An appalling policy

If you're an underclassmen, don't wash your shot glasses in public bathrooms next year — it's now considered "adequate cause" for your residential college adviser to demand entry to your room to ensure compliance with school alcohol rules. If you don't let them in, they "should" report you to Public Safety. That's because "doing shots of hard alcohol, or planning to" is considered a "significant" violation of the school's alcohol policy. A single shot, or even the preparations for one, is all that is necessary to call in the cavalry.

I didn't want this column to turn into a broadside against the lunatics running the asylum, but Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Hillary Hillary Herbold's letter to the editor on Tuesday was too much for me to let pass without comment. In what is the most recent and possibly the most blatant example of a long list of University doublespeak on issues relating to alcohol, the Street and student life, Herbold insisted that The Daily Princetonian is "misstating" the provisions of the new alcohol policy and is "misinforming" its readers.

As the 'Prince' admitted yesterday, Herbold is technically correct in saying that "RCAs are neither required nor expected to intervene when advisees are consuming alcohol in a manner in keeping with the University's alcohol policy." She says that only "significant violations" require intervention. But policy, as defined online, essentially does require exactly what the the editorial board claimed: Intervention any time an RCA sees drinking — because every form of campus drinking I have seen at Princeton is now considered a "significant" violation of school policy, including:

1) A party at which alcohol is made available to underage persons: At the very least this covers 95 percent of parties on campus and 99.9 percent of parties held in an RCA's zone.

2) Students of any age participating in "pre-gaming:" That again covers the overwhelmingly majority of on-campus drinking.

The RCAs will also now have a responsibility to investigate alcohol use when they have "adequate cause" to believe that a significant violation is occurring or may occur. Adequate cause includes but is not limited to the presence of more than 12 beers in a room of any size, the possession of any hard liquor, "signs that students are playing a drinking game or doing shots of hard alcohol, or planning to do either of these things" and (most disturbingly) "credible rumors or discussion suggesting that students are planning a party or other activity in which the alcohol policy will be violated." This responsibility is not limited to the RCA's advisees. The policy says that if RCAs encounter an alcohol violation outside of his or her "zone," they "must" notify either the local RCA or public safety. In other words, this responsibility extends across campus.

Perhaps people have a different opinion, but what I see here is that the University has reclassified the vast majority of alcohol consumption on campus as "significant violations" and has then tasked the RCAs with stamping out "significant violations" anywhere. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that ipso facto makes the RCAs responsible for stopping almost all on-campus drinking.

Look, the University has an obligation to do what it can to prevent underage drinking, and in the past, I've suggested focusing more on dangerous on-campus drinking as opposed to the relatively safe alternative that is Prospect Avenue. But enforcement is a job properly assigned to Public Safety. I know that residential advisers at other schools have more responsibility to break up parties; one such school is Columbia, where I've been at several parties busted by RAs. The result is that a charitable description of the relationship between my friends at Columbia and their RAs would be "adversarial." Is that what we want for Princeton?

I come to this from a position of personal experience. I did something moderately stupid freshmen year (most of us do) and went to my RCA for help because she was an authority figure who was also on my side. She wasn't out to get me or to make sure that Public Safety busted every party we threw: Her job was to be a mentor and to steer us away from self-immolation. Would I have gone to her for help when I needed it if she had spent the first three months I knew her busting freshmen parties? The question answers itself. It would have been difficult to invent a more damaging policy had that been the administration's actual intent. Barry Caro is a history major from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.