Later that day, authorities determined she had stumbled out of a bar the night before, wandered alone to an isolated area, passed out and died of hypothermia. Her blood-alcohol level was 0.21, nearly three times the legal limit for driving, according to preliminary autopsy results.
"It breaks your heart," Gow said Friday. "It is the most challenging and painful part of what a chancellor does."
University leaders across Wisconsin know too well the cost of excessive drinking. Every time a special event or holiday rolls around that inspires binge drinking, chancellors go to bed at night, hoping the phone won't ring. It doesn't take an excuse like St. Patrick's Day for someone to drink too much, make a poor choice and pay dearly. But this weekend is among the riskiest, with pitchers of cheap green beer flowing freely at bars and kegs of beer fueling house parties near college and university campuses across Wisconsin.
"We're up against some powerful socialization forces, and young people have their own peer norms," Gow said.
A report this week estimated the economic costs of excessive drinking in Wisconsin at $6.8 billion, including premature death, lost worker productivity, health care costs, criminal justice system costs and motor vehicle crashes. Public health advocates are using the report to advocate for higher taxes on beer, sobriety checkpoints and making sure the 21 legal drinking age is uniformly enforced in establishments.
But state beer taxes likely won't go up, and other suggested measures face hurdles of their own, in part because the state's drinking culture is so entrenched.
Chancellors agree education is a big part of preventing students from drinking too much, too fast and from venturing off alone when they are drunk.
In La Crosse, students have an extensive buddy system - volunteers who patrol the banks of the Mississippi after bars close on weekends and turn away drunks stumbling toward the water, which has claimed several lives in the past decade.
After a UW-Stout student was hit and killed in an alcohol-related traffic accident three years ago in Menomonie, Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen ordered more Friday classes to curb Thursday night drinking. Now, 35% of all classes meet on Fridays.
Freshmen are required to do an online alcohol self-assessment and are taught to look out for each other when they're drinking.
UW-Stout also started expelling students for infractions resulting from high-risk drinking off-campus, not just on university grounds. Sorenson said Friday that's led to a significant decline in house parties. Two students were expelled last spring.
"Education and tough love," Sorenson said. "We kick kids out of school, and that sends a strong message."
He tried to persuade area bar owners to ban Thursday night drink specials. But that hasn't happened.
Chancellors understand the culture that students grow up in. "The state is a horribly hard drinking state," Sorenson said.
Gow agrees it's an uphill battle.
"Ninety-five percent of the time we have some tragic or terrible thing happen to a student, it begins with excessive drinking," the UW-La Crosse chancellor said. "Not just horrible deaths, but sexual assaults, fights, vandalism . . . I'm 52, and I would say it's always been that way."
"But there's a subculture on campuses today. Not only do they not know responsible drinking, but they want to engage in irresponsible drinking and take it way too far. You'd imagine the lesson gets learned; a little bit of alcohol is not a bad thing. But they play drinking games and chug bottles of whiskey."
Change in culture
American college campuses didn't always have a culture in which heavy drinking was so pervasive, said Dwight Heath, a Brown University anthropology professor emeritus. Heath has studied drinking cultures around the world for more than 50 years. He worked at UW-Madison in 1963 and remembers the drinking culture then as pleasant and sociable.
"I've seen college drinking change from pleasant and sociable to binge drinking with fights and people throwing furniture out windows, falling down stairs and drowning in their own vomit," he said.
Having said that, Heath thinks alcohol also gets a bad rap, and he questions reports that attempt to put a price tag on lost worker productivity and premature death linked to drinking.
He suggests taking the "forbidden fruit" attraction away from alcohol and teaching young people how to drink alcohol without getting sick or doing stupid things.
"There's this assumption you know how to drink at a certain age with no experience or training," Heath said. "You're supposed to be able to drink safely and with impunity. In other cultures, kids learn at a young age to drink at home with meals - slowly - and it's no big deal. It doesn't make you sexy or strong or special. You learn that drinking too fast is likely to make you drunk and act in stupid and dangerous ways."
Heath also begs to differ with the definition of binge drinking - five or more drinks for men and four or more for women on a single occasion. Drinking this number of drinks over the course of an entire evening, with food, is not binging; slugging them back within three hours may be, Heath says.
"It's not the sheer quantity that makes for problems," Heath says. "If you drink too fast, you're likely to have impaired physical and mental condition."
No new taxes
Raising taxes on beer isn't the answer, especially when it comes to guiding young people, according to Heath.
The beer industry, not surprisingly, agrees.
Among the leading opponents of higher beer taxes is MillerCoors LLC - the nation's second-largest brewer that is based in Chicago with operations in Milwaukee.
"Beer is already one of the most highly taxed consumer products sold in Wisconsin and the reality is that taxation does not impact behavior," Jonathan Stern, MillerCoors director of media relations, said in a statement.
"In addition to taxes and fees, MillerCoors invests heavily in the state and in partnership with communities to prevent drunk driving and offer programs to promote responsible consumption," he said.
Those programs include Miller Lite Free Rides to prevent drunken driving on major holidays, including St Patrick's Day, through the Milwaukee County Transit System.
High-volume brewers aren't the only opponents of raising the beer tax.
While customers of higher-end craft beers tend to be less price-sensitive, craft brewers Deb Carey, president of New Glarus Brewing Co., and Russ Klisch, president of Lakefront Brewery Inc., said they fear higher taxes would still hurt sales.
"Any time you add price to a cost of a good, people are going to buy it less," Klisch said.
Carey said craft brewers help combat binge drinking by focusing on pairing different styles of beer, such as pale ales and stouts, with different foods. "We really are talking about quality," she said.
On Friday, Sen. Fred Risser (D-Madison) said he is drafting a bill to raise the beer tax to at least $4 a barrel and maybe higher.
The beer tax was last raised - from $1 to $2 a barrel - in 1969.
Risser, 85, acknowledged his bill will face opposition from both parties.
"There is opposition to it, there's no question," he said. "There just seems to be a culture supporting beer."
Craft brewer Carey thinks some headway can be made by restricting tavern promotions that encourage binge drinking and cracking down on house parties in college towns.
Carey, who's 53, noted that attitudes have changed about smoking, and she thinks the same can happen with excessive drinking.
"It's not cool to be out of control. Puking is not cool," she said.
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