Have you ever been stranded in Downtown Binghamton on the weekends, forced to somehow travel the four miles back to campus at 3 a.m.? Have you ever had to pay money to take a taxi because the bus line was too long? Or have you gotten lost Downtown late at night?

All of those problems could be solved for students living on campus if Binghamton University brought back the on-campus pub.

If you didn’t already know, BU used to have a pub on campus until it was closed in May 1998 due to changing attitudes about drinking and the rise of the legal drinking age from 18 to 21. It first opened in 1970, in what is now the package post office in the basement of the University Union. It was where students, and even some faculty members, hung out on campus. Many clubs and organizations would host events there on the weekends. It was a fully stocked bar, along with serving the same greasy food that you can get today at Nite Owl in the dining halls.

Bringing back the pub doesn’t mean bringing back the alcohol; that would be too much of a liability and a public relations nightmare for BU. I can almost picture President Donald Trump’s response: “University is giving underage students alcohol. No longer Premier Public Ivy of the Northeast! SAD!”

Instead, students could pregame and then go to the pub. It could be more of a club where students would dance and socialize, but in a safer setting. Our campus doesn’t really have a spot for that on the weekends, which may put some intoxicated students in tricky situations Downtown.

Navigating Downtown during the day is difficult enough; trying to find your way around while under the influence is nearly impossible. The worry of trying to find a cab, Uber or bus to get home would be alleviated if you only had to walk five minutes back to your dorm room.

All too often, I see Facebook posts on Saturday and Sunday mornings saying, “Lost my phone/jacket/keys at the Rat/JT’s/fraternity house, please help.” If a student left something at the pub on campus, retrieving the lost item would be much easier.

Assuming students would stay at the club until 1 or 2 a.m., there would be fewer incidents of drunk driving since the need to head Downtown would be eliminated. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 1,825 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor-vehicle crashes, each year. Too many BU students have died in off-campus incidents in recent years. If we had a club, it would eliminate the need to leave the safety of campus.

The binge-drinking atmosphere of college campuses is a cultural problem, not an administrative one. Commercials for beer and liquor brainwash us into thinking alcohol consumption is a carefree activity that happens all the time, without consequences. There is not an easy solution, as the Prohibition era pointed out — restricting access to alcohol only makes the sale of it more lucrative and the use of it more dangerous.

Students across the country will drink alcohol in college, just like their parents did. That will never change. The primary job of the University is to keep students as safe as possible. To enforce a dry-campus policy would require hundreds of police officers, money to pay them and time — all things the school doesn’t have unlimited access to. The only feasible option is to create a safer environment than Downtown where students can be social and have fun.

Nicholas Walker is a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering.