On Tuesday, the College unveiled a draft of its new Alcohol Management Program, intended to replace the current out-of-touch and convoluted Social Event Management policy. With the AMP, the College has undoubtedly taken some steps in the right direction, but it has also made some blunders and left many questions unanswered.
AMP will make it easier for organizations to use kegs instead of cans, provided a maximum of three are tapped at any one time -- a reasonable constraint. This more liberal keg policy, which will allow Greek houses to produce less trash and waste less money, is a laudable yet obligatory change, particularly given the College's commitment to sustainability.
But while the AMP policy has done away with many of the complicated regulations of its predecessor, it has introduced some questionable new ones. The AMP mandates Weekly Management plans requiring each organization to submit a social itinerary for the upcoming week with times of events, the number of people expected to attend and the types and amounts of alcohol to be served. At the same time, the new policy has eliminated the option of registering an event on the fly. One of the best facets of Dartmouth's social scene is its spontaneity and welcoming atmosphere -- it is ridiculous to expect organizations to anticipate the whims of fellow students on any given night, and even more absurd to suggest that they turn people away because of arbitrary numbers listed on a plan crafted days before. Furthermore, because the plan must list any event expected to draw more than 30 people, with no exception for members-only events, nearly every meeting in any social organization on campus will now have to be regulated.
More troubling, however, is that the new policy makes no event-type distinctions, and thus presumably permits party sponsors to serve hard alcohol at open parties. This is an unnecessary concession which carries dangerous implications for the future of Dartmouth's social scene. Though the Dartmouth drinking culture may not change overnight in response to the policy, the policy's effects would slowly pervade the campus, making hard alcohol available in larger quantities and at later hours of the evening than ever before.
But the most important question that remains to be answered is how stringently the new policy will be enforced. College alcohol policies are, at best, an uneasy compromise -- the students and the College will never be completely honest with each other on this subject. We can only assume, however, that the College would not devote time and resources to drafting a new policy it does not intend to enforce. The College has asked for feedback on the draft of the AMP policy. We hope that in its discussions, it will keep in mind the reality of the Dartmouth social scene -- after all, one of the major catalysts for the development of a new policy in the first place was that the old was too difficult to follow.
