I'm cringing at your comment. If you'd paid attention to the literary analysis, you'd realize that the author's point is a lot more nuanced than something as o

I'm cringing at your comment. If you'd paid attention to the literary analysis, you'd realize that the author's point is a lot more nuanced than something as obvious and basic as "teach responsibility, not abstinence". Any college with a non-religious/ideological bent already teaches "responsible drinking" and has done so for decades. But as the author notes, it's a lesson that's taught outside of the context of classrooms and professors, and is instead usually relegated to a cheesy hour-long seminar and accompanying workshop at the beginning of the fall semester. What colleges fail to do, in the author's eyes, is address the deeper questions about intoxication. He's not talking about teaching freshmen to "never let a stranger pour your drink", or "limit yourself to one drink per hour", he's talking about teaching students to think about what it means to be intoxicated, why we do it, what we're seeking from it, and how it affects us. Liberal arts curriculums ask students to ponder these questions in the context of socioeconomic structures, race, politics, religion, art, literature, and history, but not intoxication. The reason the author digs into the symbolism and themes in The Bacchae isn't so he can have a pretentious backdrop in arguing for a realistic approach to college drinking; it's to show us what it looks like when someone really tries to stop and think about humanity's relationship with intoxication.