UTA group backs alcohol sales to appeal to older students
By Jan Jarvis
Knight Ridder Newspapers

ARLINGTON — After a dry decade, students at the University of Texas at Arlington have decided wetter is better.

The Student Congress has passed a resolution supporting the sale of alcoholic beverages at Bowling and Billiards, a 12-alley hangout with video games and a snack bar in the E.H. Hereford University Center.

“This isn’t calling for some big bar that will be a big money-maker,” Student Congress President Chris Featherstone said. “I don’t think it’s about the alcohol as much as having a social area where students can congregate.”

Alcohol may be served on the Arlington campus now, with university approval. But beer hasn’t been sold at a campus pub since 1992 when the Dry Gulch in the Hereford Center closed. The pub opened in the mid-1970s, but sales declined after 1986 when the legal drinking age in Texas increased from 18 to 21. After losing $21,000 over two years, the pub closed.

UT-Arlington President Robert Witt said he has not received the students’ resolution, but a variety of issues, from safety to economics, must be considered before alcohol sales would be allowed on campus. Witt may approve the plan or send it to a committee for study.

“There is no way I can support opening a facility like that if it has to be subsidized,” Witt said.

Kent Gardner, UT-Arlington’s vice president for student affairs, said he is not taking a stance.

“Some say it lessens problems because students know we will be checking IDs,” he said. “Others see it as a negative because it institutionalizes drinking.”

Attracting business could still be tough because many students are underage, Gardner said. In the mid-1980s, when the Dry Gulch thrived as a hangout and place to watch Monday Night Football, about 90 percent of the student population was 18 or older.

Today, about 25 percent of the school’s population is younger than 21, officials said.

Similarly, the once popular Rock Bottom Lounge at the University of North Texas in Denton closed in 1989. But last year, UNT began selling beer again during its Wednesday night jazz concerts in the University Union. The events draw up to 300 people, UNT spokeswoman Kelley Reese said.

Southern Methodist University is dry, as is University Park, the city in which it is located. Campus residents who are 21 or older, however, may drink in their rooms, officials said.

Alcohol consumption is generally not allowed at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, but those who are 21 and older may drink in the parking lots before and after football games.

Students of legal drinking age also may consume alcohol in their rooms, but TCU prohibits it in all other areas of residence halls. Elsewhere on campus, the sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibited.

With beer, UT-Arlington’s Bowling and Billiards hall would become more of a community gathering place, giving students an alternative to leaving campus after class, graduate student Baronda Bradley said.

“Students could see professors not as people who live in ivory towers but as people they can sit down and talk to,” Bradley, 34, said.

But freshman Annie Lewandowsky, 19, said serving beer a few yards from residence halls where alcohol is forbidden sends the wrong message by promoting drinking on campus and “makes it sound like the university condones alcohol.”

UT-Arlington students have proposed selling beer at a campus pub several times since
1992, but the resolutions were either rejected by administrators or never made it out of the Student Congress.