If you have ever relieved yourself in an academic building, you have probably seen the alcohol consumption posters depicting the percentage of Whitman students drinking various amounts each weekend. As part of his thesis for mathematics, senior Kevin Duh found an obvious flaw with the poster.
“They don’t add up,” he said triumphantly, brow still speckled with beads of sweat from the tedious calculations he squeezed out. “Only 79 percent of the student body is represented on this poster. That’s not even half of the school!”
While he still has some crunching to do, Duh was certainly correct that some of the school is not being represented. A large number of the school’s students (approximately 21 percent) are up in arms over what is being called “inebriation without representation” and drawing parallels to the Occupy movement.
“We are 21…. The 20 per…. One percent of the 20 school,” argued a drunken Delta Gamma sophomore.
The DG was one of many of the “top bracket” students who were down in the dumps after being left off of the drink chart for having more than nine drinks on a night of debauchery.
“I don’t let academics get in the way of my drinking. So what? TKE is bestly the def of the sororities,” said a Tau Kappa Epsilon junior into a Breathalyzer that he mistook for a microphone. Like his statement, his BAC was hard to discern, but was estimated at around .30. “On the metric system?” he asked over bites of an uncooked quesadilla.
The Whitman administration has their hands full stifling the complaints of a fifth of their student body they had swept under the rug for years. “We want to promote healthy choices, not that,” said Barbara Maxwell, gesturing towards the Beta porch.
The movement to hide the 21 percent’s drinking tendencies has raised questions as to the other substance abuse amongst students being hidden by the administration. Namely, folks are concerned with addressing the jenkem rumors circulating North Hall. Jenkem is a Zambian street drug produced by collecting the methane gas from fermented waste.
“If there are students drinking 10 or more drinks on a weekend night, there are definitely probably some students huffing poop gas,” said John Masla, resident assistant of North Hall.
For some students, it is more of a matter of ethics than anything. “I just can’t, in my right mind, huff jenkem with the knowledge that the administration won’t make my habits public. It’s really just nutty,” said brown junkie Sam Crosby.
For the time being, Whitman’s administrative team is satisfied to have pinched off the jenkem movement through stifling the voice of minority substance abusers on campus.
Whether Whitman’s 21 percent or jenkem community will mobilize and serve a piping hot pile of justice by occupying the gutters and alleys of Walla Walla in protest remains a mystery, but the voiced frustrations of a stifled voice have been heard, sort of.
