The Wooster Voice staff shares our view on the Party Monitor Policy’s effect on drinking
A recurring topic of this semester has been the attempted introduction of party-space-limiting rules and the continued enforcement of vague and unclear party monitor policies. The reason for these policies is reportedly to put a stop to, or at least limit, irresponsible drinking behaviors. While most of the criticism of these policies has been focused on their ambiguity and the consequent difficulty with respect to enforcement, less has addressed the systemic ways in which the policy fails to encourage responsible drinking. Both through the behaviors it actually encourages and the ways it goes about encouraging them, the Party Monitor Policy is unsuccessful when it comes to encouraging responsible, intelligent drinking.
The first concern is what behaviors the policy actually encourages. Some attention has been given to this in conversation surrounding the party monitor policies. It is the concern of some that binge drinking in rooms (and the consequent risk of sexual assault) has increased because of the limitations on where parties can occur and increased stringency with respect to who is allowed inside. There is some anecdotal evidence behind this statement; various Greek leaders have reported an uptick in younger students (particularly first years) showing up to parties already incredibly drunk. If this is true, and if it resulted from the Party Monitor Policy, then it would undoubtedly be the case that the policy was having an inimical effect on student life.
This claim has been hotly contested, though. Some, including members of the administration, have argued that drinking always occurred in rooms. Implicit in this claim is the idea that the practice of doing so has not increased substantially since the implementation of the policy. This is often joined by the claim that the number of alcohol-related incidents has decreased since the policy was put into place. (It is questionable, though, whether there is an actual causal relationship between the implementation of the policy and the decrease in drinking incidents. Some of the decrease could be related to confusion about where individuals are able to host parties and other similar ambiguities in the policies.) If true, this would seem to be a mark in favor of the Party Monitor Policy. It is a powerful response to the claim that the policy encourages bad behaviors.
However, this is not the only concern with the way that the policy does or does not encourage responsible drinking. For responsibility to be the byproduct of a policy like the Party Monitor Policy, there must be agency given in both a broader and more limited sense than the current policy allows. For example, the current policy requires that alcohol be served by a third party and that it come only in the form of beer. While the first makes sense — it is a policy that makes sure students know what they are drinking, which has not always been the case — the second is unnecessarily restrictive. If the aim is to encourage responsible drinking, why not allow students a choice in what to drink? It is far from the case that the only responsible drinking comes in the form of beer drinking. Instead of limiting the permissible drinks to “certified” beer, why not allow the introduction of other drinks, including possibly supervised drink mixing. If the concern is that mixed drinks can have dangerous ingredients, then the restrictions should be designed to solve that problem alone. They currently and unnecessarily do far more.
Finally, there is no focus in the current policy on how much the students have actually had to drink or what their levels of inebriation are. Any policy actually concerned with responsible drinking will be more concerned with monitoring the actual students and not the process of providing them with drinks. In its current form, the Party Monitor Policy only does the second. True development of responsibility with respect to drinking requires the first. This is the type of individual development that the ethos of Wooster requires.
The administration and Campus Council are implementing policies that they claim encourage responsible drinking. The term “responsible” is both a deeper and narrower term than the definition they are using. They use it as synonymous with “not unsafe,” but responsibility is so much more than that, and if Wooster wants to encourage us students to be responsible, their policies need to change. Anything else falls short of the liberal arts promise by failing to develop engaged, critical, thoughtful and principled students.