Kegs, in all their glory, are the stainless steel bastions of college culture. When you think of kegs, images of debaucherous frat-house indulgence and Animal House-esque antics probably come to mind. These 15.5-gallon symbols of the idyllic party scene that college students dream of have long been demonized and condemned as the sure sign of alcohol-related tragedies by college administrations across the country. My Googling of ‘first college to ban kegs’ returned few usable results, but at some point, likely in the 1990’s, some college administrator made the decision to outlaw kegs at their respective school’s parties. In the months and years thereafter, banning kegs quickly became the hottest trend in college administration since the institution of the sacred Blue Book for academic exams. As soon as they heard of it, administrators around the country lined up in droves, eager to join in the fun and become the latest institution of higher learning to hop on the bandwagon and slap a giant ‘Kegs are Killing our Children’ sticker on the bumpers of their shiny new Priuses.

While I highly doubt whichever college President or Dean of Students birthed the idea of banning kegs had malicious intentions, I do believe the decision was shortsighted and came with a slew of unintended consequences — many of which directly contradict the ‘Safety First’ mindset that these keg embargoes are supposed to promote.

This brings me to an important point, one that drives this proverbial ‘War on Kegs’: Binge Drinking. Ahh, the college administrator’s equivalent to yelling ‘bomb’ in an airport. Binge Drinking, or consuming large amounts of alcohol in short periods of time for the purpose of becoming intoxicated, is public enemy #1 among parents and school officials everywhere. Even before that pivotal moment when incoming freshmen arrive to campus, they are already being bombarded with messaging deterring them from binge drinking. Gettysburg College, like many other colleges and universities, requires first-years to complete AlcoholEdu, an online alcohol education program, before they even set foot in a classroom. The campaign continues in orientation week, when students sit through hours of lectures from college officials and skits put on by student organizations, continually warning them of the dangers of binge drinking.

However, these students, soaking in the newfound freedom from the supervision of their parents and all the excitement that comes with college life, seem to forget about it all as soon as that first party happens. Next, the inevitable happens. Some, not all, but a significant portion nonetheless, end up kneeling in a bathroom, miserably expelling the liquid freedom they’ve consumed into the porcelain toilet bowl in front of them. Those are the lucky ones, others end up in the hospital with their stomachs pumped out, returning to campus the next morning with that white WellSpan bracelet around their wrist and a hefty bill for the ambulance ride they never saw coming. Last comes the possibility none of us want to think about. Sure, you may not be able to point to a time when it’s happened on our campus, but the reality is that every year, a number parents of college students around the country have to get the unimaginably horrific phone call informing them that their son or daughter has died from alcohol poisoning.

Without a doubt, binge drinking is not a good thing, and it is a leading cause of alcohol-related death among college students. With that said, however, it is important to remember that little clause in the definition of binge drinking: “consuming a large amount of alcohol in a short period of time”. Sure, if you crack your first beer in the morning and continue drinking all day, you’ll probably experience relatively similar effects to those that result from imbibing more heavily in a shorter timespan, but for the sake of argument let’s focus on the typical 10:00pm-2:00am time slot of college-sanctioned partying. For most student-partygoers, it doesn’t take long after walking through the front door of whichever edifice is the locale of the party du jour for them to come into contact with alcohol, whether they actively seek it out or not. The process by which they obtain that drink is as usually as simple as walking up to a bar and asking for a beer, having one handed to them by a friend, or even just reaching into a case and grabbing it. It’s pretty easy to imagine wherein the problem lies; like clockwork, a can of beer is presented to them, and they are free to consume it as rapidly as they please, under the careful supervision of absolutely no one.

Think back to when I had you imagine how many cans of beer you could remove from a case in 30 seconds. This process is about as rinse-and-repeat as it gets, students can come back for another drink and be gratified faster than they can even feel the effects of the alcohol they are consuming, and far before these effects become apparent to whoever is serving them, if that person even exists in their given setting.

Now, think about how much that process would be slowed down if beers were poured individually from a keg. You might now be starting to change your opinion on kegs as the Devil’s favorite beverage source, and I wouldn’t blame you. When the facts are laid out, kegs — the same kegs that have long been denounced by college administrators as enormous liabilities — start to look more like safety devices than safety hazards, don’t they? Seriously, the goal in mind is to increase safety by decreasing the rate of consumption. Cans do nothing to help this cause, while kegs quite literally have built-in mechanisms to slow the rate at which alcohol can be consumed, and yet they’re still banned? Riddle me that.

If you’re a college administrator, you might still be inclined, however, to make the argument that kegs are still communal sources of alcohol. You may still be thinking that, because of that fact, my argument is completely useless. After all, we all know that communal sources pose the opportunity for the malicious drugging of mass-quantities of alcohol to be served to unsuspecting victims. If that is now the platform on which you continue to justify this imprudent and outdated policy, I invite you to go to a place where beer is sold and examine a keg. For that matter, even a cursory Google image search will do the trick. One look and it becomes immediately apparent that kegs are pretty damn hard to tamper with. Is that risk still there? Could someone who really knows their way around a keg find a way to tamper with it? Sure. But would it be far easier for a would-be wrongdoer to surreptitiously slip some incapacitating substance into the hole atop their chosen target’s can of beer? I’d say so. Thus, I consider the ‘communal source’ argument for maintaining the keg ban to be irrelevant, if not just plain dumb.