COLUMN: ?or did the student body have it coming?

From Mark Fiore's, "The Right Stuff," Fall '99 From Mark Fiore's, "The Right Stuff," Fall '99One of the most absurd protests in the history of student activism will take the stage tomorrow on College Green. A group of students has organized the rally to oppose the University's new alcohol policy, which bans alcohol at registered undergraduate events. Though Senior Class President Sarah Gleit has seen those effects -- her brother died from alcohol abuse -- she apparently chooses to ignore them, instead focusing her efforts on helping to organize Tuesday's rally. Talk about hypocrisy. One month ago, Gleit, along with men's basketball tri-captain Jed Ryan, urged students to become aware of the dangers of alcohol by sharing her family story with the University community. Now she's protesting similar efforts. Such apathy to alcohol-related tragedies diminishes the deaths of individuals like Michael Tobin and the injuries to the dozens of Penn students who have been rushed to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after taking in too much alcohol over the last five years. Indeed, during University President Judith Rodin's five-year tenure, the number of alcohol-related incidents has grown each year and the dialogue aimed at preventing them has increased proportionally. The new policy is a culmination of those events -- not the result of a single tragedy, Tobin's death. It is also the upshot of the irresponsibility of Penn students, all of whom deserve at least some degree of blame. This academic year alone, at least six Penn students have been hospitalized for alcohol-related causes. One student, a male freshman in Stouffer College House, drank so many shots of vodka that he vomited repeatedly and eventually drifted in and out of consciousness. Another student, a female freshman, landed in the hospital after drinking about 10 mixed drinks and at least two shots of tequila at a hotel party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. She later returned to her Quad dorm room, where she started to throw up and became unresponsive. "She looked horrible. It was scary," said one witness. Such scenes -- and the realization that one of your friends might die -- should be enough to convince any Penn student that the new policy is absolutely necessary, at least until more permanent measures can be implemented. What's more, the University has worked toward finding effective permanent measures for years. A task force established to examine the issue made several recommendations last fall, including the hiring of an alcohol policy coordinator and an increase in alcohol-free programming. Students who argue that the new policy came out of the blue need only look at those efforts. In the fall of 1997 -- following a string of alcohol-related incidents at Penn and across the country -- University administrators pleaded for action to curb alcohol abuse. Prophetically, University President Judith Rodin said at an October University Council meeting, "I don't think that there will be a consensus on this issue. I think that, ultimately, we will have to make some hard and important decisions." Those decisions, at least for the time being, have now come. And students have no one to blame but themselves. Just look at the disasters that alcohol produced in the fall of 1997, when the number of students sent to HUP from excessive drinking was "in the double digits," according to Drug and Alcohol Resource Team advisor Kate Ward-Gaus. In separate incidents early that semester, three Hill freshmen almost lost their lives. One male student stopped breathing after consuming a large number of shots of liquor and had to be put on a respirator. Another male student repeatedly threw up and eventually lost consciousness. Later that semester, a drunk Zeta Beta Tau brother and College sophomore jumped out of a second-story window at the ZBT house and sustained minor injuries. Such violence wasn't confined to individuals. One night, two groups of drunken students engaged in a bloody fight that ended when a student hit the ground, opening a large gash on the back of his head. One of the students then punched a University Police officer in the face. Alcohol-induced violence both to individuals and to others was far less common when Rodin took the helm at the University in the summer of 1994. During Rodin's first year as president, 1994-95, only one student reportedly landed at HUP from intoxication. That number jumped to a handful the following year and has been increasing ever since. The University has been left with no choice. So instead of attending Tuesday's foolish rally, use the afternoon to reflect on when you drank just a little too much or saw a friend drink just a little too much. Because the next time you drink a little too much, you could find yourself at HUP, or worse, the morgue.