Alcohol policy to change

Author: Hilary Hall

On Jan. 13, Dean of Wonnacott Commons Matt Longman and Director of Health and Wellness Education Jyoti Daniere presented new ideas and initiatives about the College's alcohol policy to the Community Council. Longman and Daniere are both members of the Alcohol Policy Review Committee, a group of faculty and staff members that recently completed its report for the fall semester. The report not only presents a different focus on college students and alcohol as a whole, but also suggests changes to the College's citation system and other drinking-related rules.

Daniere cites articles by Aaron Brower of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the biggest influence on the Committee's proposed initiatives. Brower, who is Vice Provost at the University of Wisconsin - which Playboy Magazine named the country's top party school in 2006 - has been immensely successful in changing the school's social community.

According to Daniere, the report essentially stated that most college students are not alcoholics from a psychiatric point of view, but that they do abuse alcohol and that alcohol has negative effects which colleges should monitor.

The key is that college students can stop and start drinking at will, while alcoholics cannot control themselves. Thus, according to the report, the College should use a non-traditional approach and define student drinking as a problem for the College community as a whole, as opposed to a problem for the individual.

"I think the problem is what alcohol is doing to our campus," Daniere told the Council, "but we have always treated it individually."

Using this idea as a guide, the new policy cites the following priorities: to identify students with destructive relationships to alcohol, respond more strongly and publicly to students who disrupt the community and foster a coherent environmental approach based on education and prevention. According to Daniere and Longman, the new focus of the policy will be mainly on hard alcohol consumption.

"We have been putting our emphasis on students who are not the problem," Longman said.

As a result of this shift in direction, the Committee is proposing several new initiatives. For one, Public Safety officers will begin to note students who are overly intoxicated at parties, using a "tag," or incident report, to report them to their Commons deans, who choose how to respond. This is meant to result in more students receiving counseling, and to thus increase communication between the deans and Parton Health Center. Longman likens the idea to a "Neighborhood Watch" system, but calls it a "caring and healthy" one, rather than one dedicated only to punishment.

With the tagging plan comes new citation protocol, which will greatly simplify the citation process. As the policy is now, a student must meet with his or her Commons Residential Advisor (CRA) after receiving a second citation. Both Longman and CRAs call this a waste of time, as most students who receive two citations do not have problems with alcohol and are not destructive in their behavior around alcohol.

The new protocol dictates that students will receive warning letters from their dean upon their first citation. After a second citation, they will receive a second warning letter, and their dean can choose to meet with them if deemed necessary. After a third citation, a letter will be sent home, and there will be a mandatory meeting with their dean. Additional citations will result in further disciplinary sanctions and possibly counseling, at the discretion of Commons deans. The deans will now be reviewing the entirety of students' disciplinary records - which will become increasingly more detailed - when making these decisions.

Another major component of the report is the hard alcohol policy. Hard alcohol has continually presented a problem for the College. Hard alcohol punches are already banned at every social house except for The Mill, where they must be made in front of a Public Safety officer.

"I would be 100 percent behind banning hard alcohol on this campus," said Public Safety Officer Mike Dykstra. "All of the kids who are getting really sick have been drinking it, especially girls."

Both Longman and Daniere agreed and plan to get rid of hard alcohol at College-registered parties. Kegs, they said, are a far better option, a sentiment echoed by Steve Hardin '10, president of the social house Alpha Delta Phi.

"Kegs are not only cheaper, but they slow down the rate of drinking," he observed. "It's also 140 less cans to recycle."

The Committee has yet to put its initiatives into "handbook language," and they still must be approved by members of the administration. Acting Dean of the College Gus Jordan, though, congratulated the members on an informative and constructive report. Like many social house heads and student leaders who have heard the report, he hopes that it will lead to party regulations that make it easier to have safe gatherings.

Ultimately, "it's about respect," Daniere said. "How many more students have to die on college campuses to make change?"