We have been haunted by the smiling, pretty face of Beth A. Speidel, a 19-year-old Miami University student who was struck and killed by a train in April 2007 after an evening of drinking to excess.

Speidel's blood alcohol level was double the legal limit when she was hit while walking across a railroad crossing in Oxford. Police said Speidel had visited two bars and also had drinks in an off-campus apartment before wandering to the South Locust Street rail crossing sometime after 1 a.m. A southbound CSX train hauling 53 freight cars and going 35 mph hit the girl, but the train operator did not realize it and continued to Hamilton. A northbound Amtrak train operator noticed the body at around 3 a.m. and contacted authorities.

Speidel, from Strongsville, Ohio, was a speech pathology major.

The death of a young person always evokes feelings of promise lost, potential unrealized. But in this case, the cause was so senseless, so horrible, so ignoble. And so avoidable.

In April 2005, three Miami University students died in an early-morning off-campus fire at a two-story brick student rental house in Oxford. The coroner ruled that all three — Stephen J. Smith, a senior marketing major from Bethesda, Md.; Kathryn (Kate) Welling, a junior business major from Bronxville, N.Y.; and Julia Turnbull, a senior mass communication major from Milford, Ohio — were heavily intoxicated. A night of drinking to excess had slowed their reaction time and they did not escape.

A cigarette started the blaze.

There have been less severe instances of students assaulted, robbed, and passed out after binge drinking. And the problem certainly is not isolated to the university in our backyard. Binge drinking by college students is a nationwide problem.

To Miami's credit, school officials have been proactive and comprehensive in combatting the problem. But we feared that drinking at college was so accepted and expected by young people — stretching all the way back to "Animal House" and beyond — that official pronouncements and hand-wringing would fall on deaf ears.

Then Miami professors came to us with a proposal. They would bring their best and brightest journalism students to our newsrooms and they would work with us on a variety of stories. They received "real world" experience and we received stories written from a younger perspective.

We thought this arrangement provided the perfect vehicle to examine binge drinking on campus from a student perspective. Peers talked to peers to ask why. Today's paper bears the fruits of their labor.

We hope they learned from the experience; we certainly did.

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