A "social-norms" campaign targeting drinking among University of Mississippi students will be funded with a new $300,000 grant from brewer Anheuser-Busch, the Associated Press reported March 12.

Jeff Hallam, director of the Ole Miss Center for Health Promotion, said that the campaign will try to dispel the notion that most students on the school's Oxford campus are heavy drinkers. "Most universities could not operate if all of their students went out and drank on Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays," Hallam said. "It is actually a small percentage of students -- creating the impression that everyone is binge drinking."

Robert Khayat, the school's chancellor, said that, "Given the success the social-norms approach has shown in educating and empowering students to make responsible decisions about drinking, we believe it is an important component to any comprehensive education program."

But J. Edward Hill, M.D., a Tupelo-based physician and past president of the American Medical Association, called the school's partnership with the alcohol industry "extremely disappointing." Hill said that the alcohol industry likes social-norms campaigns because they boost their market share, and that the money should have gone to mandatory alcohol education programs for incoming freshmen or other proven programs.