Editorial Conversations: Lehigh’s Alcohol Policy
Question: How should Lehigh’s administration deal with underage alcohol consumption?
For Lehigh, the difficulty in this situation lies with the fact that it has a fully-accredited police force, sworn in by the state of Pennsylvania. As such, they are required to enforce the laws of the state over any policies that the University sets with regard to underage drinking.
With that said, Lehigh’s goal should be to create a system where underage students can drink responsibly without fear of legal troubles. Certainly, Lehigh does need to react to and set consequences for drinking that is dangerous to the individual in question or others.
From my point of view, the issue that students and administrators do not see eye-to-eye on is what drinking is defined as dangerous. I am reminded particularly of one conversation I overheard in a finance recitation last semester. I won’t belabor you with the details, but one girl was wearing the same dress as the night before, and she was the one person involved in the conversation who did remember what happened.
Certainly, the administration would see drinking enough to black out as dangerous to the individual, others, and to Lehigh’s reputation. But to students, this practice can be commonplace in some social circles. Students, to some extent, have a distorted view of what is responsible drinking, and what should be prevented. Lehigh has several interests that merge at this point, which can make things difficult to handle properly: student safety, state law, and Lehigh’s reputation are all affected by how administrators handle this issue.
So how does Lehigh measure up? When all of the issues at hand are considered, they do fairly well. Sure, they’ve messed things up. The frequent “busting” of fraternities is often unnecessary. It drives parties off campus into a less-safe environment, and only makes the hill seem more dangerous and less attractive to students. As students, we can certainly list a great deal of times when we have perceived the University to have erred on alcohol and safety matters.
That being said, there are things they can do to improve the way they deal with alcohol. President Gast should sign the Amethyst Initiative, and Lehigh should join the push for a drinking age of 18. Such a law would make it incredibly simple for Lehigh to deal with alcohol issues on campus.
Second, administrators should work with the police and Lehigh security to establish set reasons for fraternities to be “raided,” and set a policy that police must knock on the door before they enter. While Lehigh owns the houses can enter them at any time, the police should, as a state-run service, have to notify a house’s occupants before entering. This is something Lehigh could set in place, and would provide a more fair system as opposed to cops being able to enter a building for no reason.
Even with these changes, Lehigh can still monitor irresponsible and reckless drinking, and work to control that. The current system though is inefficient at doing that, because time is inevitably spent dealing with people who were drinking responsibly, but were in the wrong place. Signing the Amethyst Initiative and establishing how and why Lehigh Police enter residences would improve the alcohol situation at Lehigh.
To Discuss this issue, please see all three of our editor’s viewpoints, and comment here.
