College students like to drink — yes, especially the underage ones. This is a simple fact of life the Northwestern administration can’t seem to get over. That’s not news, but in the last couple of years, the university’s efforts to squash alcohol consumption have become bizarrely authoritarian, including threats on extracurriculars and a bent towards off-campus life. Now there’s an unspoken uproar of students who say the administration’s Cosmo-hunting tactics aren’t just annoying — they’re actually damaging.
Student productions have frequently thrown fundraising parties at off-campus apartments where a door fee, usually $5, is charged. They may be the easiest way for theater students to raise extra money for shows and for freshmen without connections to dance and drink Everclear-spiked punch to their livers’ content. Though they’ve been a mainstay of Northwestern life for years, one sophomore theater producer says it became apparent last year that police were busting parties much earlier in the night than they had previously. One party she was unaffiliated with greeted the po-po at their door as early as 11:30 p.m., and she said patrol cars regularly sought people out.
Two students producing shows this year say that, behind closed doors, the administration threatened ASG funding if they were caught throwing fundraiser parties. That belligerent policy maneuver has pushed theater parties farther underground, with little to no publicity, and many have disappeared altogether. In that sense, the effort to curb these kinds of events has worked, even if students haven’t stopped getting wasted. “It’s forcing us to be more creative,” said sophomore Naadia Owens, producer for the Jewish Theater Ensemble’s Hair, which premiered last weekend. (Full disclosure: Owens wrote two articles for NBN last year.)
But the administration’s tactics aren’t fair or logical. When an underage friend of mine was written up for drinking in a dorm, he received a mild warning from the head of the housing area and was let go. That violation on his school record will be erased once he graduates. The same thing happened to another friend, caught in a different housing district. In both cases, they say the housing officials emphasized being more careful about getting caught, rather than not drinking altogether. If the administration opposes underage drinking as forcefully as it seems to, it’s anyone’s guess why it wouldn’t try to stop illegal drinking on its own property first. When asked about the issue of a crackdown, Mary Desler, dean of student affairs, declined to comment.
Alas, contradictions can be found everywhere in campus anti-alcohol policies: While sororities are automatically barred from hosting parties to prevent date rape, frats still throw the same keggers where it’s no secret that girls can get raped just as easily (no matter how watered-down the Busch Light tastes). Greek houses have been put on probation for their “pre-gaming” rituals, but both sororities and frats still host bar nights with underage members in attendance.
A recent article in The Weekly amusingly follows a freshman girl who’s received a sorority bid for a week of indulging herself at The Keg bar in Evanston, in her sorority house and at various frats. With so much publicity, it’s the most flagrant examples of debauchery that the university has been glossing over. For making too much noise, theater ensembles are threated with financial losses essentially amounting to being shut down, but in 2003 it took finding a flask in a beluga whale tank following a Kappa Sigma formal at Shedd Aquarium — where President Henry Bienen is on the board of trustees — for the frat to be shut down.
When you’re an upperclassman, you spend more time drinking in small groups among close friends. But even when they’re sweaty and crowded, fundraisers are an essential outlet for the wannabe freshman starlet to hang out with the senior director of a main stage play. And yes, people dance: Theater parties and frat parties set decidedly different moods, even when many people end up going to both. By squeezing out one, the university simultaneously puts pressure on the other, cramming more drunks into the on-campus quads, and limits what it means for average students (read: people who drink) to have fun.
Without tipsy theater majors to amuse them, maybe NU students should take a page from Delta Upsilon and hire extreme midget wrestlers. After all, while underage drinking is horribly illegal, having “midgets bleed what little blood they have for your enjoyment*” is as lawful as drinking Sunny D.
* from the Half Pint Bawler’s website