COLUMN: Use It, or Lose it

From Jason Brenner's "My 20 Inches," Fall '95 From Jason Brenner's "My 20 Inches," Fall '95To BYOB or not to BYOB, that is the question. In fact, it's such a difficult question that in the three years I've attended this fine educational institution, the issue remains unsolved. For anyone who hasn't been outside their room this semester, please allow me to tell you how you can get beer at a BYOB party. Go to your favorite fraternity and show a note from your mom that says you're 21. Pay the five dollar "entertainment fee" (you're paying for the DJ -- wink, wink). Now walk to the bar, stick your hand out and receive a three-week-old, warm can of some delectable brew like Piel's, Black Label, or the ever-exquisite National Bohemian. Call me old-fashioned, but if the University wants to be BYOB, the University should support the policy. As a Greek member myself, I feel it has been sufficiently proven throughout the last few years that the policy will not work at Penn without significant revision. So either support it or drop the policy and quit pretending. Despite the policy's ineffectiveness, the reason behind instituting BYOB truly makes sense. Let's say some dork comes to your party in which you are serving alcohol. He drinks too much and decides to walk home in the middle of the street, thus ending up as a giant mess for a clean-up crew the next day. Well, you and your fraternity better start holding that bake sale so you can raise a couple million dollars to pay for the kid's medical expenses. Something must truly be wrong with our legal system when other people can be held accountable for a person's irresponsibility, but it's no news flash that the American legal system is greatly flawed. When the BYOB policy works correctly, it will protect fraternity members from paying millions of dollars out of their own pockets to cover expenses from drunk students who commit harm to themselves and others. As most Greek members can attest to, fraternity insurance is expensive?but if you serve somebody alcohol and that person injures himself or others, you can watch your insurance company drop you like an empty can of Schlitz Ice. I'm not trying to rip apart fraternities because I truly believe that they are not responsible for the BYOB fiasco. Can you really blame houses for not adhering to the policy? There isn't any incentive for a chapter to throw a true BYOB party in which five people might show up. There isn't any real consequence for violating the policy. Fraternities have adapted all kinds of cute little tricks to convince monitors into believing parties are actually BYOB. But in reality, monitors don't even show up to inspect the parties a lot of times. Can you blame them? These monitors are adults (read: people with real jobs) who spend their weekend nights trying to institute a policy that will protect the fraternities. When violations are found, monitors are practically left in the cold, with little or no support from the University. Chapters get off scott-free or their case is tied up in bureaucratic red tape for months while awaiting a hearing from the Greek Peer Judicial Board, a group of fellow Greek students. I think it's doubtful -- maybe questionable at best -- that BYOB can ever work on this campus. I truly don't think that partying freshmen will want to buy overpriced beer at Wawa and give it to some meathead working at the fraternity's bar, only to see it distributed to everyone but themselves. Not to mention that paying a couple of bucks merely for the use of a sticky basement floor and some overplayed songs does not sound too attractive. In a true BYOB setting, fraternity parties will become a memory of the past, a piece of nostalgia to be reminisced by upperclassmen such as myself. Fraternities will lose a solid base of their rush classes as freshman will not be able to see how houses fare in true social settings. Freshmen will go elsewhere, be it other campus groups or off-campus houses, to find parties. They will die of alcohol poisoning just as easily as they would at a fraternity party. Holding Greeks to a strict BYOB policy is great, but what about all the other parties on campus? The University should either decide to support its floundering policy and apply it to all aspects of campus social life or drop it entirely. Simply saying that Penn is a BYOB campus, while attractive to alumni and faculty, is an outright lie. The policy -- changed over and over again through the years -- has been entirely unsuccessful since I was a freshman. BYOB is a noble idea, but a dying reality. In the meantime, don't waste your time and money buying alcohol and bringing it to parties. Enjoy drinking your Golden Anniversary premium beer and hope that no drunk person slips as they walk down your fraternity's stairs.