Moving forward as a college community, I think we all need to focus on encouraging people to make good decisions about alcohol. We need to encourage people to have a beer over the course of an hour at a party instead of taking 14 shots in their dorm room before hand. In my opinion, the way to do this ease restrictions on beer at parties. I don’t believe that if someone is casually sipping a beer at a party, or if someone is serving beer at a party, they should be punished. These people are making smart decisions about alcohol. Beer is much safer than hard alcohol and those individuals who limit themselves to just beer are keeping themselves out of the hospital and more under control.

Everyone should recognize that drinking will always be a part of college culture. It is not a part of everyone’s college experience, but each individual has their choice to participate in that aspect of college culture if they want to. Instead of trying to eradicate drinking, which has proved time and time again to only make the problem worse, we need to encourage smart drinking. Will it come with mistakes and will there be bumps along the road? Yes; but every good change needs time to settle in. The actions we take now are not going to change Middlebury for us, but hopefully we can change Middlebury into a place that is open about drinking and where smart decisions are made about drinking for future students.

The basic function of the citation system as I understand it is more for monitoring those whose drinking or behavior appears to be problematic rather than discipline people for individual instances in which they are in possession of alcohol, a concern that would still be addressed with an amnesty rule. Amnesty would also allow for more consistent reporting of dangerous drinking, creating information to identity specific problem areas or behaviors that lead to the problem. There will be no panacea policies, but data collection will certainly inform future decisions and should be weighed heavily when considering options to reform the current policy.

In large gatherings (say at a social house or an interest house), it is not only impractical but probably impossible to determine who in the room is of age and who isn’t, and thus it is clearly protocol to not go through the room demanding proof that everybody is of age. The primary reasoning for this is prioritization of officers towards something that better advances safety, even at the cost of catching each and every underage drinker. Necessarily, the alcohol policy must balance these two ends: safety and accordance with law.

One way to do this is to prioritize security in entry and exit of parties to assure that spaces do not become overcrowded, forcing everybody out of that space due to safety concerns and shunting large groups to other party spaces, thereby increasing the chances of other locations being shut down. This is the cycle that repeats itself every weekend, and can be mitigated simply by prioritizing preventative measures to parties getting shut down: security and entrance monitoring, rather than patroling freshman and sophmore dorms. By keeping parties going, fewer officers can actually monitor more people because they are in higher concentrations in fewer locations for the bulk of the night. This point is especially important in locations that are even bigger, such as the Bunker.

Something that specifically shocked me: my FYC, right after giving us freshmen a lecture on safe drinking and such, invited us all to do shots at a party at KDR that night, as some kind of hall-bonding activity!

In conclusion, I would recommend seriously looking into how the topic of alcohol is dealt with at orientation.

First, I think we had a really positive experience with Public Safety in our parties. In one in particular, they came through at 11 said we were too crowded and they let us thin out the crowd. Instead of flashing the lights and causing a stampede for the door, we got people who we didn’t know to leave peacefully, and within an hour we were back up to a roaring dance party. That continued until about 1:45 when Public Safety came back and said it was loud and that it was time to shut down, so we did. I think the system worked great. PSafe gave us (the people in the suite) the responsibility of controlling the party, and we did to a very reasonable degree. If PSafe had thrown on the lights and tossed everyone out of the suite it would have killed the party, instead people went outside for half an hour, came back and resumed dancing the night away.

Second, I was wondering what the current state of the keg debate is on campus. They are comparably priced to the equivalent amount of cans, they don’t create the all the waste from cans, and they flow out beer at a slow rate. I remember the second party we threw this year, we didn’t buy a keg because we were afraid PSafe might find it (they didn’t during the first party) and fine us. That beer literally evaporated within a half hour. Drunk people have no problem shoving their pockets full of other people’s beer and leaving to go some place else. Kegs create a social center at a party and can only pour out beer so fast. It seems to me like they should be allowed in senior housing to enable less intoxicated, more environmentally-friendly, and more social parties. Who has the counter argument for me because I haven’t been able to come up with anything too convincing for why kegs cause more harm than good.

People can take responsibility for their own parties when PSafe allows them to, and kegs seem like a good way to keep parties social and alcohol consumption semi-controlled.