Trustees Form Alcohol Advisory Committee
By Jeff Horwitz
News Editor

There were plenty of firemen and paramedics at Harwood Halloween this year, and most of them weren’t in costume. By the end of Harwood, Pomona’s biggest party of the year, three students were in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, one student with serious respiratory problems. In response to similar incidents, Pomona’s Student Affairs Committee will begin researching Pomona’s “alcohol culture” this week.

The study, to be undertaken by the all-student Committee for Investigating the Alcohol Culture at Pomona College (CIACPC), will use questionnaires and public forums to gauge student opinion and habit regarding alcohol. When its inquiry ends in early December, the committee will present its findings to the Student Affairs Committee, which is sponsoring the study, as well as to the Pomona community at large.

According to Phil Kopczynski ’03, ASPC President and chair of the CIACPC, the study’s report will not draw any conclusions or make any suggestions. “There will be no policy recommendations,” he said, “just the picture.”

While fundamentally a fact-finding venture, the data gathered in the study could potentially result in a major change to the college’s alcohol policy. According to Dean of Students Ann Quinley, the Board of Trustees has been concerned with alcohol policy since the near death of a Pomona Student in Nu Alpha Phi’s fraternity initiation last year, in which the victim had to be resuscitated. The incident was Pomona’s closest call in years.

“I spoke with the trustees about [the initiation incident]. They suggested we have a consultant look at alcohol, because they said if this person had died, we would be having a really different conversation. So let’s have that conversation now, before someone dies,” Quinley said. “Once you have a death, you don’t play with [the alcohol issue]. You say it’s over.”

At the trustee’s suggestion, Pomona looked into hiring an outside consultant to study the issue. However, issues of effectiveness and cost quickly convinced the school that an outside consultant might not be appropriate. “Students felt that nobody could come in and understand the alcohol culture at Pomona half as well as the people who live here and observe it every day,” she said.

Student Affairs Committee member Cory Forsyth ’03, who is on the committee, agreed. “Consultants are extrememly expensive, and a lot of the work they were going to do was just snooping around,” he said. “No one knows Pomona’s alcohol culture better than the students.”

The committee was formed out of four student members of the Student Affairs Committee, and supplemented by four other students of the original four’s choosing. “We have a pretty good spectrum of students,” said Kopcyznski. “We have everybody from people who drink regularly to people who don’t drink at all.” Six of the eight authors of the study are seniors, with the last two spots occupied by sophomores.

The CIACPC will begin its research this week by sending out a 40 question electronic survey to all student email accounts. Over the course of the next month, the committee will hold forums to gather data on student drinking, and attempt to assemble profiles of situations that commonly lead to alcohol poisoning through an analysis of the hospital records of students who were treated for alcohol-related problems. “We expect that alcohol poisoning primarily occurs either on nights that are totally dead, or at big parties, like Harwood Halloween,” Kopcyznski said. The study will also collect data on other potential risk factors for alcohol poisoning, including class year, the style of college parties and student awareness of the signs of alcohol poisoning.

While the investigation into alcohol use will almost certainly uncover some unhealthy drinking habits, both the students on the committee and the Pomona administration denied that the results of the study would be used simply as an excuse to restrict drinking on campus. “There’s a lot of misperception on campus,” said Kopcyznski. “The goal of the study is definitely not to tighten the policy,” he added, “none of this is happening with the assumption that all alcohol is bad.”

Speaking for the Pomona administration, Dean Quinley expressed a similar opinion. According to her, the problem isn’t social drinking, but hard alcohol and the way in which students drink it. Even before the completion of the study, anecdotal evidence has convinced her that drinking hard alcohol in private is the primary source of the recent increase in poisoning cases. “I told the trustees that if I could ban hard alcohol on campus, I would,” Quinley said. “I don’t think I can, though.”

Beer, according to Quinley, is a much safer alternative to hard alcohol, due to the sheer quantity of liquid that is required to arrive at a toxic blood alcohol level. As evidence of this, she noted that all three Pomona students hospitalized on Harwood Halloween were doing shots. “I don’t think you could [get seriously sick] from beer, unless you were funneling,” she said. Kopcyznski agreed: “It’s real, real hard to get alcohol posioning from beer,” he said.

The comparitive safety beer offers brings both college social organizations and Pomona’s administration together in an unusual way. To avoid student consumption of hard alcohol in private, both students and the administration would prefer having large college parties at which the entire student body is able to drink beer, rather than restricting the fun to upperclassmen of legal age and assorted underclassmen with fake ID’s. “I was much happier with the situation quite a few years ago, when people who were 18 could drink,” said Quinley, “I don’t think there was nearly as much hard alcohol in that environment.”

Changes in federal law at the beginning of the 80’s, however, put an end to keggers in freshman dorms. Today’s tighter national alcohol laws mandate that schools must not permit “enforcement free zones”—public places in which illegal alcohol and drug usage is tolerated. According to Dean Quinley, this often puts Pomona in a situation in which the school’s obligation to protect student welfare comes into direct conflict with Pomona’s obligation to obey the law.

“I think we have some obligation to enforce alcohol policy, and not have every first year student have a fake ID card that the college knows about and winks at,” she said. “On the other hand, if you’re going to cheat and drink, I’d rather have you cheat and drink in public.”

It is, she admits, a strange position for a school’s administration to be in, and one which may complicate the school’s ability to address the issue of alcohol policy when the CIACPC’s report comes out in December.

For the moment, however, the student members of the committee on alcohol claim that they are only interested in forming an accurate picture of the drinking scene at Pomona. According to several students on the CIACPC, their research will be used to promote safe drinking on campus, not end it. “Generally, the feel is that if we crack down, people are going to drink in secret, which is not conducive to a healthy environment,” said Forsyth. “The primary goal is safety.”

Kopcyznski concurred. “Many, many students use alcohol responsibly,” he noted, adding, “There’s nothing wrong with social drinking.”

Although it’s impossible to tell how the administration and trustees will react to the study’s conclusions, Kopcyznski expressed his faith that any eventual steps they take “will not look like they were made by the dean from Animal House. It’s my impression that the trustees are simply concerned about the safety of students,” he said, noting that alcohol issues at Pomona have traditionally been handled primarily by RA’s and the student body, not dictated from above. “This is students looking out for each other,” he said, “Students are going to have a say in this from start to finish.”