Senate endorses steps to curb alcohol abuse

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

he designation of an alcohol-free residence hall for first-year students and several other steps aimed at curbing alcohol abuse on campus were approved Dec. 5 by the Faculty Senate.

     The vote came after the Chancellor's Task Force on the Prevention of Alcohol Abuse presented its report to the Faculty Senate.

     The report also calls for the chancellor to continue the task force; the rescinding of the designation of Greek residences as campus-approved housing for traditional-aged first-year students; the review and editing of existing alcohol policies to ensure that they are concise, clear, and effectively implemented; and an evaluation of the effectiveness of student enforcement of laws prohibiting underage alcohol use in residence halls. The senate voted to endorse all five recommendations.

     "This university is no different than the rest of the universities and colleges across the nation," said interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Jo-Anne Vanin, co-chair of the task force. "This is a public health problem; it is a university problem; it is our societal problem."

     Approximately 1,400 students between the ages of 18 and 24 die annually from alcohol-related injuries, and an additional 500,000 sustain such injuries, according to the report.

     "Additionally, there are tens of thousands of instances of rape and assault, unsafe sex, attempted suicide, academic underachievement, drunk driving and vandalism that result from alcohol abuse," the report notes.

     Vanin said rescinding traditional-age students' option to live in Greek housing during their second semester will help to ensure that the University provides a coherent first-year experience, including residence-hall programming.

     "I do believe that this campus, though, for many, many years has had superb programs of intervention, superb programs of counseling, support and education," Vanin said. "But this is ... an ever-changing target ... Our population changes each year by one-quarter. That's a whole new host of young folks coming in with their norms and their values and their perspectives on substances.

     "And that population over the last 10 years or so has changed dramatically. We have young folks coming to us now that have been in rehab already. We have young folks coming to us now who ask for substance-free facilities because they need to be in a safe environment. It's not the college environment of 10 or 15 years ago."

     Vanin said that designating one of the smaller residence halls, which would hold 130-140 students, as an alcohol-free environment would maximize the chances of filling it next fall.

     "It will have more, though, than just the designation of substance-free," she said. "There will be the appropriate kind of programming and life skills involvement going on so that it becomes ... a very positive living, learning environment."

     Vanin said that Student Affairs will need to study the effectiveness of undergraduate residence assistants in preventing alcohol from finding its way to underage students in the residence halls.

     "I think the students who are being put in that situation to try to stop their peers from bringing alcohol in do not have the capacity or the leverage to be able to stop that," said Robert Sinclair, professor of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies and the task force's other co-chair. "We're hoping that through this [recommended] evaluation, we'll be able to...clarify if, indeed, our hunch is correct. Our hunch may be wrong: maybe they are doing a good job, but we think it's very hard for them to do this kind of monitoring of their own peers.

     "Our committee believes that the greater insight you have to a problem, the more likely you are to create a meaningful solution."

     Sinclair said that opening up student alcohol abuse for investigation and discussion might make the University more vulnerable to off-campus attention to the problem, but "it seems to us that unless we face squarely the fact that we have a problem, we will not be able to solve it."

     Alcohol abuse has grown into the campus culture for too long without "a deliberate effort to be able to address it in an open ... fashion in which we ... anchor ... our recommendations in the kind of data and understanding of the problem that's necessary," he said.

     Vanin said most off-campus alcohol-related problems are beyond the campus's legal control, and the task-force's recommendations center on what can be done with the on-campus living environment.

     "The coming year will be an important one in terms of our continuing to connect with our students," Vanin said. "The challenge we face is understanding what they understand. The perceptions that we may have about alcohol, the perceptions we may have about its appropriate role, are not necessarily the perceptions that our students have. The challenge is to understand their perceptions and match those with programs, services and activities that will foster the kind of community we want."

     "We're trying to have the kind of report that doesn't sit on the shelf, gathering dust," Sinclair said. "It's taken a long time to get where we are in terms of the culture of alcohol abuse on campus, and it's going to take a long time to be able to change it."