'Big Sibling' to Big Brother

As reported last week in The Daily Princetonian, the University has announced changes to the role that residential college advisers and Public Safety play in the enforcement of alcohol violations. The new system would require RCAs to intervene when they notice any signs of alcohol consumption among their advisees and break up and possibly report any parties on their floors. It also designates a group of Public Safety officers to patrol dorm hallways on the lookout for alcohol violations. This policy will damage much of the RCA-advisee relationship, significantly reduce the desirability of becoming an RCA and adversely affect students' privacy.

The new policy was formulated "because alcohol is a huge concern, and we're all so afraid that we'll have a student death as a result of dangerous drinking, according to Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Hillary Herbold. The administration is right to share a concern for student safety, which should only be lauded. So what does "safety" entail in this case? Getting sick student the medical attention they need and making sure any drinking is done in a safe and responsible manner.

Both of these constituent elements of safety, in the current system, are facilitated by RCAs who focus solely on helping and (shockingly!) advising students on what the best ways are to make sure sick students get attention and parties do not get out of control. Students are actually likely to seek help from an RCA whom they know to be concerned only with their safety and not with possibly placing them before the Committee on Discipline. Trust is the essential component of this system and the cornerstone of alcohol safety at Princeton.

Under the new system, this trust between RCAs and students is demolished. Students now have one of several options: They can attempt to hold parties on their floors and learn to quickly loathe their RCAs; they can binge drink on the Street or even farther off campus; they can roam the night in search of upperclass dorms where the hard liquor flows fast and free from prying eyes; or they can stop drinking in groups, instead imbibing the occasional martini by themselves over a light evening problem set.

While the last is unlikely to happen any more frequently than it does currently, the rest of these iterations of drinking will probably increase significantly, and each of them poses more danger to students' health than any alcohol abuse perpetrated under the current system. Each situation, additionally, will now be accompanied by students forgoing help for fear of punishment. If the administration claims improving safety as a rationale for this change, it is either exceedingly naive or it is lying.

If students learn to treat their RCAs as shoes on the feet that can kick them out of Princeton, this will damage trust in the RCA-advisee dynamic in realms unrelated to alcohol violations. What previously had been "big sibling"-type friendships will soon grow cold and distant. For the potential RCAs who look forward to the fulfillment of helping a new generation of Princetonians, the specter of this new enforcement requirement will irrevocably undermine the position.