ACC focuses on safety

Director of Campus Life Initiatives Amy Campbell, the ACC co-chair, said, “High-risk drinking crosses all boundaries ... It doesn’t matter whether you’re a member of an eating club or participate in a fraternity or sorority or are in a residential college ... It’s a particular behavior we’re focused on.”

Though the ACC has no direct power to craft University policy, several ACC members said that the coalition’s efforts to reach out to stakeholders in the University community ensures that administrators place a high value on its input.

“It’s not just 15 people in a group making these decisions,” ACC co-chair Elizabeth Borges ’11 said, noting that the ACC consults with RCAs, Public Safety and medical staff, among other people. “Many, many voices are included in the conversation.”

Campbell said that the organization’s purpose is “not about [killing] fun. It’s about, ‘How do we keep the student body safe?’ ”

She added, however, that the ACC is limited by certain existing constraints.

“As much as we may want to have the drinking age lowered, we can’t do that,” Campbell explained. “We work within certain boundaries. There are state and federal laws.”

In May 2008, the ACC presented its strategic plan to address high-risk drinking to the Healthier Princeton Advisory Board, and it has since continued to work toward forming policy recommendations.

Working groups

To tackle the problem of high-risk drinking on campus, the ACC is divided into six working groups, each headed by one student and one faculty member.

“The working group model has allowed us to address discrete tasks,” Borges said. “[They] really keep us on task, to say, ‘This year we want to accomplish XYZ.’ ”

The Alcohol Policy Working Group — which Borges co-heads with Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Hilary Herbold — will likely have the most direct effect on the student body, Borges said, since the group is tasked with reviewing the University’s current policies on alcohol.

“We want to make sure we have an alcohol policy that reflects what [values] the University holds dear” and effectively promotes a safe environment, Borges explained.

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The University’s lack of recognition for differences in severity between various alcohol violations, such as those “between three students with a six-pack in a room watching a football game, and 40 students in a room with hard alcohol ... and Everclear where students are vomiting and passing out,” is one major problem the group has identified, Borges said.

The University needs to implement a “risk spectrum,” which encompasses a wider range of both violations and consequences in making disciplinary decisions, Borges added.

Based on the group’s research, the highest risk drinking scenario appears to be dorm-room pregames with hard alcohol, she said, explaining, “We are trying to figure out what is less risky behavior, what is more risky behavior, what would the consequences be.”

Borges added that she hopes the working group’s recommendations will be implemented during the summer in time for the fall semester.

The positive role-modeling working group is focused on reforming the party registration system, which currently only recognizes gatherings that are restricted to students age 21 and older.

Borges said the group has proposed some changes to the existing registration system, including allowing parties which admit students under 21 to be registered.

“By having mixed-age parties, older students can model proper alcohol-related behavior to underage students,” she explained.

The Education Working Group hopes to create a system to teach students to act as first responders if they are present during an alcohol-related emergency. The group was inspired by programs at other schools where students trained in emergency response wear identifying red wristbands.

Borges added that the program would be easy to establish at Princeton, where Outdoor Action leaders are already trained in emergency procedures. She added that the program is part of “a two-fold approach” and “wouldn’t supplant attempts to try to prevent getting to that place in the first place.”

The Princeton Specific Alcohol Education Tool Working Group is also working on a better education system for incoming freshmen.

Borges explained that the ACC’s research indicates that the social ambivalence of incoming freshmen, combined with misinformation they receive about the University’s social scene, can lead first-year students to become involved in dangerous alcohol-related activities.

“There’s a sense ... that you’re on display a lot during your freshman year,” she said, noting that freshmen might feel pressured to drink in a new and foreign social scene when they arrive on campus.

The end result of their research, which the group hopes to complete in 2011, will be an online web program that will be “hopefully very effective, hopefully very engaging” and inform incoming students about the social scene and campus resources. Borges added that the program may replace the University’s current orientation website, AlcoholEDU, which “has a reputation for being not as engaging.”

The Dispelling Myths working group identifies campus myths about alcohol and works to clarify misinformation, Borges explained. She noted that the two most prominent misconceptions are the idea that high-risk drinking only affects certain groups of students and that students will incur consequences for seeking assistance.

“You won’t get in trouble if you call for help, but you will get in trouble if there’s a violation,” she said, noting that the issue “is very nuanced.”

Future directions

Members of the ACC said that much of the group’s effectiveness comes from the diversity of its student membership. The equal weight given to student, faculty and staff input in the ACC’s discussions also helps ensure that their debates are productive.

“It’s almost an equal and open discussion arena where faculty and students are on equal footing,” explained Brittney Scott '11, co-chair of the Education Working Group. “If there’s a certain idea that comes up in a meeting that a faculty member proposes, and all the students are like, ‘Whoa, no, no!’ the faculty member would drop it.”

Borges said that she thought the respect for student input stems from undergraduates’ unique perspective on campus culture.

“Because administrators are not at student parties on the weekend, they don’t know what sort of high-risk drinking is occurring,” she explained.

Though many working groups’ recommendations are not yet complete, electrical engineering professor and former ACC co-chair Sanjeev Kulkarni said the ACC has already sparked broader campus awareness as well as many “concrete outcomes,” such as an “Alcohol: Just the Facts” booklet.

“I hope in five years we’ll be able to feel a little bit of an impact and change in culture,” Kulkarni added.

Campbell also said she was optimistic about the ACC’s future efforts.

“We’re now poised to begin to take that foundation and to think about how does that shift into policy ... that could have a positive impact,” she said.