For the past two weekends, Residence Life has limited residents of University townhouses to no more than four registered parties per weekend night. According to Dmitry Vovchuk, hall director for Alumni Square and University townhouses, the new cap is intended to limit weekend activity to a “legitimate number of parties” in order to address concerns over trash, noise and excess foot traffic.
Practically, this policy may have little effect-students rarely exceed the four-party cap that Res Life has set. For example, this past weekend, said Vovchuk, there were four registered parties on Friday, and three on Saturday. No request for a party registration has yet been turned away, Vovchuk said. In fact, he said, only one weekend this year has seen an excess of registration requests, and many people voluntarily changed the dates of their events at Vovchuk’s request to avoid a glut.
“Have too many parties been registered?” Vovchuk said. “I would say no.”
That Res Life’s limit is unlikely to be exceeded except in anomalous situations (such as the first weekend of the semester) is only one of the many logical inconsistencies of the cap. It is even more mystifying because registered parties aren’t typically a source of problems, according to Vovchuk. “Students from the townhouses have been fantastically responsible in running [registered parties] smoothly,” he said.
If registered parties have not been a problem, it makes very little sense to limit them and encourage townhouse residents to throw the rowdier unregistered parties which have been a problem. Res Life should be encouraging students to register their parties, not dissuading them.
What makes this new policy even more questionable is that it comes in the wake of a laudable effort by the FRIENDS Initiative to make common-sense changes to the overly rigid University alcohol policy by eliminating superfluous regulations and emphasizing safety and responsibility. Among its suggestions is to eliminate party registration altogether, and instead encourage partiers to keep noise down and respect their neighbors.
FRIENDS understands it is key to allow students to take responsibility for their behavior, rather than subject them to more rules. Res Life, instead, has simply chosen more rules.
Luckily, administrators from Residence Life and the Office of Student Affairs are still evaluating the cap’s future, said Vovchuk. They need to ditch the cap, and allow students to take responsibility for themselves.
