BATTLE OF THE BINGE

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Benjamin Wynne, 20, underwent two of the most time-honored rites of passage at Louisiana State University last week. He received a pledge pin from the fraternity that voted him into the brotherhood, and he got rip-roaring drunk to celebrate. Wynne and his fellow Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers began their bacchanalia with an off-campus keg party featuring "funneling," in which beer is shot through a rubber hose into the drinker's mouth. Next came a communal bender at Murphy's bar, a frat hangout a few hundred yards from L.S.U. There, the libation of choice was "Three Wise Men," a high-octane mix of 151-proof rum, Crown Royal whiskey and Jagermeister liqueur. Wynne "was staggering, but no more than a lot of other people," says a college woman who was there. The festivities ended with upperclassmen wheeling the pledges out of the bar in shopping carts, because they were too far gone to walk. "They were like firemen carrying people out of a burning building," says Christopher Sule, an L.S.U. student who works at a sandwich shop next door. When police were called to the frat house hours later, they found almost two dozen men passed out on the living-room floor. By early morning, Wynne was dead of alcohol poisoning, and three of his fraternity brothers had been hospitalized. An autopsy found that Wynne, who downed the equivalent of about 24 drinks, had a blood-alcohol level six times the amount at which the state considers a person intoxicated.

Wynne's death last week sent a tremor down L.S.U.'s fraternity row and set off a round of back-to-school soul searching about binge drinking on campuses all over the U.S. Just days before the incident, The Princeton Review had ranked L.S.U. as No. 10 in the nation on a list of "top party schools." L.S.U. officials protest that their school is no worse than many others, which underscores the larger issue. A Harvard survey of 18,000 undergraduates found that 44% said they had engaged in binge drinking--four to five drinks in a row--in the previous two weeks. "Most schools realize they are just one tragedy away from being in the spotlight themselves," says Debra Erenberg, an alcohol-policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. To combat excessive drinking, colleges in recent years have taken such steps as establishing alcohol-free dorms and writing letters to parents of hard-drinking students. But critics contend the L.S.U. tragedy shows the schools are still not doing enough. The incident also illustrates that although the drinking age is now 21 everywhere in America, making most college students underage, alcohol remains widely available--and highly promoted--to students of all ages.