Less Liability, More Danger

It’s late on a Saturday night in the near future, and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 has received a nightmare call. A student has died from alcohol intoxication after a night of binge drinking with a student organization—and was not taken to University Health Services (UHS). Soon afterwards, Gross must call the student’s parents to deliver the news.

Thanks to the College’s new alcohol policy—approved last week by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—he can place the blame on the student organization’s leaders and tell the parents those leaders will be punished. What he probably will not say is that if those same policies were not in place their son or daughter might still be alive.

We hope a hypothetical situation like this will never happen. But the new alcohol policy has made it more likely. By reshaping the amnesty policy so that student group leaders are held responsible for all alcohol-related incidents at student group events, regardless of whether or not an ill student has been taken to UHS, the College has erected a dangerous obstacle to students voluntarily bringing their friends to the hospital.

Though the College’s amnesty policy for intoxicated students who voluntarily seek medical help for themselves or their friends was previously uncodified, it provided the right incentives for promoting sound decisions. Now, the policy has been muddied by the new culpability clause for student group leaders. Its message to students? "We’ll give you amnesty…except when we won’t."

The new policy is especially ironic since UHS released a study in early May that reported a steady fall in the number of alcohol-related hospital visits over the past few years. Even more promising, the students who enter the hospital have lower blood alcohol levels, meaning that students are taking their friends to UHS well before their condition becomes life threatening.

Ryan M. Travia, director of the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Services and a member of the Committee on Social Clubs which designed the new policy, told The Crimson that the lower levels are largely due to Harvard’s amnesty policy, which does not levy penalties on students who seek medical attention or students who bring their friends to the hospital.

The Committee on Social Clubs—the ad hoc body responsible for the alcohol policy revision—ignored Travia’s statement to the detriment of the student body. Rather than focus on the positives of the College’s new amnesty policy, this committee—unsurprisingly commissioned by the General Counsel of the University and not the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Services—centered its attention on two near-death incidents last fall.

Although these cases are obviously terrible, the committee is delusional in thinking that anything the College does short of actively enforcing a total ban of alcohol on campus will eradicate dangerous drinking.

Its report, which is almost comical in its naiveté, states, "The Committee’s impression is that undergraduates view excessive drinking or drug use as an accepted feature of college life" and "it is imperative that we try to change attitudes on campus now, before such an incident occurs." It is obvious from just those two sentences how out of touch the Committee—which did not include students—was for the realities of student life.

The College’s focus should be on promoting alcohol safety, not conducting pointless witch-hunts against student group leaders. A much more practical way to save lives, and even prevent binge drinking from getting out of hand, would be to make the College’s amnesty policy as loose as possible. Students—and especially intoxicated students—should not have to conduct a cost-benefit analysis every time they think they might want to bring an intoxicated friend to hospital.

We hope that the Faculty either rescinds the legislation in the fall or that the College simply does not enforce it. Otherwise, Dean Gross may well find himself struggling to answer difficult questions from devastated parents in the future.