I went to a deliberation on Saturday, February 28th from 1-3pm at The Commonplace. The deliberation was focused on the topic of alcohol use at penn state. It was put together by a group from Lori Bedell’s class. They started off with stating the main purpose of the deliberation was to figure out who is responsible for this excessive college drinking and to reach ideas to improve the atmosphere of partying and drinking on campus. The three main approaches were stricter policies and enforcement, changing the alcohol culture, and encouraging an alcohol-free lifestyle. There were a few students from different english classes and a member from the community who was running for a public office. Instead of dividing into smaller groups, we all stayed in one big group. In my opinion it was quite a good deliberation, although very differently formatted than our discussion.

The first approach was stricter policies and enforcement. The approach was introduced with a brief overview of the current policies and the type of enforcement that is related to those consequences. The biggest question was are these policies strict enough and do we need more enforcement? There were several comments on how RAs will sometimes turn their back on students drinking in residence halls. There was also comments on how the police is only able to go after the students that are excessively drunk and causing disruptions. In fact I learned that the town police had to increase their force by three times this weekend because of state patty’s day. This is very expensive for the police force, and the reason why usually they can only monitor so many of the students that go out on a regular weekend. I agreed with most students that the best approach was to educate students instead of stricter policies. If the policies are too harsh, students may protest. If educated more, students may refrain from drinking in the first place. The other solution was to give RAs better training, so they don’t feel “too cool” to report students to administrators.

The second approach was to create proactive rules and regulations. The main idea here was that penn state claims to be a dry campus, but there is over 76% of students that admit to drinking. Is this because penn state is not doing enough to prevent students from drinking instead of assuming students will drink? Throughout the topic we discussed what are some initiatives penn state could provide to students to steer them away from drinking. There were comments on the few activities that occur in the HUB and IM building such as late night movies, crafts, and sports activities. Unfortunately, many of these events become repetitive. We thought a good solution would be to have a special committee that can establish events on friday and saturday nights that would be fun like tie-dyeing. This will encourage students who are on the edge of going out to persuade their friends to do something else instead. There was a lot of discussion on the idea of positive peer pressure in this context.

The final approach was changing the alcohol culture at penn state. The issue is many people come to this school with the conception that we are a huge party school. It is expected that students will participate in drinking. The main cause of that is peer pressure. Students want to make friends and find one of the main way to make friends is through partying, which usually leads to drinking. Once students make friends who drink they are pressured into drinking because they want to feel included. This where the idea of positive peer pressure came back. We need students who are not into drinking to stand up for their values. This can influence their friends to do the same. There is also the problem of binge drinking. Underclassmen go to a party and feel like they have to get blackout drunk, since its their only opportunity to drink. To help solve this we need to educate students on what is the safe amount of alcohol to drink. Right now there is a program by the name of SAFE and AWARE, but there is no mandatory check on whether students have taken or not. That program needs to become mandatory for every student.

We concluded with going through all three solutions and the solutions we came up for them. We also discussed how important it is to continue making this safer and educating the students that attend it.