Dartmouth College bans hard liquor: Can booze limits improve student safety?

[KamaAina]

http://news.yahoo.com/dartmouth-college-bans-hard-liquor-booze-limits-improve-205446575.html

Dartmouth College, a school with a notoriously rowdy and widespread Greek culture, is taking action to curb misconduct on the Hanover, N.H., campus by banning hard liquor.

On Thursday, school President Philip Hanlon announced that starting March 30, all students, regardless of age, will be prohibited from possessing hard alcohol on campus. The school’s Greek societies have also been warned that they need to improve their behavior or risk being banned.

The measures come at a time when school officials across the United States are considering ways to crack down on a culture of excessive partying found at many colleges. The White House says the behavior has led to an “epidemic” of sexual assault on school campuses....

Dartmouth’s plan, entitled Move Dartmouth Forward, is just one response to the party culture. Instead of banning fraternities, Dartmouth is experimenting with new rules to make the campus safer.

Dartmouth introduced Jello shots to the rest of the Ivy League. An old buddy who was in the Yale band and thus used to road-trip up there is encouraging them to go for the beer and wine options with the highest alcohol content, such as malt liquor and Night Train. (OK, that one was my suggestion. )

[benz380]

1. Good luck with that. The ban will cause more students to want to get hard liquor. nt

[Maedhros]

2. When I was in college, there was a local law preventing the establishment

of a "bar" (i.e. a business primarily selling liquor) within a certain radius of campus. The net effect: students drove to the bars, liquored up, and drove back home. I wouldn't say that made anyone safer.

Later, when I was in graduate school in Canada, the drinking age was 19 and there were 7 or 8 bars on campus. Binge-drinking was not a common occurrence, and the only alcohol-related injury during my four years there was when a student slipped on the icy steps of her dorm on her way back from the bar inside the student union (and there is an argument to be made that that injury was weather-related, and not drinking-related).

Prohibition doesn't seem to solve these problems.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. You'd think a school as big as Dartmouth would have a History department. Apparently not.

[KamaAina]

4. Well, it's not one of the Big Three Ivies

Yale, Harvard and Princeton.

[kelliekat44]

5. When I was in school (1960-1964)

Alcohol ON CAMPUS would get you expelled if you got caught. Didn't cause our student body any problems. Some kids went off campus to get drunk and surely some bought alcohol on campus secretly. But alcohol and drugs were not the problem they are now on campus and rape was unheard of but hazing was a problem.

[KamaAina]

7. Unheard of?

Or unreported?

[hifiguy]

6. i went up to Dartmouth's Winter Carnival once.

I was in law school and a friend's brother was a senior there. He was a member of the fraternity that was the model for, and fraternity of the guy who wrote, Animal House: Chris Miller.

Didn't drink a drop of hard liquor all weekend. 30 beers the first night and about fifteen the next were more than sufficient.

[Brickbat]

8. Went to college on a dry campus and it does absolutely nothing to curb underage or legal drinking.

Or rape, for that matter.

[Still Sensible]

9. Now they'll just go off campus

to drink. Doesn't help the problem, probably increases the risk... just transfers it to others.