Last week, Dartmouth College announced a campus-wide ban on hard alcohol. Beginning this spring term, students will no longer be able to consume liquor containing 15 percent or more alcohol on school grounds.
Spearheaded by Dartmouth’s new president, Philip Hanlon, the policy change is one of several recent, ambitious overhauls of campus life aimed at reducing irresponsible drinking, sexual violence, and abusive fraternity activities. Of Hanlon’s initiatives, the blanket ban on hard liquor has unsurprisingly received the strongest resistance from Dartmouth students.
While alcohol consumption is a problem at virtually all U.S. universities, media coverage has made Dartmouth infamous for its campus drinking culture. The Princeton Review has ranked Dartmouth one of the nation’s heaviest beer-drinking campuses. In 2012, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother published a column in The Dartmouth, the school’s campus newspaper, detailing his fraternity’s abusive hazing practices involving alcohol and other substances.
Hanlon’s ban on hard liquor is, in his words, “moving Dartmouth forward”—but in the wrong direction. Banning hard liquor, for one, does not attack the root causes of sexual violence. Even if a majority of sexual assault cases are associated with alcohol consumption, drinks alone do not lead to sexual assault. An inebriated student does not bring an assault upon herself or himself by nature of his or her consumption of alcohol.
Moreover, a blanket ban will prove difficult to enforce and could ultimately backfire. After the national drinking age increased from 18 to 21 in 1984, college students did not cease drinking—they simply moved their parties from from public bars to private residences. Dartmouth’s plan will do the same, driving parties underground where students will continue to binge drink regardless of university policy.
Instead, Dartmouth should consider the educational—rather than punitive—approaches peer institutions have taken to address alcohol abuse. In 2012, Georgetown administrators reversed an unpopular on-campus party registration system and allowed open containers in public areas. Stanford has even taken this sentiment a step further: it acquired an alcohol ordinance exemption in 2010, encouraging students to drink in an open-door policy. By bringing drinking back into public purview, students have less of an impulse to binge drink at pregames. They can more confidently seek the attention of Residential Assistants and emergency services while learning for themselves the risks of over-consumption in a safer environment.
Despite its laudable intentions, Dartmouth’s new policy will contribute little to changing drinking culture on campus. Students will only lose opportunities to seek help or counseling or to learn from their mistakes. For a university that inspired the infamous college film Animal House, Dartmouth should know better than to enforce a ban on hard liquor.
