Getting drunk is a central part of the college experience for many students. It has been for a very long time, and despite the best efforts of administrators, police and parents, it likely will be for the foreseeable future.
Our goal, then, should be to mitigate the negative effects of binge drinking rather than outlaw its practice altogether, although it should be discouraged wherever possible. Undesirable products of the status quo include sexual assault, bullying and alcohol poisoning. These could be alleviated in part by a revised, even-handed approach to the enforcement of alcohol laws.
Student Affairs’ efforts to confront the worst of binge drinking must begin with a thorough examination of the power dynamics at play — who provides alcohol, who receives it and who controls the places where it is most easily accessed.
By and large, and especially in the case of freshmen, fraternity houses remain the cheapest and most reliable places to drink with the lowest risk of legal consequence. In many cases, they provide direction to new students who haven’t yet found other places to party or means of procuring alcohol. In the unlikely event that police are summoned to a fraternity party, citations are rare.
This, in itself, is not damaging, but the fact that such leniency is provided only to a single set of institutions provides those institutions with undue power as gatekeepers for alcohol, which will always be in high demand.
The danger implicit in this arrangement is inherent to fraternities’ place in the landscape of alcohol enforcement rather than to fraternities themselves.
Administrators must acknowledge that no single policy will cull students’ collective desire to drink, which has proven over time to be especially adept at finding an outlet. New approaches should aim to channel this desire into safer spaces where students have more control of their bodies and their drinks.
Expanding alcohol’s availability would be politically unpopular, but allowing students who choose to drink to do so on their own terms is a far safer alternative to any situation in which a distinct subgroup of students is arbitrarily given such significant leverage over another.
Such leverage has the potential to increase the likelihood of unwanted sexual advances made out of the assumption that the provision of free alcohol requires reciprocation in one form or another.
