Well, at least now we are all on the same page. When Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone announced the delay to his undercover alcohol "sting operations" plan last week ("Hanover Police delay implementing policy," Feb. 11), he said, "The Town shares with the College the goal of reducing the risks to student health and safety posed by excessive alcohol consumption." College President Jim Yong Kim and Greek student leadership welcomed the decision. They agreed that we need to have a constructive dialogue on how to reduce the harms associated with alcohol abuse at the College.
While it's great that we all agree that harm reduction is the order of the day, sooner or later we have to recognize that reducing harm is difficult. Put bluntly, what we are trying to do here is stop people from making bad decisions. Historically, there have been two approaches to that end: prohibition and education. Prohibition doesn't work. We are all familiar with the failure of universal prohibition in the United States in the 1920s. Every day, however, prohibition fails on a smaller scale as Americans under the age of 21 find easy access to alcohol. We have to work from the premise that minors will always find their way to booze.
Education is the option, but it's not entirely clear that ignorance is the problem. The College has required incoming students to complete online alcohol education courses for awhile. Dick's House, similarly, sponsors a range of educational programs. These ideas are well-intentioned, but they have yet to solve the problem of alcohol abuse at Dartmouth. This result is not surprising. There is no reason to expect that teaching students what "proof" means or what constitutes a standard drink will change their behavior. Every freshman knows high blood-alcohol content can kill. That doesn't stop them from occasionally taking too many shots before heading out on a Friday night.
Prohibition and education have not stopped alcohol abuse to date for a simple reason: no one really knows why students make bad decisions concerning alcohol use. If we did, then we would have a reasonable place to start, both in Hanover and around the country. Despite this fundamental collective ignorance, the police and the College have tried many times to reshape the student body's relationship to alcohol. Their efforts have often put the Greek system in the crosshairs of strange, wrongheaded policies.
The Student Life Initiative, announced in 1999 during former College President Jim Wright's administration, is one example. The Board of Trustees Committee on the Student Life Initiative recommendations report from January 2000 states, among other things, that fraternity basements "must be converted to general purpose uses, such as kitchens, lounges, study/computer space, storage areas, exercise rooms or workshops." Although the College did not go through with eliminating the student body's primary social spaces, they did make some visible changes. Go to any fraternity basement on campus and you will find neither a permanent bar nor pressurized taps for kegs. But these changes did not eliminate alcohol abuse at Dartmouth. Perhaps that is because the Student Life Initiative was crafted by people who, like me, still have no idea why students abuse alcohol.
The police have periodically stepped in with their own policy changes. On Green Key weekend in 1987, an undercover police officer caught eight different fraternities serving alcohol to an underage female who accompanied him. Chief Giaccone's recent proposal, if enacted, will be just another chapter in a familiar story. These operations make sense if the police department is primarily interested in enforcing the letter of the law, but Chief Giaccone has made it clear that harm reduction is his priority.
The goal of reducing alcohol abuse is admirable, but as far as I can see no one knows how to do it. We should not pretend otherwise by constantly shifting policies and enforcing radical changes on Greek life without empirical grounding. Hasty changes run the risk of imposing pointless new restrictions on Dartmouth students, making everyone worse off without decreasing alcohol abuse. Before we make any changes, let's make sure that we can explain, with substantive data, exactly how the changes will make Dartmouth students safer.
