For freshmen, drinking at Georgetown is about waiting—waiting for an older friend to get out of a liquor store with the goods, waiting in line for a keg, waiting to click through AlcoholEdu. While freshmen get used to waiting, the rest of campus can get something else we’ve been waiting for: a sense of the results of Georgetown’s policies on parties and alcohol education.
Georgetown’s new party policy, imposed in the summer of 2007, has not been as devastating to the party scene as initially imagined. Party registration helps the Department of Public Safety (DPS) and ResLife anticipate potential trouble and prepare for it, and I Know How to Party host training is only a short inconvenience. Still, requiring that parties be registered by 10 a.m. Thursday morning is unreasonably early. The deadline should be moved to later in the day on Thursday, or to Friday, as the current deadline only encourages students to hold unregistered parties.
More problematic, though, is AlcoholEdu, the mandatory online program for freshmen, which is also used to sanction students with alcohol violations. At times, AlcoholEdu’s stories and graphics are so outdated and out of touch that they make the cheesy Academic Integrity tutorial seem like gripping edutainment. Another solution is needed to get across the important message of how to drink alcohol safely.
Despite its obvious inadequacy, Georgetown may insist on retaining AlcoholEdu for its potential institutional insurance benefits.
“I think schools do use [AlcoholEdu] as a risk mitigation strategy,” said Megan Palame, a spokesperson for Outside the Classroom, the company that produces AlcoholEdu. Palame would not confirm whether schools get discounted insurance rates for using AlcoholEdu.
If Georgetown continues to use AlcoholEdu, some changes should be made to improve the system. Freshmen should be required to complete AlcoholEdu before they come to school, instead of during the school year. By then, the program has become just another New Student Orientation joke, and lost much of its potential impact. NSO should also be supplemented by a Pluralism in Action-style discussion about the danger of alcohol abuse, where Orientation Advisors and freshman can talk frankly and openly about drinking culture and its risks.
Until these changes are made, the rest of the University will have to join the freshmen in waiting—this time, for a solution that properly deals with the dangers of drinking at a college.
