Let’s be honest: students in search of the quintessential Lehigh experience will go Greek. Those who move onto The Hill after freshman year will tell you they wouldn’t have done it any other way. Those who go it alone might not have any regrets, but they’ll certainly feel as if a significant part of our campus is walled-off.
For too long we’ve taken in stride that there’s something inherent to Greek organizations that makes the decision to pledge so pivotal in one’s college lifecycle. That joining a fraternity or sorority is widely considered the only way to have a social life is a major blemish on Lehigh’s character.
Students should choose Greek life based on its merits, not because there simply isn’t a decent alternative. For all the grumbling about the demise of The Hill, Greek life will remain Lehigh’s social bread and butter until drastic changes are made. This is because Lehigh’s policies are a deliberate form of social engineering masquerading as neutrality. In reality, fraternities and sororities dominate our social scene because Lehigh stifles social activity everywhere else.
For instance, Greek houses are the only residences on campus without Gryphons. In other words, fraternities and sororities are effectively exempt from the enforcement of regulations that ensnare the rest of us. According to Lehigh’s social policy, 10 people in a room with alcohol constitutes an unregistered party. A gathering that size would go unnoticed in the privacy of a fraternity house – but try it in one of the Sayre apartments. With a nod and a wink, Lehigh gives Greek sophomores and juniors the exclusive right to party. The decision to pledge, then, isn’t made based on the merits of the Greek system – it’s a lifestyle necessity.
This situation would be ameliorated if unaffiliated groups were able to host viable campus-wide events, but social policy also prohibits alcohol consumption in any non-residential campus buildings. The Hawk’s Nest, originally recommended by the Strengthening Greek Life Task Force as a non-Greek social alternative should fill this void. But the task force erred in assuming students would trade a night of partying for a night of waiting in line for chicken fingers. Now that most parties have been pushed below Packer Avenue, there is even less of an opportunity for non-Greeks to establish a presence on campus.
The barriers don’t end there. Our increasingly labyrinthine and unwieldy social policy makes it cost-prohibitive for any unaffiliated group to serve alcohol at an event. Increasing occupancy requirements, a general obsession with recruitment numbers and the recent attrition of several fraternities has increased the average size of each Greek house. Only organizations that collect substantial membership dues and have the financial backing of the University can afford to hire the layers of security and University personnel now required to make a party legitimate.
To solve this problem, Lehigh should encourage the establishment of co-ed social organizations modeled loosely on Princeton University’s “Eating Clubs.” Eating Clubs function as dining halls, communal recreation spaces and hosts to social events. At Lehigh, these clubs would be attractive to students who like the idea of joining a social organization, but not the idea of pledging their souls to one.
Ideally, eating clubs at Lehigh would also lose the characteristic tribalism of Greek organizations. Membership could be determined by lottery, providing an incentive to host open events that draw a more diverse cross-section of the campus community.
The administration has made overtures towards this vision of social life in its recent push for more special interest housing. But their approach buys into the same divisive pattern of social organization that has plagued us for years. Lehigh needs a more inclusive social space, not more pronounced boundaries between different interest groups on campus.
It’s time to debunk the notion that social segregation at Lehigh is a naturally occurring phenomenon. The University’s policies privilege Greek life above all others, and many freshmen pledge reluctantly just because it seems like ‘the thing to do.’ This translates into dissatisfied students in and outside of the Greek system. Students should demand real alternatives to this state of affairs, and the resulting competition will improve campus life for everyone.

The Federal Government, under the guise of “energy freedom” has crafted a broad array of overbearing and Constitutionally invalid laws designed to increase fuel economy among cars on the road today and steer our country away from its fossil-fueled way of life. Despite the best intentions of the federal government, the array of laws on the books are not the best way to accomplish change in our world.
Under the current system, the federal government’s mechanisms for change are composed of three main areas: Minimum mileage requirements, direct subsidization of energy development, and the ubiquitous “Cash for Clunkers” program. Of these, the first is the most egregious in terms of impacting the average American consumer.
The fundamental flaw of all three of these mechanisms is the belief that the government is the entity that needs to push for change. However, the government has never been an efficient mechanism for change; federal programs are often muddled in bureaucracy and unfairly favor some technologies at the expense of others. For example, during the Bush administration a major push was into research of switch grass, a plant that could be turned into ethanol. However, the federal government ignored other promising technologies such as hemp-based fuel, or solar, geothermal or wind power.
Minimum mileage requirements are harmful to consumers because they eliminate choice. The current federal system requires the average mpg rating of all cars sold by a company to exceed a certain threshold. What if an entrepreneur wanted to make a company that specialized in one particular class of car, such as large trucks to meet a consumer demand? Under the current system, they would still need to sell fuel efficient cars to produce gas guzzlers.
My solution is a simple one: replace all of these programs with one tax. By increasing the federal fuel tax from its current level of eighteen cents to a far steeper three dollars, the burden of fuel efficiency shifts from the federal government to private enterprise. Under this new system, a private corporation has tangible financial incentive to fund research, and consumers will pay for increased fuel efficiency because it is worthwhile for them to do so. Furthermore, unprofitable research will be stifled, as a profit-driven and results-oriented corporation has no desire to waste money in areas that lack promise.
The tax soultion also gives automotive companies something that has been missing for decades: specialization. A CATO article listed “GM’s competitive strength [as] the luxury car, muscle car, SUV, and pick-up truck categories. “ An automotive company should not be forced to develop small cars as a cost of doing business. Rather, they should be allowed to market what customers want. If Ford’s most profitable cars are Mustangs and pick-ups, there is no reason for them to waste factory space on compact cars.
The major caveat to this system is that the cost of goods will go up. However, even this is not a bad thing. Instead of produce being shipped across the country to stock shelves, the market would reward local farmers in small towns across America without the need for biased and politically controversial federal farm subsidies.
Furthermore, this proposal will ease congestion on major US thoroughfares. Between fewer and shorter truck shipments and fewer people making frivolous trips, less wear and tear will occur on our roads. Corporations that abandoned railroads in the 70s and 80s would begin reinvesting, since there would be demand for them; demand created by the free market and not a Federal entity. Programs such as Amtrak, an unprofitable government entity, may become profitable as its fares become more affordable.
This proposal will hurt poor Americans the most. However, a system of “rationing” could be created, where criteria such as distance to employment and number of dependents would allow poor families to receive a portion of cheaper gas. More importantly, it would give them the power of choice – the ability to prioritize their travel and make responsible decisions at home so that as a country we can achieve energy independence.
For college students, these ideals provide a similar outlook: a construct that rewards personal choice. Frivolous trips home or to another college would be less frequent and would only occur when one believes it is worth the expense. Things like the Lehigh University Ride Board would be utilized more often, creating a sense of community amongst the student body. Furthermore, increased transportation costs would lead to increased programming on campus and a decreasing need to go off campus to have fun, again engendering fellowship amongst the student population.
Despite the cost of higher fuel taxes, it is the only responsible alternative to federal subsidies and redistribution of wealth. By creating a system that rewards innovation and allows private corporations to decide the value of products, the United States can become a greener country because its citizens, not its lawmakers, choose to make it so. Furthermore, car companies would gain the ability to specialize without the need to sell super-efficient cars to stay in the marketplace.

Authority must always be questioned. It is simply inherent to a modern democratic society. As college students, we can certainly appreciate this sentiment and should act on it. Our system of government operates with the understanding that some of our basic liberties will be given away in order for the state to function. Laws impede some of our liberties since, by definition, they determine what people should and should not be allowed to do. Absolute liberty would result in anarchy where those with physical power oppress those without it.

Because our laws require a mechanism of enforcement, police are a necessary evil in a democracy. Their goals of ensuring safety and civility will often be at odds with personal liberty. The suggestion here is not that police are themselves detrimental to society but that their power will inevitably infringe on citizens’ rights. The police are needed to arbitrate disputes and to serve as a neutral authority to guarantee that all people are allowed to live as freely and safely as possible. It is the right and duty of citizens of a democratic system to be on guard as a check on those who are given power over us. We willingly hand over essential rights with the understanding that the police will provide fair protection and that laws will be upheld.

Nonetheless, police are human beings and therefore capable of overstepping their authority. This is why we must remain vigilant – when government is given power, it will not voluntarily return it to the people. That is why citizens must constantly and actively protect their rights. Citizens must defend liberty and democracy even in the event of popular complacency, as is visible in America today.

A blatant example of the police trampling the civil rights of an individual is the case of Cheye Calvo, who had his house broken into about a year ago by a SWAT team during a botched drug raid. Mr. Calvo was innocent of any sort of drug smuggling. The police broke down his door and shot his two dogs, which were allegedly non-hostile. Despite the egregious violation of his civil rights, Calvo is still fighting for compensation. This sort of behavior on the part of law enforcement is unacceptable.

The “no-knock” policy of many police and SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) organizations has been hotly contested in court, yet remains a widely-used practice. Are citizens and their privacy to be considered less important than ending the marijuana trade in this country? Nothing can be more important than these civil rights. We owe it to the men and women who died for this nation’s freedom to not accept these barbaric practices. Even the notion of a SWAT team is something that ought to be received with caution. Why is it necessary for nearly every county in America to be armed with a paramilitary organization? Several of these groups are involved with weapons and drug trading themselves. The most widely known of these cases is the police department of Hoboken, NJ, which dismantled their SWAT team after serious corruption charges emerged. The growth of these “militarized” police has increased at a frighteningly rapid pace in the last few years. According to the CATO Institute, the number of SWAT team deployments has jumped from 3,000 a year in the early 1980s to more than 40,000 a year by the early 2000s. This vast and deliberate militarization of police departments is unnecessary. Again, most police officers do their jobs with honesty and integrity, but we must be awakened to the reality that sometimes law enforcement will cause us to be less free.

Although most Lehigh students will not suffer such serious civil rights violations, we will undoubtedly experience or become aware of police crimes against liberty. As a student body, we must never become complacent in the face of infringements on our civil liberties. We need to be aware of police actions and speak out when they cross the line. An alert community is a democratic and free one. As Thomas Jefferson said: the government should fear and serve the people, not the other way around.

College students have a great and defiant history of fighting against the “man.” We led the charge against the Vietnam War. We have never hesitated to take up a cause that is important to us – even if we’re just whining about the drinking age. We need to make noise and use our voices, both in and out of the voting booth, in order to keep the authorities in check. Their job is to protect and serve, and we must continuously remind them of that.

We must also recognize the alarming trend towards government control over society. We are seeing how the government rescinds more and more of our rights for the sake of ‘security’. The ironically named Patriot Act and any similar legislation that restricts the rights of the people for the sake of collective ‘security’ should be contested and overturned. It is a travesty that we are selling away our liberties out of fear. As Benjamin Franklin put it, those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

The founding fathers would be ashamed of the unwillingness of the masses to put their liberties above all else. We must follow their example and lead the charge to defend liberty. Question authority and do not submit to injustice! Be defiant and recognize that you have certain inalienable and undeniable rights. Vigilance must be a hallmark of our society. When we witness injustice in any form, it is our duty as free persons to speak out against it. We can not call ourselves the heirs to the noble idea of America if we failed in this sacred duty to protect our liberties.

It would be great if we could have a world without nuclear weapons. This is a dream for many idealists, but a farfetched reality for most pragmatists. Some consider this dream possible, if we were able to rid the world of despotic dictators. Others say that human nature and its proclivity for conflict makes war inevitable. Thus, countries need the right to defend themselves from foreign threats. Meanwhile, the uninformed, without any regard for what’s happening in the world, say that every nation should make a pledge to destroy their nuclear weapons arsenal immediately.
This brings me to the United Nations and its new commitment to implementing nuclear disarmament. With its upsetting track record, the U.N. has rarely been effective in accomplishing anything from holding successful peacekeeping operations, to preventing genocide, or to maintaining human rights. Even with the support of President Barack Obama, the inherent corruption and bureaucracy of the U.N. will make disarmament nearly impossible. With unpredictable countries like Iran and North Korea, countries will not be willing to lessen their deterrence.
While Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn’t the most unstable world leader, his country is the biggest threat to our strongest ally in the Middle East: Israel. According to the New York Times, “Iran’s agreement in principle … to ship what American officials called ‘most’ of its declared stockpile of lightly enriched uranium to Russia and France to be turned into nuclear fuel.”^1,2 According to experts at the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency, Iran has all the materials to make an atomic weapon.³ Using this material, Iran is most likely gearing up to create weapons earmarked for use on Israel or, at the very least, to sell them off to any number of terrorist organizations. This may cause Israel to preemptively attack Iran. Considering that nearly all the oil leaving the Middle East passes through the Strait of Hormuz, right off the coast of Iran, Iran is likely (and has threatened) to choke off this passageway if Israel or the United States attacks.⁴ This would put 40% of the world’s oil in the hands of a single country, and a volatile one at that.
In contrast, North Korea has perhaps the world’s most deranged dictator, Kim Jong Il. While the man is of poor health, his third son is poised to take over. North Korea, with its habit of testing missiles and bombs, is a major threat to our ally, South Korea. North Korea also has the capability to strike Japan, and even Hawaii with its missiles.⁵
The UN’s dream of a nuke-free world is nice, but idealist, at least for now. If every nation were a democracy or a constitutional republic, it would be easier to rid the world of most of its nuclear weapons. But, for now, with some of the world’s farcical governments threatening proliferation and stockpiling, we’ll have to put that dream on hold.
1) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/middleeast/02nuke.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
2) http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSLP63169620090226
3) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090917/ap_on_re_eu/eu_iran_nuclear
4) http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,374905,00.html
5) http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/03/n.korea.military/index.html

As the Dow marked a psychological rebound at 10,000, few analysts were quick to verify this achievement. With an unemployment rate heading for 10% and no clear connection to revenue, the 10,000 mark might just be an artifact of a much bigger picture.

Internationally, the dollar is suffering, exchanging at only €0.67, almost a split from a 2001 high of €1.20.¹ Nationally, banks are still suffering, with Bank of America reporting a one billion dollar loss; real estate demand is dwindling with record lows in rent; and companies are only exceeding earnings by cutting costs.

In this climate of rising futility, weak markets, and unpredictable demand, companies are becoming increasingly cutthroat in their competitive strategies. Businesses are responding to decreasing market size with more aggressive strategies to demolish their competitors through hostile competition, mergers and acquisitions, and unethical behavior. A look into a few companies emphasizes this point.

Head-to-head, Amazon and Walmart are engaging in airline style price wars with books. Cutting bestsellers from the typical $25 to $10, Amazon thought they could out-price Walmart. Think again. Walmart, known as a cost leader, cut the price to $9, and when they were matched by Amazon, went down another penny to $8.99 a copy.^{2 In the same context, Microsoft sought to challenge Apple in the retail arena by opening two Microsoft retail stores. These stores will function as near replicas of Apple stores, selling high-tech gadgets and software packages licensed by Microsoft. They will even copy the Genius Bar, Apple’s signature customer service and repair center at the back of every store.3}

Top-to-bottom, Oracle offered to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in order to compete directly with IBM as a one-stop-shop for big business IT solutions.⁴ Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek to expand its information clutch on the magazine channel.⁵ These big buys were financed by the industry of continual mergers: banking. With JP Morgan connecting with Chase and TD enveloping Ameritrade and Commerce, it’s hard to get anyone’s name straight.

Unethically, Toys ‘R’ Us is under FTC review for using market forces to hike the price of strollers and breast pumps.⁶ Likewise the SEC has recently identified the largest insider trading ring in a century.

In this environment of ultra-competitive forces, companies and watchdogs need to step back and observe the long-term results of their actions. Will this competitive behavior end the recession? Is it best for us and our customers?

In most cases the answer is a clear ‘no.’ In the long run, consumers and producers will both lose. As companies increase cutthroat competitive tactics, they will decrease long-term profits. If you make the seas red, no one wins. Customers will lose choice and quality while companies will lose capital and positive PR.

In the case of book selling, Walmart and Amazon will have to sell below cost and will discourage publishers from selling through their channels. For Microsoft, they will create channel conflict with their nearby retailers and increase costs for the customers, since retailing is not their core competency. Oracle will minimize the functional number of customer combinations from nine (e.g. IBM + Oracle, Oracle + Other, or IBM + IBM) to two: either IBM or Oracle. This will decrease the market capacity for their software product while increasing the risk of gaining market-share since Sun + Oracle is not a well-established combination. Finally, the losers will lose – unethical business practices never get companies ahead. Toys ‘R’ Us will end up paying in the jugs for their breast pump price fixing.

In this zero-sum game, there is only one way to get ahead and win in the long run: ignore the rules. Instead of buying into the U.S. magazine market, Bloomberg could offer a hybrid terminal with a magazine feel. This would create a “blue ocean” of uncontested market space. Instead of trying to find more ways to sell products with bugs and overheating Xboxes, Microsoft should focus on developing an operating system that is not vulnerable to viruses. Banks might even be able to do more than clean their balance sheets by offering investment products to small companies.

Taking this theory out to the market, analysts see a bleak future because companies are hollowing out. They are trading cost-cutting strategies for revenue-building approaches. Instead of expanding their intellectual property they are selling it below its true value. When we can learn to step off the battlefield, our market will stabilize.

Sources:
1 – http://www.x-rates.com/d/EUR/USD/graph120.html
2 – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322004574477050954174722.html
3 – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125582090441392365.html
4 – http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/15/ellison-oracle-wont-be-seventh-in-services/
5 – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574473382444906054.html
6 – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125573656435491057.html

With sweeping health care legislation making its way through Congress, our leaders are overlooking one of the most pressing issues in the US: public education. Since the 1960s, our expenditures have grown and our grades, domestically and internationally, have dropped. Education, which is so important for a free and industrial society, has been left by the wayside for decades.
The United States public school system instructs 55 million children in over 100,000 schools. We spend on average $10,770 per student, which is one of the highest expenditures per student in the world; financed almost entirely from property and school taxes. Of course, spending money is not a panacea. The average vocabulary of a 14 year old in 1945 was 25,000 words; today it hovers around 10,000 for the same age group. Our dropout rate is about 30%, and the kids that do graduate are already academically behind based on international test scores. American businesses are importing more and more foreign talent rather than hiring our own, and many people fear that what happened to our auto industry from 1970 till now will happen with our job market. What is wrong with America’s oldest “public option”?
1) We have one of the ‘slowest’ curriculums in the world, meaning we spend a great deal of time reviewing material such as arithmetic in middle school when comparable schools in other countries are onto geometry and algebra. Our textbooks are set up to skim several topics instead of delving deep into a couple topics over the year, which produces students that know very little practical information on several topics.
Instead of separating the gifted students from the slower learners, all students are taught together in the same classroom to avoid hurting anyone’s self esteem. This leaves the gifted students bored as the teacher must teach to the lowest level in the class. Suffocating a gifted student intellectually is a far worse crime than hurting someone’s self esteem. We will never know a gifted student’s true potential unless they are taught at an accelerated rate fairly early on.
2) We spend about 4 times as much money on education than we did in 1960 and our teacher to student ratio has plummeted, so we should be scoring significantly better on the SATs, right? Well actually the scores have taken a nosedive; the more money we pump into education, the worse our students score. We have more full-time nonteaching staff and other administrators than ever, which contribute very little to actual instructing.
3) Ever since 1960, our education system has been on a steady decline, which leads to the central problem of modern US public education, unionization. In 1962 teachers were allowed to unionize, and ever since, the main beneficiary of the education system has been its employees, not the students. The point of a union is to use collective bargaining to protect its own interests. I find it incredible that on any day of the school year, a group of teachers can go on strike and shut down the school until they feel like going back to work. Despite what any teacher on strike says, strikes send a pretty clear message that personal interests of teachers trump quality education for the children. The late Al Shanker, teaching union founder and president, said it best with “I will begin to care about the quality of children’s education in this country when they start paying union dues.”
Stemming from the union contracts is the idea of tenured teachers. Right now there are about 700 teachers in New York that are barred from teaching because of misconduct, but can’t be fired because they are tenured. Their union contracts force the school district to go through a maze of paperwork that can take up to several years to get through. While their paperwork is being processed, they sit in a room provided by the district and make $70,000 a year – to do nothing. That’s $5 million out of the budget for New York alone.
We need to fix these problems.
We need to drop this “social re-engineering” garbage and get back to basics. That means less sing-song time for ‘praise the president’ and more time for fundamentals. We need to end ‘social promotion,’ which means advancing a student through the grades based on age and not test scores. If a student doesn’t understand the material after summer school, then repeat the grade. A superintendent (which rakes in a national average $148,387 a year) in the Miami school district flat out said, “Half our job is education, and the other half is social work”. This is not improving our test scores.
Instead of the age old fix-all of raising taxes and dropping more money into the system, maybe we should do the unthinkable and switch from a “free” system to a free-market system in which students pay tuition to go to a school. Private school students consistently perform better on standardized tests, not because of the biggest budgets, but because every school knows they must instruct efficiently or face closure.
Finally, teaching unions have to dial it down to control the rising cost of education. The tenure system must be weakened or dissolved in order to ensure that schools do not get caught up in the mountain of paperwork involved with replacing a misbehaving or just plain bad educator. Award a limited tenure based on performance reviews by an outside group, not seniority.
Perhaps instead of writing massive and broad legislation enacting more “public option policies”, we should take a stronger look at the ones we already have.

Sources:
“Center for Education Reform – K-12 Facts.” Center for Education Reform – Home. Web. .
“Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) – Overview.” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. Web. .

Many believe that the role of art in society is to define the culture of a certain time and place. At Lehigh, such art is all around, whether you have noticed it or not. I have divided the art seen at Lehigh into three distinct categories: Art, Modern Art, and Stall Art. Their existence at Lehigh and student’s responses to them provide an interesting look at Lehigh’s culture.

Art

Traditional art consists of the paintings, stained glass windows, and other established methods of expression. Even the architecture of buildings like Alumni Memorial and Packer Chapel satisfy the definition of expressing something about Lehigh.  While such displays are everywhere, they go completely unnoticed by a sizeable portion of the Lehigh population. How often do students walk by Alumni Memorial each day, without realizing how incredible a structure it is? Can you describe the paintings on display in Rauch Lobby right now? Traditional art receives the least attention from Lehigh students. This is a sad fact, because the art is all downhill from here.

Modern Art

Chunk - The Museum of Modern Art

Lehigh, for an unknown reason, has been able to acquire a great deal of interesting sculptures that have been strewn haphazardly across the campus. These sculptures can be broadly defined as modern art. While the definition of modern art is tough to determine, I generally use a simple test which requires answering only three questions:

1. Do you think it is pretty?
2. Do you know what the artist was trying to express?
3. Did you initially wonder how you ended up at a junkyard?

If you answer ‘no’ to two out of three of the above questions, you are probably looking at modern art. My personal favorite is not at Lehigh yet, but my hope is that a generous alumnus will send “Chunk” (pictured below) from the Museum of Modern Art to Lehigh where it belongs. While “Chunk” may not provide as many drunk-photo opportunities as pieces like the model student or woman on bench, I am sure students would find a way to utilize some of its finer qualities.

Stall Art

Stall Art - Lehigh University

Lastly, we arrive at the art that Lehigh students are most intimately involved with: stall art. The public restroom has always served as a hub for news, rumors, and more. Thanks to Lehigh dining, many students spend a good portion of their day frequenting some of the many stalls around campus.

This, inevitably, leads to expressions that come directly from Lehigh students. As such, they provide the most detail about the culture at Lehigh and provide a great way for all students to learn on the job. Lessons in anatomy, philosophy, and even physics can all be found around campus.

For those freshmen who need a quick social lesson, stall art at Lehigh provides that too. A quick tour through several stalls can provide anyone with a good idea of which fraternities house the cool guys, and which fraternities no one likes. Events like Meet the Greeks and open houses are meant to be the way students are introduced to Greek life. However, stall art has allowed many savvy freshmen to form preconceived notions before they even head up on the Hill.

Stall art may not be as refined as its partners on campus are. However, no one can deny that a visit to several public bathrooms on campus would give prospective students a much better idea of life at Lehigh than a stroll down University walkway.

Question: How should Lehigh’s administration deal with underage alcohol consumption?

The drinking age debate is doomed. The most passionate advocates for reform have three years to make their case. Then one day, they miraculously stop caring, or worse, they join the opposition.

Attrition is not the only problem, of course. There are no new arguments to be made. Compelling statistics overwhelmingly support a 21-year-old drinking age, and the political will for change is non-existent.

However, that the drinking age is and will remain 21 does little to rationalize the way the law has been enforced here at Lehigh. The administration is in the precarious situation of trying to reform our ‘party-school’ image while somehow retaining it – because, well, you can’t put lipstick on a pig.

If candor were the order of the day, President Gast could express skepticism about strictly enforcing a 21-year-old drinking age. Most 18-20 year-olds at Lehigh drink regularly, and the law is hardly a deterrent. But Lehigh is under the yoke of two separate but overlapping police forces: the LUPD and the Bethlehem Police Department. In recent years, the Bethlehem Police have received grants from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Those grants provide the money to pay the small army of cops on bikes that patrol the South Side each fall.

As such, it is difficult for the University to find the right tone with which to address this issue. A more progressive attitude could create the illusion of amnesty for underage drinkers or risk undermining the authority of the police.

To walk this tightrope, the administration should reiterate that its primary concern is the safety and security of Lehigh students – safety from alcohol abuse, to be sure, but also from a tarnished permanent record and from the physical dangers of South Bethlehem.

The LUPD should coordinate with the Bethlehem Police so that underage-drinking citations are handled through the University disciplinary system – not a kangaroo court above a video rental store. The University should then scale back the severity of the punishment for first-time offenders so that students stop fearing the police. With this ironclad partnership between students and law enforcement in place, maybe the Bethlehem Police Department will turn its attention to some “real” problems – like plasma TVs with legs.

To Discuss this issue, please see all three of our editor’s viewpoints, and comment here.

Question: How should Lehigh’s administration deal with underage alcohol consumption?

From the vantage point of the Lehigh administration, minimization of risk and maximization of student experience should be the focus of any policy conversation. Considering these metrics, Lehigh should adopt the following three approaches to reduce instances of underage drinking abuse “on campus”.

1) Prevent the worst instances – Using the broken window theory, Lehigh can target the outliers and worst offenders to reduce the net effect of the whole problem. By targeting students involved in recurrent hospital trips, drunken driving, and acts of public disturbance, Lehigh enforcement personnel can cut the worst out of the system. This focused policy will discourage students from engaging in the worst underage activities. Also, reducing the standard variance of underage offenses will discourage students from “breaking all the rules” because the perceived risks are much greater.

2) Use resources for next-best alternatives – Spend some of the extensive enforcement and correctional budget on exciting and extraordinary activities. If Lehigh students had other experiences that were just as “pleasurable” as drinking, they might spend their time on next-best alternatives. For example, if Lehigh offered free scuba diving lessons, showed movies in theaters, or took students on weekend adventures to different cities around the country, students would choose those alternatives. Administrators should spend less time making rules and more time making experiences.

3) Push drinking away from campus – With Lehigh’s “not in my backyard” mindset, controlling consumption can be as easy as pushing it away from campus. By monitoring underclassmen dorms on campus instead of patrolling off-campus houses, the university can save resources and push drinking away from campus. By creating a circle of control, the university will ensure that less students drink on campus.

To Discuss this issue, please see all three of our editor’s viewpoints, and comment here.