A recent objective of the administration has been to change the university's culture surrounding alcohol and other substance usage. Basically, the university would like to change the school’s reputation as a huge party school.
This initiative was kick-started back in 2011 when the school announced its new policy concerning sanctions for on-campus underage alcohol consumption, changing the punishment for a first-time offense from a slap on the wrist to required alcohol education programs known as Choices About Alcohol and BASICS, that would be paid for by the student. This change was then further implemented in 2013 when new Chancellor Rebecca Blank instituted a new policy restricting the ways in which alcohol could be served on campus.
However, despite these as well as numerous other changes, our university was still ranked by Playboy, of all sources, as the number two party school in the nation. This is backed up by the university's consistently high ranking in the Princeton Review in categories such as “Party Schools”, “Lots of Hard Liquor”, “Lots of Beer”, and “Reefer Madness” (the only other schools to appear in all four categories are Syracuse University, and University of California-Santa Barbara). These results starkly contrast the goal of the university as well as beg the question of what exactly has been going wrong.
While most fault definitely lies on the student body for refusing to adhere to both university and state laws regarding alcohol, and dismissing the program AlcoholEDU as a tedious, meaningless task, it is unfair and inaccurate to rest the blame solely on the shoulders of the students. Some of the blame needs to be directed at the university's, as well as the police’s, failure to create an environment of fun surrounding not consuming alcohol rather than one of fear surrounding consuming it.
For example, the 2011 policy enacted by the university that steepened punishments for first-time offenses has undoubtedly been effective in preventing second-time offenses. One must wonder whether it is the mandated classes or the fear of paying for them again that is truly making an impact.
Another example is the patrols for illicit behavior that resident advisers make every weekend in residence halls. These patrols do not encourage students to stop drinking but instead create paranoia that forces the residents to always have the door closed and essentially hide if they choose to drink. This fear is then perpetuated by police behavior such as tweeting game day stats of how many arrests or detox trips occurred during home games. Those tweets do not make the police appear as a friendly group concerned for our safety but rather as a group of bounty-hunters out to get us.
This joint effort by the university and the police to change the culture of UW-Madison has been done by mostly attempting to scare students straight and ultimately has failed as students still choose to consume alcohol in numbers large enough for Playboy to take notice. Clearly, a different approach is in order.
Rather than putting so much effort into discouraging students from drinking alcohol, the university should work on improving its alternatives to alcohol instead. For example, when I walked with my group of friends to the Night at the Overture, the marquee event for the university's non-substance programming, we could barely get by the scores of our peers walking down State Street telling us the event was a flop and it was not worth going into. If the university had made a better effort that night, then many students probably would have decided to not consume alcohol at all that night. While improving non-substance events such as the Night at the Overture is a big thing that the university should work on, there are many small changes it could make as well to change the party school culture here.
For example, at the end of AlcoholEDU, there is a box that students can check if they want to receive information regarding non-substance events. If the school actually wants to change the culture surrounding alcohol, then why not just e-mail this information to students to begin with? Also, by labeling these events as “non-substance” the school is already implying that having alcohol is the norm to begin with, essentially conceding to the very party culture that they are trying to fight. Maybe this is the school’s biggest flaw concerning its approach regarding alcohol or other substance use. The university does not believe that it can actually defeat it, so rather than focusing their effort on eliminating it, they instead focus on restraining it through fear.
Do you believe that the university’s approach toward underage alcohol usage is appropriate? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
