"Stanford's undergraduate students will no longer be allowed to drink hard alcohol at on-campus parties," CNN reported a week ago. There are so many things wrong with this statement that I'll try to dissect them all, but I make no promises.
It is not a new phenomenon that universities across the board are having major problems with alcohol abuse and the unfortunate events result from it. What I mean by this is and what the facts show is that in this day and age 1 in 5 college students experience sexual assault to some extent during their college experience.
The Huffington Post details how the "It's on Us" nationwide campaign has brought light to the situation on many college campuses. But, what all of these reports, regulations, and stipulations don't address is that alcohol does not make decisions. Alcohol may make you unable to make rational decisions, but alcohol is not to blame when you make a bad decision. You and you alone are to blame.You can ban hard alcohol or all alcohol for that matter from college campuses, but students are still going to find the parties. They'll put their alcohol in water bottles. You'll never be able to stop it because it has already gotten way too out of hand.
"The university's students can still drink beer and wine at such events, but will no longer be permitted to have hard alcohol that has more than 20% alcohol by volume or 40 proof. The new policy also limits the size of the bottles of hard liquor they're allowed to keep in their dorms or common areas to under 750 milliliters."
So instead of educating the student population about binge drinking and the repercussions of it they are just going to "take away" all of the more "dangerous" alcohol. This will not help. This seems like an excuse of rule in response to the Brock Turner case. To me the University is blaming alcohol for their recent diminished reputation by the media. Alcohol must be the one to blame when 21, 22, or 23 year-old's make bad decisions, right? Wrong. The University was forced to take action. This is what they came up with; a sad excuse of a rule that will make no difference. I included some tweets below that responded to the fact that Stanford was basically saying that Brock Turner was not to blame and that alcohol was.
