Alcohol Policy Spurs Confusion in Dunster

The “working draft” of the College-wide alcohol policy announced this past February became the subject of even more confusion earlier this week when Dunster House administrators mistakenly announced that “hard liquor” was banned in all private suite parties.

The House’s newsletter said that the College’s new alcohol policy stipulates that students are “no longer allowed to serve hard alcohol (whiskey, vodka etc.,) and must instead serve beer or wine.”

In an interview Monday, the Dunster House resident dean Paulette G. Curtis ’92 said that this announcement was in accordance with “College-wide” changes to the alcohol policy.

But the most recent draft of the policy does not include anything that supports a ban on hard liquor in room parties.

Dunster co-master Ann Porter confirmed in an interview yesterday that the ban on hard alcohol applies only to House Committee (HoCo) and House-sponsored parties, and that the statement was a “misprint.”

Dunster House HoCo co-chair Jeffrey C. Holder ’09 said that he will discuss the matter with the House masters in a meeting today.

College deans did not respond to repeated requests for comment both yesterday and Monday.

In February, College administrators presented an alcohol policy to the Committee on House Life (CHL) as a working draft, saying that it was collaboratively produced by the Office of the Dean of the College, the Office of the General Counsel, HoCos, and House masters.

Holder said that he and other HoCo chairs were not informed about the new policies until after the policy was reported in a Crimson story.

The working draft has not been distributed to the student body and is being announced in each of the Houses at the discretion of individual House masters. Additionally, though it is a draft, it is also “working,” meaning that it is being enforced by the College at the same time that it is still being finalized.

Undergraduate Council Vice President Randall S. Sarafa ’09 said that the alcohol policy was simply presented to CHL as a policy that would be immediately put in force.

“There is definitely a lack of transparency with how these rules were developed,” he said.

The most recent document is the 14th version of the policy that intends to standardize alcohol policy for students, student groups, and HoCos.

Since the announcement of this policy in February, a number of incidents have indicated that the policy may not be a cure-all for problems of miscommunication and variation that exists among the Houses.

Just weeks after the document was released, rumors and confusion left HoCo chairs uncertain about how to proceed in light of the new regulations, prompting College administrators to attend the HoCo retreat in mid-February to clarify questions and concerns that arose from the new rules.

The document also includes changes to policies that affect private parties as well as student group-sponsored events.

In late January, controversy brewed on Mather House’s open list about regulations that prohibited students from advertising private parties over the e-mail list. Though the rule was a part of the College-wide alcohol policy announced later that week, administrators in other Houses have not made similar efforts to enforce it.

“All they did was disseminate it to the masters and the HoCo chairs and not the general student body,” Sarafa said. “I think it needs to be better communicated to students exactly what these policies are.”

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached at adphill@fas.harvard.edu.