This link is a blog write up of last night’s events at Wesleyan. More coverage in other Wesleying posts.

Other coverage is here and here.

If you want to picture the scene, think a typical packed Fountain party on a misty night. Line the entire street with MPD cars. Both sides of the street were flanked with curious/bewildered students with digicams and camera phones, and right in front of the first MPD car in the middle of the road is basically a clusterf*** of maybe 50-100 people. It’s this cluster that’s doing most of the chanting/singing/clapping.

About five minutes later, the police formed a line and started moving forward with their dogs and firing their paintball guns. A canister of tear/pepper gas was fired into the air. At this point it was pure chaos–One person made a run for it and was promptly brought to the ground by five MPDs. Picture people screaming at the police, students physically restraining other students, and one of the arrested kids kicking a patrol car’s door so hard that it bent the frame from the inside and nearly knocked out the window. MPD began menacingly shining the laser guides of their tasers at people. Five students were apprehended for various reasons (I saw at least one running). Of these, two were tasered, and at least three were viciously attacked by the dogs. Many people suffered from the pepper gas because the wind blew it across the crowd, towards Church Street. There was a lot of coughing and people covering their noses and mouths with their shirts. At some point, maybe out of spite, someone went into a house and turned up the music even louder. Students began asking for badge numbers and for reasons for the police presence and why their friends had gotten arrested.

Four years and three days ago College Council debated this very issue, and decided overwhelmingly against restricted card access. Direct input from a large number of students was the basis of the decision; we had an unusually high influx of opinions that week.

I urge the leaders of campus today to remember the debate of four years ago, links to its records are in the extended entry. I urge them also to remember that no decision that provides Security with a new tool that they feel prevents danger and damages can be easily reversed. In other words, restricted access in even some dorms this year is highly likely to lead to at least as much restriction in future years, and likely more, and even if no benefit from such restraints were to materialize the restrictions will remain in place.

We are looking at not just an inconvenience this semester but likely an enduring change in campus culture. Students may well have this forced on them someday, but they ought not to take it by choice.

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Thought that my praise of the College’s openness with regard to the Alcohol Report was premature? You were right! Director of Public Affairs Jim Kolesar ‘74 writes:

We made a technical mistake in posting the alcohol web site. The data is intended to inform college discussion. The intent was for it not to be available to the public since we’re not aware of sufficiently comparable data from other schools. The mistake was that the site was posted originally in a way that made it open to all. That’s now been corrected. We intend to make it available to alumni and parents. That correction will take a day or two. When it’s ready, we’ll notify all alumni and parents for whom we have e-mail addresses.

Pathetic. As Jim notes, the site is no longer available.

1) File this under the category of no praise goes rewarded. When will the College learn that, 95% of the time, honesty is the best policy? I find it impossible to believe that any potential applicants would choose, say, Amherst over Williams because of what they read in the Report if Amherst refuses to publish similar data. High school seniors are not that stupid!

2) It would be reasonable for the College to sanitize the Report a bit, prior to publication. Reasonable people might suggest that the raw comments should be summarized and not included. But to hide the entire report from the world over concerns about the lack of “sufficiently comparable data from other schools” is borderline dishonesty. Will tour guides be instructed not to mention the Report? Will applicants who request a copy be denied one?

3) Still want to read a copy of the Report? Well, EphBlog is here to help! Now, the relationship between EphBlog and the College is a tricky one. We are not out to embarrass the Williams; we want more people to apply and more of those accepted to enroll. But, as Dean Fix reminds us, “intellectual honesty is the highest value at Williams.” So, while I have never abused my alumni login privileges by accessing a private document and then making it public, I am happy enough to facilitate such abuse by others. So, where is the student brave enough to post the Report (or at least the highlights an summary) to her own blog?

4) The most recent example of similar College reticence concerns the Report on Varsity Athletics. To this day, the College refuses to post a copy of this Report on its website, despite the fact that it is one of the most important College documents produced in the last decade. Why should the College be afraid of discussions like this? It is sad to see a similar pattern of secrecy and denial in the case of alcohol on campus.

Congratulations to Williams, and the people who run it, for being so open in discussions of the issue of alcohol on campus. The full report is here. Below the break is the e-mail that Dean Roseman recently sent to the “Williams Community”.

[I make this point every week or so. Let me make it again now. Alumni are part of the "Williams Community." Any all-campus staff/student e-mail should be publicly archived so that interested alumni can stay abreast of campus issues. Why must the College be so secretive that we alums need to rely on undergraduate spies to be kept informed?]

The topic of alcohol (much less drugs) is an interesting one. Perhaps the report is worth reading. But, for a process-obsessed curmudgeon like me, the most important thing is that Williams has published it conclusions and the underlying data for all to see. Openness is the sine qua non of a scholarly community. Kudos all around.

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After reading the Record editorial decrying the College’s poor response to a report on alcohol use at Williams, I was intrigued.

Then today I read this article in the Washington Post about how my city has a “zero-tolerance” policy for people who drive. Sadly, it drove home the point at Williams, the only people who are serious about enforcing the law are the Williamstown Police. And that’s a shame.

Why? Because the college has always had a strange relationship with its students concerning the consumption of alcohol. There’s a tacit understanding that if people are “having a good time” and not harming themselves, in a safe environment, that the college isn’t concerned with underage drinking. The WPD have a clear line, however, that extends for everyone below 21. It’s the combination of these two properties that creates a murky area doing no one any good.

Outlawing personal alcohol at homecoming last year, for instance, is a perfect example of the college’s unwillingness to perform its own duties vis-a-vis alcohol. If Security were capable of enforcing a ban on underage drinking at games, they wouldn’t have needed to outlaw all fans from bringing in alcohol to tailgate. Because they were not, however, changes had to be made to the system which ultimately hurt alumni and all people of age.

That’s the sticky point: the WPD, despite any flaws, respects law-abiding citizens. The college, however, seems to view the problem as an area in which it can

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There has been some interesting discussion on Ephblog of binge drinking recently (here and here).

Jeff Zeeman made the following claim:

re: state schools, I obviously can’t say anything definitive since I have no hard data. But based on experiences of friends at Rutgers, UMass, and Penn State, which I would imagine are pretty typcial, the big difference from Williams is that, at Williams, hardly anyone was drinking Sunday through Wednesday night, most people would go out Saturday and perhaps either Thursday or Friday as well. At the bigger schools I have visited or heard about, there seemed to be more people who were plastered on the weekends, and a LOT more who were drinking consistently 4-5 nights a week. Of course, the student bodies are so much bigger that it might have seemed deceptive, but talking to my friends, they just thought it was laughable based on their visits to Williams during their frosh year that Williams students considered the school to have a lot of campus drinking going on.

Well, I went to the US Dept. of Education site that HWC suggested and found the crime rates for the schools in question. I then divided the incidence rates by the number of students at the school and averaged over three years. You can download the small excel spreadsheet here.

Bottom-line (measured in incidents per 1,000 students):
Williams = 65
Penn State = 34
Rutgers = 21

So Williams has twice as many liquor law incidents as Penn State and three times as many as Rutgers.

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