More Matter Ban the hard stuff

Author: Matty Van Meter

I walked into my dorm one Saturday morning and found a series of progressively filthier messes in the lounge, hall and bathroom which I will refrain from describing; suffice it to say that few bodily fluids were unrepresented. The mess stayed, of course, until early Monday morning, when our custodian pulled on her rubber gloves and scrubbed away what the soundly sleeping students had left over forty-eight hours before. She simply smiled and said "Good morning" to me in the hall as I passed, and I felt a pointed urge to apologize. While volumes could be written on the mindset that allows students to step over their own excretes for two days, waiting for someone else to scrub them up, what I really want to address is the much-maligned alcohol policy at Middlebury.

Much has been said about the changing social policies at the college. Putting aside the bellyaching over a perceived lack of parties, there is something to the substantial complaints about such controversial policies as the guest list and the need for a TIPS-trained organizer. Any college administration must play the fine line between interests here: to allow students too much freedom is to endanger both their lives and college property, and to restrict them too tightly is to invite surreptitious and uncontrolled drinking. Students, by choosing the easier route of partying off-campus, have a new set of concerns to deal with apart from the alcohol itself: drunk driving, lack of the on-campus support network and Health Center, police intervention and being far from dorms. The TIPS training requirement, the guest lists, indeed any policy which makes it harder for students to find what they want on campus will send them away and into a situation over which the college has no control.

There are few role models for colleges wishing to go beyond simplistic alcohol policies like Middlebury's, but they do exist. One is Earlham College, which bans outright the on-campus sale, possession or consumption of all alcohol by anyone, regardless of age. In equal but opposite egalitarian spirit Haverford College declares itself to be "cognizant of the Pennsylvania state law against underage drinking," but does not restrict on-campus consumption, instead making students responsible before the Honor Code Committee for their peers' behavior. While either of these may be extreme for Middlebury, there was an idea for a policy, which incorporates both, and strikes the balance.

There was discussion last semester of a proposal to ban the possession and consumption of all hard liquor on campus, which was met with fiery resistance by students, according to a Campus poll. At the risk of flying in the face of the great majority of students, let me make a recommendation for the policy: the students who become uncontrollably drunk, damage college property or go to the hospital are not generally drinking beer or wine. The simple truth is that of-age students, most of whom live in suites which public safety cannot enter, would be able to drink liquor in the privacy of their rooms, and underclassmen could drink beer and wine without fear of citation. Such a policy would also, presumably, be accompanied by a loosening of restrictions for such dangerous policies as guest lists and the TIPS training requirement, which drive students off campus, away from the care of the community, and into the jurisdiction of the police. Whatever the Beastie Boys might say, partying is a privilege, not a right, and one which the college has a need to supervise both for its own good and for the good of the students in his community. Correctly implemented, the liquor ban could be an effective way both to increase the safety and cleanliness of the college, and to revive a declining social scene, by decreasing regulations placed upon on-campus parties. And maybe the custodial staff could have a more enjoyable Monday morning.