Alcohol Policy Unevenly Enforced

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 does not like to talk about Harvard's alcohol policy.

But he will write about it--he has authored several statements presenting his case for the College's strong stance on student drinking.

"The main thing we don't want," he has said repeatedly, "is for anyone to die."

Up to this point in Lewis's five and a half year tenure, no one at Harvard has died of alcohol poisoning, although in the fall of 1998, Scott Krueger, a first-year student at MIT, drank himself to death at a fraternity party.

Krueger's death shook the nation's college campuses to the core, and the ramifications of a similar incident at Harvard, Lewis says, would be monumental.

College officials say the possibility is a real one, both in the Yard and in the Houses.

"The first thing that happens when I bust a party is I look around and see if everybody looks okay," says Noah S. Selsby '95, a proctor in Thayer Hall.

"If a student is sick in some way and needs medical attention, that's the first thing to deal with," says John O'Keefe, Allston Burr senior tutor in Dunster House.

Even Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley "Ibby" Nathans, known for her hard-line stance on drinking in the Yard and strict enforcement of College policies, says preserving students' health is of the utmost importance.

"The law grants us the latitude to encourage a response which focuses on health issues or on treatment in cases of repeated or habitual substance abuse," Nathans writes in an e-mail message.

Administrators downplay discipline and stress the protective aspects of the College's policy, framing restrictions on alcohol use as safeguards to stop students from drinking themselves to death. They emphasize the College's efforts to place students with problems into alcohol counseling.

The general sense among Harvard students is that the College's policy is fair.

In a Crimson poll of 353 undergraduates, only 30 percent said they thought the drinking policies should be less restrictive and a majority were satisfied with the status quo.

But a significant number of students are nonetheless skeptical of the College's priorities in enforcement. Less than a third said they would be likely to notify a proctor or resident tutor in the event that a friend had too much to drink, and less than tenth said they would be likely to tell another College administrator.

Stories of alcohol crackdowns permeate the College, making students--particularly first-years--wary of uneven enforcement on the part of some administrators.

As a result, students seem more comfortable turning to friends, roommates or student groups, instead of proctors and administrators, in potentially life-threatening situations.

Administrators say they must tread carefully in order to maintain the delicate balance of policy enforcement and student health and safety.

The challenge for Lewis, then, is finding a viable policy that conforms to the law and also shows concern for student health--and selling it as a logical combination rather than a balance of competing interests.

Staking Out Students?

Tales circulating throughout the College about first-years' experiences with the alcohol policy seem to validate students' mistrust of administrators.

One member of the Class of 2004 recalls a routine advising meeting with her proctor early in the fall semester when the proctor casually asked what her plans were for the night--to which she answered that she was having dinner with friends.

But when she arrived drunk at the Crimson Sports Grille later that night, she was given a rude awakening when she saw her proctor sitting at a table with Assistant Dean of Freshmen Philip A. Bean.

"[My proctor] called me over...He said, 'This is Dean Bean,'" she remembers. "So I shook hands with Dean Bean, at the Grille."

After introducing her to Bean, the proctor politely asked her to make an exit.

She later received an e-mail from Assistant Dean of Freshmen Wendy E. Torrance, who told her they should meet to discuss her "attendance" at the Grille.

At the meeting, Torrance did not ask her how she got into the Grille or if she had been drinking.

"She just said, 'I worry about you...You're going to get arrested, and when it gets to that point, Harvard can't do anything for you.'"

She received no official warning after the incident, and her proctor later apologized for what happened.

"He told me, 'If you told me you were going to the Grille, I wouldn't have accepted Dean Bean's invitation," she recalls.

The student's proctor corroborates her account of the events but would not comment further.

Lewis dismisses charges that proctors operate as spies for the College looking to catch deviant students, but he says he understand that students might see the situation differently.

"Exactly the same behavior might be regarded as looking out for students in trouble and prying into their private lives, depending on how one looks at it," Lewis writes.

Whether administrative stakeouts at the Grille constitute breaches of privacy depends on individual perspective, says Greenough Hall proctor Matthew J. DeGreeff '89, who has been a proctor for eight years.

"The Harvard police say most of the bad things that happen at Harvard start at the Grille, and they make their way out," DeGreeff says. "And the Grille lets everyone in."

Though DeGreeff says he has never gone to the Grille to catch students, if he ever ran into one of his students there, he would not be able to ignore them.

"If I see the kid and the kid sees me, I think I would have a conversation with the student the next day," he says. "And I would probably just mention it in passing to the dean."

Double-Secret Probation

DeGreeff says proctors, tutors and deans do exercise discretion regarding student alcohol use. The way he responds to an incident will often depend on how many times he has caught the student drinking in the past.

He says Nathans' policy that all alcohol incidents must be reported to the Freshman Dean's Office (FDO) does not necessarily handcuff proctors in their dealings with students, as some have charged.

"I try to give kids the chance to behave themselves," he says.

The main thing, he stresses, is for students to respect each other and their proctors and to avoid the mindset of being in Animal House.

But DeGreeff will resort to Animal House measures if necessary.

"I've put rooming groups on double-secret probation," DeGreeff jokes.

When students do get caught, they should act responsibly and honestly, DeGreef says.

According to the "Drug Tome"--Lewis's affectionate name for the 22-page pamphlet the College issues to all undergraduates in September--simple alcohol offenses can result in any number of disciplinary responses, from an informal warning to a requirement to withdraw. The best way to avoid a stiff penalty, administrators say, is to be honest with authorities.

"It's students who try to resist the law who usually get the harsher punishments," says Selsby, who has six years of proctoring experience. "We expect them to tell the truth."

But some students, he says, try to strong-arm the authorities.

"'You shouldn't have to call me in here and talk to me'--I've had students say that to me in exactly those words," Selsby says. "[Those students] don't understand how rules in society work."

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Selsby and DeGreeff note that the Yard is not the place it was 10 years ago.

"The policy seemed a lot more 'don't ask, don't tell,'" Selsby says.

But proctors like Selsby and DeGreeff who have been in place more than a couple of years are a dying breed. The high turnover rate among proctors and FDO administrators has been well-documented, but Selsby is optimistic about the performance of the large number of new proctors.

"I'd like to think that the proctors I advise deal with things the ways that I do," he says.

DeGreeff says some newer proctors are "control freaks" who feel a need to enforce the College's policies to the letter.

An e-mail message that one rookie proctor sent to her entryway in December informing her students of "new" rules in the dorm has put her under the scrutiny of FDO administrators and her students.

The e-mail informed students that if she sees them drunk in the hall, she will ask for their I.D. and she expects them to open their door on the first knock for an inspection of their room.

These rules are of course not "new," but they illustrate the discretion with which Yard proctors can--and have attempted to--administer the College's guidelines.

Under these new policies, some students in the entryway feel that they are under a great deal of scrutiny.

"We trip in the hallway, and she's like, 'Oh, you tripped because you must be drunk,'" says one student who says she never has parties in her room.

But many students still do not take the policy seriously.

"It seems like she's all talk," says another dorm resident who says he has had parties in the past. "No one has gotten in serious trouble yet in the entryway."

The proctor declined to comment for this story.

DeGreeff says the proctor's trust must have been seriously violated in order to prompt such a reaction.

"I would never send an e-mail like that," DeGreeff says. "I don't think the FDO would encourage that."

But some students say the proctor's response was justified.

"I do believe that her response was an acceptable response. This dorm has been going crazy," says one first-year, who remembers being awakened by drunk students banging on her door at 4 a.m. and watching HUPD officers force students to clean up after themselves after vomiting in the halls.

"I don't know how much [the e-mail] served its purpose," she says.

The self-described targets of the proctor's actions say they have neither the strictest nor the most lenient proctor where alcohol is concerned.

One says his roommate got his I.D. taken when a proctor broke up a party in another dorm. He adds that another friend was almost put in counseling.

But there are clearly more lenient proctors as well, he says.

"I've got friends across the Yard, you can tell that [their proctors] don't really care," he says.

The idea that some proctors prefer to handle certain incidents on their own without reporting every detail to the FDO bothers some relatively new proctors.

"I would be upset if I found out that there were [proctors not reporting alcohol incidents to the FDO], because that makes my job harder," says Casey Due, a second-year proctor in Canaday Hall. "It makes me look unnecessarily harsh...That really upsets and shocks me."

Due says she believes she would lose her job if she failed to report an incident to her assistant dean.

Certain dorms, however, are known among student for permissiveness.

"There's so much stuff going on in Thayer," one student says of Selsby's turf. "Every weekend there's an ambulance there."

But Selsby disagrees with the conclusion that some proctors are not following FDO protocol.

"It's a difficult thing to interpret from a student's point of view, because if a student does something and doesn't get caught, he might read it as the proctor looking the other way," he says.

"Kids get together in rooms and make noise," DeGreeff says. "It doesn't mean they're drinking.

"It doesn't mean [my dog] Bix is out sniffing for alcohol," he adds.

Animal Houses?

First-years say enforcement of College alcohol policies in the Houses is much more lenient than it is in the Yard--an assessment that administrators do not refute.

A security guard or a resident tutor will sometimes drop by and tell students to quiet down in the Houses, but no more, first-years say.

"When that happens in a freshman dorm, people get in a little bit more trouble," says one recipient of the December e-mail message.

Lewis says more relaxed policies in the Houses make sense both for legal and health reasons.

"All freshmen are underage, while a significant number of upperclassmen are not," Lewis writes in an e-mail message. "So from a practical standpoint, alcohol in the freshman dorms is automatically a violation of state law and College policies--in the Houses, it is not."

"[And] people who are drinking to excess for the first time are more at-risk," he says of first-years.

Despite the fact that first-years and upperclass students technically conform to the same College rules, practical differences in administrative chains of command lead to different results in the Yard and in the Houses.

When a drunk first-year checks into UHS, nurses call that student's assistant dean. The assistant dean then contacts the student's proctor who asks the student if the visit was alcohol-related. If so, the proctor must report the violation back to the assistant dean, who can then call the student in for further questioning.

But when upperclass students check into UHS, their senior tutor gets the call and will contact the students directly by phone or e-mail--or not at all. Students' resident tutors may not ever find out about the visit.

Resident tutors say they always inform their senior tutors about alcohol violations, but do not report fearing for their jobs if they fail to do so.

"I'd be surprised if that information didn't find its way over to me," says Glenn Magid, Allston Burr senior tutor in Leverett House.

HUPD will sometimes break up a House party, and neither the senior tutor nor the local resident tutor will hear anything about it, says Robert Neugeboren, senior tutor of Cabot House.

And while Selsby gives the assurance that "we bust plenty" in the Yard, resident tutors report that there is a general lack of policy violations in the Houses requiring their attention.

"I've talked to students about drinking, in the abstract," says Margaret Carter '96, a second-year resident tutor in Dunster House. "I've never had to personally implement the policy."

Carlos Diaz, a popular government department teaching fellow and Dunster House resident tutor who told Fifteen Minutes last year that he occasionally holds informal office hours at the Grille, says he has never caught any underage students drinking.

"Loud, all the time," he says. "Drunk, no."

Out of the 353 students interviewed by The Crimson, only eight said they had to meet with a proctor or resident tutor about drinking since the year began--less than 4 percent of first-years and less than 2 percent of upperclass students.

Only three said they have to meet with a senior tutor or dean, and only one said they had appeared before the Ad Board because of an alcohol violation.

But almost a tenth said they had received treatment or counseling because of alcohol use since arriving at Harvard.

Staying The Course

Lewis says he has done nothing to change Harvard's alcohol policy since he became dean in 1995.

But even if the letter of Harvard's law is the same, the spirit behind it has undergone noticeable change since the beginning of his tenure.

Proctors and tutors say that Harvard has cracked down on enforcement of its alcohol policies in the past few years in response to specific events. For instance, DeGreeff says the Ad Board handed out much tougher penalties for a period immediately following Krueger's death.

"Last year I thought the decisions were a little more even-handed," DeGreeff says.

Lewis agrees that the administration has grown increasingly vigilant about alcohol use but denies that this translates into more disciplinary action--instead he has been aggressive in promoting counseling programs.

"There actually aren't very many cases where alcohol is an explicit part of the basis for an Ad Board sanction--less than two dozen per year," he writes in an e-mail.

Small-scale changes to the College's rules--like administrators' recent decision to ban kegs at future Harvard-Yale football games--do not merit much attention as indicators of a larger ideological crackdown, Lewis argues.

"It's a very important matter that you actually have to pour beer into a cup instead of opening a tap," Lewis jokes. "This is very big stuff!"

"At some level this makes very little logical sense," he adds. "We are still going to allow alcohol."

Over the past several years, the College has been largely unwilling to experiment with or even discuss fundamental changes to the way it handles student drinking.

Lewis says his thinking on student drinking has been informed by the research of Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health.

But recommendations of Wechsler's that do not conform to Harvard's existing policies have received little notice from the administrators. The idea of a dry campus--something Wechsler considers a viable policy choice--has never come up in administrative circles, Lewis says.

"It has not been discussed to my knowledge," he writes in an e-mail. "We have not taken the viewpoint that the use of alcohol itself is wrong, only its abuse."

Despite Wechsler's feeling that heavy drinkers respond best to tough policies, disciplinary actions taken by the Ad Board for underage drinking have never risen to the level of what the College considers actual punitive measures--probation or worse--Lewis says.

The College usually handles alcohol incidents with administrative warnings, and when incidents do reach the Ad Board, the body seldom does little more than issue its own warnings. Lewis stresses that the focus of the College's response to alcohol abuse is on counseling students rather than on reprimanding them.

DeGreeff says other colleges take a much tougher stance on alcohol abuse. Babson College fines students $50 for underage drinking and the University of Delaware sends letters home to the parents of students who break drinking rules.

Legally, Harvard's policy could certainly be stricter, but Lewis says he sees no reason to take substantial steps in that direction.

Administrators have also been reluctant to explore the idea of "social norms initiatives" which aim to educate students about moderate drinking. Experts who favor such initiatives tend to argue that Wechsler's characterization of many college drinkers as binge drinkers polarizes campuses into heavy drinkers and abstainers.

Advocates of the initiatives say that colleges can counteract binge drinking by displaying signs informing students that most people party responsibly, drinking only a couple of beers per night.

But Wechsler calls this a "Madison Avenue approach" to student drinking, arguing that it advertises the problem rather than helping to fix it.

Lewis says he has heard conflicting reports on the initiatives and has not reached a decision on whether they could be effective at Harvard.

"Things that might work in one place might not work in another," Lewis says. "We haven't had any real discussions."

Nathans also says she does not consider herself expert enough to pass judgment either, though she has read Wechsler's studies and those of his critics.

Lewis has given no indication that the College will reexamine its philosophy on alcohol use in the near future.

Despite his feeling that Harvard is by no means "in control" of student drinking, he says he will have to see some new evidence before any fundamental changes are made.

"To a great extent [student drinking is] going to rise and fall with cultural trends in America," Lewis says. "Some people learn this from their parents," he says, then pauses. "It's an American problem...I think the expectation that Harvard should be solving this is a bit strange."