I am a fourth year transfer student at the University of Minnesota. I identify as an alcoholic. I started my higher education at a big city conservatory on the east coast, and was able to stay clean during my two years there. I owe my recovery to effortful engagement with 12-step communities. Yet, there were beneficial aspects to my institution: the conservatory was so small that there was an unobtrusive, generally oblique drinking culture. Also, being part of a close-knit, creative community contributed to an internal sense of purpose and well-being which aided my recovery. When I transferred to the University of Minnesota, I had a different experience. I was greeted by an overwhelming alcohol culture, along with a sense of separation from fellow students. This was undoubtedly aggravated by the size of the university, the institutional demands on individuals, the competition-based academics, and the administration’s lack of investment in community-based projects.

I relapsed during my first semester. By no means do I blame the university. Many personal factors contributed to the relapse of my disease during that time. Yet, I do believe that the University of Minnesota, in general, has underperformed in its responsibility to students, so many of which have been touched by this disease. To be fair, much is out of the control of the administration with regards to addiction and alcoholism. Yet, they refuse to have the courage to change the things that they can control. Namely, the creation and subsidization of programs and spaces which allow addicts and alcoholics, both in and out of recovery, to connect and heal together. It is this most fundamental material need for organizational resources that the administration continues to disavow.
 
With eight months of sobriety, I am grateful for the connection and healing that keeps me alive. I have had to work at finding these things completely outside of the University’s domain. I’ll manage, I’ve paid my dues. But when I walk through this campus and perceive the hundreds of students suffering with this disease (and there are hundreds), adrift in an intoxicating culture and lost in an institutional nightmare, without a clue as to where to find help, I get mad. I get mad because I know that a few, simple allocations of administrative dollar could provide the resources that might save these students’ lives.