College President Jim Yong Kim has been working extensively with the town of Hanover to determine the best ways to ensure student safety, but students must take the lead in addressing binge drinking and sexual assault on campus, Kim said in an interview with The Dartmouth Editorial Board on Friday.
Through conversations with students and community members, Kim said he has realized that it is an "ethnographic reality" that Hanover Police's recent charges against Greek organizations would deter Good Samaritan calls.
Kim said his first priority is still to ensure that students call for help when someone is dangerously intoxicated, although dealing with the problem also requires curtailing the culture of binge drinking that leads to Good Samaritan calls.
Kim is having "intensive discussions" with Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone and the town's Board of Selectmen to figure out the best way to ensure students' safety, he said.
"Every single day we're having multiple conversations with the town to try to come up with some way to accomplish our goals, and they're two-fold eliminate any obstacle to calling for help and tackle binge drinking," Kim said. "We're working very, very hard to find a solution that will keep people safe."
Kim said the College and the Hanover Police differ about the best way to deal with underage and binge drinking because of their different interpretations of data that show a recent increase in the number of Good Sam calls. While Kim said he believes the increase in calls shows students' strengthened faith in the system, which results in a greater number of students transferred to the hospital, he thinks Giaccone believes it indicates an increase in drinking on campus.
Despite these differences, Kim said he is optimistic that the increased dialogue between the town and the College will have positive results.
"I think that this is an incredibly difficult conversation, but it's extremely positive that we're talking and meeting on such a frequent basis," he said.
However, Kim stressed that it will take student initiative to change the drinking culture on campus.
To learn about how to address binge drinking on college campuses, Kim said he has also been speaking with Suzanne Fields, whose son, Matthew Sunshine, died of alcohol poisoning at Northwestern University in 2008.
"What I'm learning is very disturbing," Kim said. "The people who really looked at this are saying that binge drinking is one of the major public health problems of our time."
Sunshine who drank 17 shots of vodka during a drinking contest with another student and was carried to his dorm room by his friends died because "nobody called for help," Kim said.
A new program called Red Watch Band at Northwestern and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where Fields is a professor, trains students to recognize signs of alcohol poisoning and call for help for intoxicated peers, according to Kim.
Kim said he thinks a similar program could be successful at Dartmouth if students led the program's development and implementation.
While some educators have suggested that the drinking age be lowered to 18, medical research indicates that such a change would pose an increased danger to public health, Kim said.
"If there is evidence that supports strongly that a particular type of intervention would clearly make a difference, I would support it," Kim said. "But I just haven't seen the evidence that lowering the [drinking] age to 18 is going to make a difference."
Kim said he believes the issue of sexual assault is "absolutely, completely tied up with alcohol," but said there is still a lack of understanding among Dartmouth students about the relationship between the two.
"One of the concepts that is so difficult to get across and it's so difficult because we need to change the culture is that under the influence of alcohol, you have to assume that you are capable of neither seeking nor giving consent," Kim said.
Students must take the lead in combating sexual assault on campus, according to Kim. Administrators are looking to other schools to develop a suite of programs that may be effective at Dartmouth, but a change in the campus culture is simultaneously needed.
"I've heard that people would rather not be involved and risk alienation, or being ostracized by a particular social organization, so they don't say anything," Kim said.
The medical community has not focused enough on women's health in the past, Kim said. He called the Orchid Project, which distributed hand mirrors to campus women to encourage them to explore their bodies, a "courageous" attempt to promote positive views of women's sexuality at Dartmouth, although he said he did not know whether it had been effective.
"If this sparks a more open and honest dialogue about women's health and about how gender is really a critical issue when you think about individual health, I think that's a good thing," Kim said.