Ronnie Green explained, will completely eliminate all acknowledgment of the existence of alcohol on UNL’s campus with the intention of keeping students from ever finding out about the beverage in the first place.
“We were exploring options to improve our incredibly successful ‘dry campus’ policy, and then it just hit us,” Green said. “Our students won’t drink alcohol if they’ve never heard of it before.”
One aspect of the new program will be a Web-based “Beverage Identification Test,” in which freshmen will be shown images of several drinks and asked to name them. If a student correctly identifies the images of beer, wine or vodka, they will be required to attend a three-hour “Pepsi Re-education Seminar.”
“We’re confident that once our freshmen spend a few hours with those refreshing Pepsi products, they’ll never think about alcohol again,” Green said.
The program will also extend to popular media. Movies and TV shows airing on university cable systems will have alcoholic beverages pixelated, and a campus-wide Internet filter will redirect alcohol-related links to www.pepsi.com.
The DailyER confirmed Wednesday night that a Google image search on UNL-AIR for “beer” was already returning pictures of Mountain Dew, while searching “wine” brought up Sierra Mist.
Critics of the program called it censorship and an infringement of students’ rights to free speech.
“This plan to ban all references to alcohol is a blatant assault on the First Amendment principles this country stands for,” said UNL law professor Thomas Heisler. “Plus, it’s completely ridiculous—I mean, what college student hasn’t already heard of alcohol?”
Following his comments, Heisler was placed on administrative leave for using the word “alcohol.”
Despite the criticism from students and faculty alike, Green remained enthusiastic about the program.
“This is a bold step for the future of our university,” he proclaimed.
Following Green’s remarks, he took questions from the audience, and a reporter asked him if he plans to crack down on students casually discussing alcohol with their friends.
“Alcohol?” Green replied. “I’ve never heard of that. Next question.”
