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BY REUBEN HEYMAN-KANTOR

In print | December 1, 2005

Several incidents of alcohol-related misconduct this semester and the potential financial liability related to the current alcohol policy have led the college to tighten its enforcement of school rules, according to members of the administration.

Many students are concerned with what effect the crackdown will have on the college’s social life. While in the past, many college-funded parties served beer and mixed drinks, it appears from now on, students will have to pay for their own alcohol.

“Everyone acknowledged that there’s the potential for the social scene to change,” said Heidi Fieselmann ‘06, a member of the Dean’s Advisory Committee. “A trend that may occur is a rise in private parties or pay-parties, which might deter some people from attending. There still could be the people out there who want to throw 300 bucks of their own money out there, but you don’t know how often that is going to happen,” Fieselmann said.

With the Board of Managers quarterly meeting taking place this weekend, it is unclear if more changes to the school’s alcohol policy are on the horizon.

Myrt Westphal, dean of student life, said the fact that students were turning in false receipts to the Social Affairs Committee and using party funds for unsanctioned purchases of alcohol forced the college to act. “What are we teaching our students? To be Enron executives? I know students worry about the equality issue, but you can’t be totally equal. We don’t pay for peoples’ laundry, or their pizza or their Chinese takeout. I think there is a line over which we are not expected to be equal.” Westphal said that providing equal opportunity for students to drink illegally crossed that line.

Eve Lampenfeld ’08 doubted that the new crackdown would have much of an effect. “It will never be possible to completely control what student activities money is spent on,” she said.

Students have been falsifying receipts for a long time. However, several incidents over the past year, including broken dormitory windows, destroyed trash cans, lampposts and park benches, have caused thousands of dollars in damage and have forced the college to confront the potential financial liability of its alcohol policy and its practical implementation.

In June, a Wallingford high school student filed suit after allegedly being beaten up by Swarthmore students. The incident occurred after a SAC-funded party hosted by Psi Phi and Delta Upsilon fraternities. The lawsuit is seeking damages from the college in part over the school’s alcohol policy.

Early this semester, an inebriated student threw a table off the second floor balcony at the Sharples Dinner Hall during a SAC funded party, injuring one student. The student was later suspended.

“coming from lots of places,” Westphal said. We had already planned to review the alcohol policy this year because hospitalizations and alcohol citations were up from last year. There’s also the case that there is a lawsuit pending against the college [and] the events of the fall — trash cans, light posts, the benches that were pulled out. But also, we had more clarity about what was going on with receipts," Westphal said.

While the college has had more problems with alcohol over the past year and a half – the college reported that eight cases of liquor law violations were referred to the judicial committee in 2004, up from zero during the previous two years – it does not appear to have more problems with alcohol abuse than other liberal arts colleges.

Determining levels of alcohol abuse is difficult because colleges are generally not interested in recording and publicizing such information. However, crime statistics show that Swarthmore does not have a particularly high rate of alcohol-related arrests, compared to other colleges of a similar size.

Since the 1990 passage of the Clery Act, colleges have been required to release crime statistics to the public, including the number of liquor law arrests and cases sent to college judicial committees.

According to the reports, Swarthmore had fewer arrests (14) than Haverford (29) over the past three years. By contrast, there were 122 arrests due to alcohol on Ursinus College’s campus during the same period. Ursinus has roughly the same number of students as Swarthmore College.

But these statistics alone do not prove that fewer students at Swarthmore engage in underage drinking than at other schools. Of the 122 arrests at Ursinus College, 91 were made inside residential halls; Swarthmore police rarely if ever enter Swarthmore dormitories in search of violators of state drinking laws. Furthermore, many other small colleges, such as Skidmore, Colgate, Vassar and Hamilton reported no on-campus alcohol-related arrests.

In an effort to gauge Swarthmore’s level of alcohol abuse, Counseling Associate Tom Elverson ‘75 contacted his counterparts at Middlebury, Sarah Lawrence, Gilford, Dickenson and Kenyon. "As far as the kind of actual alcohol evaluations that I’ve done, we were at the lower end," Elverson said. “Not a lot lower, but we were lower than all of those schools, and in incidents reported to Public Safety, we were at the lower end. We weren’t the lowest, but we were towards the low end as well.” Elverson declined to release the specific data that he had obtained, citing promises of confidentiality given to administrators at the other colleges.

However, Elverson admitted that he was unsure of the circumstances and official policies of those colleges with regards to alcohol counseling.

Additional reporting by Ian Yarett

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