Are on-campus pubs problematic, incident-riddled liabilities or meaningful, community-building gathering places?
In 1973, on-campus pubs were becoming increasingly popular with 102 unions already serving alcohol in some form, so one man set out to answer that question. A. Robert Rainville, then the director of the University of Rhode Island’s Memorial Union, completed an extensive survey on the selling of alcoholic beverages in college unions. His results were positive, with 62 percent of those who completed the survey claiming that since the installment of the union pub there had been an increase in the use of the union facility (Alcohol—To serve or not to serve?, 1973). However, most interesting were the responses to questions of concern regarding the selling of alcoholic beverages. Only seven of the 429 institutions that responded to the Rainville survey claimed to have had a discipline problem because of the alcohol, all of which were minor or caused by a nonstudent (Rainville, 1973). And, in fact, many schools reported that discipline problems had decreased and there was no need to provide e
