Notes From The Desk Greening the Campus

Author: Tess Russell

Here at Middlebury, there is a discrepancy between the treatment of underage alcohol violations and marijuana use by students of all ages that I find to be somewhat out of touch. My intention here is not to advocate drug legalization, so I'm not going to expound on the reasons why marijuana is less damaging to the individual and to society than alcohol, though I personally feel that there is a great deal of validity to those arguments.

Despite what many recent, polemical critiques of the social scene on campus (some of them printed on this very same Opinions page) would have you believe, Middlebury is still, on the whole, a pretty fun place. President Liebowitz' Baccalaureate Address to last spring's graduating seniors, though decidedly ill-received by its audience, was not totally off the mark. For better or worse, we do embrace a "work hard, play hard" philosophy here.

Playing hard, of course, necessitates a certain amount of rule-breaking. The College Standards section of the student handbook maintains that "a balance of individual growth and community health guides the College's approach to ... student alcohol consumption, and the use or possession of regulated drugs." It sounds fair and, for the most part, it is. I would argue that Middlebury's disciplinary measures are, in fact, even more forgiving than those of most other schools - more in the spirit of fostering "individual growth," if you will. Let the record state that I am lauding this mentality and not in any way suggesting that the College adopt a more stringent one.

College policy is very much guided by town, state and federal laws, but universities can exercise some discretion in determining their response to the abuse of those laws. The citation policy is a good example of this - if a first-time-offending underage student were caught by the Town Police with an open container outside of Public Safety's jurisdiction, the consequences would undoubtedly be more severe than the "informal warning" issued under the citation system.

According to the handbook, a first offense for marijuana usage results in an "official reprimand." (If you have not had the misfortune of reading one of these letters, they are harshly worded and clearly intended to suggest that your actions could have resulted in a much more serious penalty.) By comparison, it is not until a third alcohol citation is issued that College discipline becomes a matter of official record. Seeing as one intention of the College is indeed to teach students to "grow" - to make mature decisions - why are they getting multiple chances to do that in one instance of illegality and essentially zero chances in another? And as far as "community health" is concerned, I wonder how many students visit the Health Center each year because they're so high that they are as physically sick and incapable of caring for themselves as compared to students who are really, really drunk.

If the College's concern is that a more lenient attitude towards pot smoking will open the floodgates - that "Pandora can't go back into the box, he only comes out," to quote the benevolent weed dealer Saul Silver brilliantly portrayed by James Franco in this summer's hit stoner comedy Pineapple Express - then the administration is even further removed from the workings of campus life than I would imagine. (Suffice it to say that this college is already, ahem, "green" in more ways than one.) To the extent that there are fewer logged records of marijuana violations than underage drinking offenses, it probably has more to with the relative degrees of visibility of the two activities in question. A rowdy, booze-fueled party in a freshman suite strewn with empties and contraband Beirut tables will undoubtedly attract more attention than a mellow sesh taking place in one of Middlebury's many open fields or, with the aid of smell-reducing fans, even in a dorm.

What I propose is that the Deans settle on a marijuana possession system that mirrors the citation system, so that all illegal offenses are judged by the same standards. (Within reason - obviously, the rare cases in which students are apprehended with "harder" drugs or with quantities of marijuana indicating intent to sell should be dealt with differently.) Because, yes, smoking pot is illegal. But so is underage drinking. You can make your own conclusions about which is the greater problem, but I think we can all accept that neither is out of the ordinary at Middlebury and that both are, to some extent, things that most of us experiment with or, at the very least, encounter during our college careers.