By Meredith Loomis Quinlan, Student Commission President
While I am unhappy about Residential Life’s decision to terminate Darrin Camilleri from the position of Resident Assistant, this letter comes from four years of frustration with K’s alcohol policy, not just this one incident. Darrin had three alcohol-related offenses in his termination letter. These offenses conflicted with the standards that Darrin had agreed to hold himself to as an RA. I do not think that ResLife was wrong in their decision, and it makes sense given their policy that this would be the course of action. My problem is with the policy and the roles of RAs at K.
Every year that I have been at K, I have interacted with students who want to change the alcohol policy—it’s an on-going issue for many students that think the policy is unfair. In my mind the alcohol policy is not the most important issue impacting our campus. I think it is petty compared to the racial discrimination experienced by students of color on a daily basis, the violence experienced by women in the basements of parties and behind closed dorm room doors, and the economic distress of taking on debt to pay off tuition. This is just the start of the list of issues I prioritize over the alcohol policy. However, unlike these other issues, which often seem nebulous and hard to change, the policy is a concrete document. The charges brought against a student in our conduct system are documented, the letters received by students have tangible consequences and all of these items provide distinct examples that can be debated and changed.
In my four years of working on drug and alcohol policy at this college, the response I have most often heard is, “Well, this is the law. It is illegal for people under the age of 21 to drink, and we must have policies that are consistent with the law.” Yes, I get that. I understand that challenging state and national law places the college in a vulnerable position. However, this puritanical law does not prevent students who are under the age of 21 from drinking. We all know this. The law does prevent us from having honest conversations about alcohol at K. It prevents us from talking about addiction; it prevents us from creating policies that are realistic and prioritize health and safety; and it prevents us from encouraging responsible drinking behavior. This law is harmful in that it is out of touch with the reality of young people in this state and country and it forces institutions like K College to take on an enforcer role that diverts resources from community building to punishment. What if Residential Life did not have to take the time to go over all of the cases involving underage drinking in the dorms? Imagine if RAs didn’t have to police their halls on the weekends and could focus their energy on creating fun places to live? Heck, if they were into drinking, they could even have some beers with residents at a party. They could interact with the partiers and non-partiers. They wouldn’t have residents avoiding eye contact at 11 p.m. on a Friday when that darn bottle-on-bottle clinking noise occurs in a backpack.
During the past fall quarter I was terrified at campus parties. I was sure someone was going to die from alcohol poisoning this year. First years, I’m sorry, but many of you didn’t know how to hold your liquor. I heard the stories about puking up bloody vomit, passing out in driveways and falling down basement stairs, just like everyone else. Yes, as students we need to be more responsible drinkers. I also think that the school needs to wake up and see that a prohibitive alcohol policy that pushes underage drinkers off campus into the neighborhood late at night, far away from RAs and security, is creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for our students.
Meredith -
I appreciate this conversation being held in such a constructive manner. Thank you for addressing the issue so bluntly and bravely, especially when many in the administration seem to be nonresponsive in their consideration of students’ voices. I also agree that the responsibility for remedying the problem is multi-faceted and needs to come from within the student body’s treatment of alcohol inasmuch as the administration’s policies need to be critically examined.
Having been an RA for 8 total quarters here at K (5 of those being a Senior RA) in 3 of the 6 halls, I’m one of the most experienced of the RAs we have here. Believe me, I have plenty of my own criticisms of ResLife and how we approach policy. My own personal philosophy when it comes to confronting policy violations is that if a resident is being dumb enough to let me know that they’re breaking a policy, they’re probably being dumb enough to endanger themselves or others because of their behaviors. At the end of the day, that’s the kind of behavior I want to avoid, and I so direly wish that the legal drinking age were 18 so that I could put the school’s money to good use and actually teach residents how to drink responsibly, both by programming and by example. Oh my god, my job would be so much more fun and useful if I could do that.
I also know that painting ResLife and RAs as a whole as strict rule-enforcers that don’t care about building community is incredibly damaging to our jobs.
We RAs are in training for 2 weeks over the summer before the rest of the students arrive (3 for the SRAs). We’re in training for 54 hours during the first week, give or take about 3 hours. Out of those 54 hours, we cover Policies, Student Conduct & Crisis for 4.5 hours, Respectful Confrontation Skills for 1 hour (which I conducted myself), and Alcohol Ed for 1.5 hours. That’s 7/54 hours devoted in some way, shape, or form to what you’re talking about, and we definitely did not cover alcohol violations for that entire period of time. The rest of that week’s training was devoted to all of the other duties that RAs have to cover in our jobs. I guarantee that the number of times I confront alcohol violations in the dorms compared to the number of times I council residents on issues or concerns they have, negotiate roommate conflicts, plan and host programming intended to build community, and refer residents to other resources pretty directly reflects the number of hours we spend in training on those various topics.
I don’t police anything in my dorm, and using language to imply that I do only makes my job more difficult. I can’t build a community that thinks I’m out to get them, and I can only hope that I’ve made my position on the policies clear to my residents. Hell, I’ve talked about what our favorite kinds of booze are with some of my first years while I’m on duty. I haven’t asked to see inside their fridge or their closets because I know I don’t need to. I would so much rather my residents have a wine night in their room with a group of their friends than go to a 30/30 at somebody’s house they don’t know and come back absolutely smashed. As far as healthy drinking habits go, the first sounds pretty damn good to me, and unless I hear “Want some more wine?” as I walk by, I have no reason to knock on the door and ask if there’s alcohol in the room because as far as I know, it might just be a group of friends hanging out. We don’t search and we don’t police, and if that’s a message that RAs are receiving during training, then we need to reevaluate that process, but it’s not one that I impart to the RAs that I mentor.
I care a lot about the dorms here. I think that living in a dorm is a super-important and really special part of college life. When else are you going to be living so closely with your entire friend group? (Hopefully always if the village model catches on, but unfortunately it hasn’t yet.) So, I try to help my residents have the most positive dorm experience possible through my relationships with them and the opportunities I try to provide for them to connect with others. Confronting policy violations is my least favorite part of the job; ask any RA and they’ll probably tell you the same. But the idea that we’re a police force is something I hate having to combat. We all get shitty reps, and that in itself is an uphill battle that I don’t want to have to spend time and energy on.