Dartmouth’s Empty Policy
In enacting a policy limiting the consumption of hard alcohol on campus in the name of reducing sexual assault, Dartmouth has chosen a system that is difficult to enforce and dubitable in effectuality. The school will set a precedent that allows many universities to cut corners when policing and curbing sexual assaults on campus.
Last month, Dartmouth chose to intercede in response to the Department of Education’s civil rights complaint which regarded the university’s failure to respond to the frighteningly high reports of sexual assault on campus. Dartmouth is certainly not the only school at which women’s safety is an issue, but it is now being lauded as the first university to have taken substantial action against sexual assaults on its campus.
Dartmouth stands out among other well-known colleges in that its policy encapsulates a blanket prohibition: other universities such as Brown and Swarthmore have only banned hard alcohols at events that have attracted much more media scrutiny, such as fraternities and on-campus events. Drinking culture, as at most universities, is a core part of the Dartmouth experience. “Greek life,” so to speak, is central to many fraternities and sororities. Binge-drinking has long been associated with colleges of all levels. Alcohol is seen at sports games and even more often during subsequent celebrations.
Colleges, competing with the rise of accessible information and online degrees, cannot simply sell “education.” Such a simple product is no longer enough to offset the cost of lifelong debt, four years lost and a slightly better job. The colleges of the modern world sell “the college experience”—homecoming, frat parties, and, especially for males, “hook-ups,” consensual or not. In the male market, most colleges are now simply a sacred space to let boys be boys, and that means let boys chug, let boys take shots, let boys go wild and let boys get wasted. By design or not, alcohol is one of the pillars of the college experience.
Perhaps one of the most troubling trends is the correlation between alcohol consumption and sexual assaults. Conservative estimates posit that a quarter of all women have been sexually assaulted: among female college students, this fraction rises to half. A quarter of college men report to have perpetrated a sexual assault. Of all these cases combined, half of victims report an assault by an intoxicated aggressor.
Will the new ban on hard liquor stop sexual assault? The Dartmouth administration seems to think so. It is clear that public parties will be made safer with the distribution of strict penalties to rule violators. But the implementation of the new policy will drive fraternities and sororities underground and inflame the issue rather than appease it. Drinking parties may move off-campus into rented houses and disrupt residential neighborhoods. To account for all these shifts, enforcement systems are forced to either considerably proliferate surveillance or resort to simple, insubstantial checks. Both arrangements are doomed to fail.
The new policy is too timid. Dartmouth, and other schools, must be progressive and ban alcohol outright. Alcohol is alcohol, whether hard or not—with the drinking age still set at 21 years old, the majority of undergraduates cannot legally drink any form of liquor.
To a point, Dartmouth has only passed the ban to improve its public image. The recent hike of sexual assault cases in the university had caused its application and enrollment rates to decrease. It seems as though the school has only recently approved this new policy—having ignored years of faculty plead—to maintain its public relations and its appeal towards future applicants.
Had Dartmouth been looking for true change, it would have passed a zero tolerance policy surrounding alcohol. The administration refuses to place a full ban on alcohol because it is afraid of becoming too “progressive.”
To reduce the sexual assault rates on campus, education is needed. In this sense, Dartmouth is has taken a big step forward and is making more progress than many other top-tier schools. Principal Philip Hanlon has recently released a letter to the school titled “Moving Dartmouth Forward” in which he describes courses of action that will be taken to promote a safer campus environment. One of those is a “comprehensive and mandatory four-year sexual violence prevention and education program for students, as well as a first-responder training program for faculty and staff.” The administration aims to remove ambiguity surrounding rightful and wrongful cases.
Dartmouth must either go all out or maintain its previous status quo. It must either smother all use of alcohol or preserve its current lenient system. The implementation of a ban is neither progressive nor conservative. Dartmouth's new policy is empty; it will do nothing but shove hard liquor into the blinding spotlight. ♥