When Chicken Sandwiches Beat Booze On Campus

Late one weekend night six or seven years ago, local police rushed to the Saint Michael’s College campus in Vermont to check out a report of a large gathering. They started breaking up the party but found that, to everyone’s surprise, the source of ruckus was not a keg stand or game of beer pong, but a table of immensely popular chicken patty sandwiches.
The mix-up bode well for officials at the Vermont liberal arts college, who’d cooked up the weekend barbecue idea as a way to minimize alcohol-related incidents and keep an eye on students who may have had too much to drink. On any given Friday or Saturday night, one-third to nearly half of the college’s 2,000 students show up during prime partying hours to hang out with campus staff and fill up on alcohol-absorbing hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken sandwiches. (Yes, they have veggie burgers as well. "In Vermont, you kind of have to," Saint Michael’s President John Neuhauser says.)

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