LSU, Florida change policies to quell alcohol culture
This story is Part 3 of a three-day series on USC’s drinking culture. This story looks at USC’s policies and how they compare to other schools. Thursday’s story addressed administration’s plans to reduce alcohol use. Wednesday’s story discussed current alcohol-related problems.
USC is not in uncharted territory; LSU — and others — has been here as well.
As the university attempts to sober up a prominent drinking culture and reacts to the alcohol-related deaths of three of its students and one former student, it appears to be following a path similar to its western counterpart’s.
On Oct. 10, 2003, Corey James Domingue, a second-year chemical engineering student at LSU, died of an alcohol overdose after he drank a fifth of rum. His blood alcohol content, The Daily Reveille reported, was 0.43. That, and a separate spate of deaths at the university, shook the community and pushed it toward cultural change, said Kathy Saichuk, a health promotion coordinator at LSU who works with the school’s culture.
“I think people started asking questions,” Saichuk said, especially referring to the other incidents. “There seemed to be sort of a cultural shift. (People asked) not only, ‘What’s the university doing?,’ but ‘What are the parents doing?’”
The reaction from the university, said Saichuk, whose office was involved in the decision-making process, included a set of tightened sanctions for underage drinking, a required MyStudentBody.com alcohol education course for new students and a larger staff within its judicial office.
The changes represented a break from a culture of drinking that persists today, Saichuk wrote in an email response, through LSU’s spirited football tailgating, “Tigerland” bar scene, large Greek community and well-known “laissez les bons temps rouler” (French for “let the good times roll”) attitude.
Particularly significant were the harsher punishments the university now imposes on students for alcohol offenses.
“It used to be a student could commit an alcohol violation two, three times and not get to the point of being suspended,” Saichuk said. “Now, basically, it’s your third strike, and you’re out. You’re going to be out for at least one semester.”
The severity of punishments has recently become a concern at USC as well, said Maggie Leitch, the coordinator for Substance Abuse Prevention and Education.
“That’s the point we hope students get to — where it’s too great of a risk,” Leitch said.
And as the university undertakes its first code and sanction review in a decade, it appears poised to make its punishments stricter, according to Alisa Cooney, the director of student conduct.
“Some people would argue that if you made the first offense exceptionally painful, you wouldn’t have those second ones,” Cooney said. “I believe that after the code and sanctions review ... alcohol sanctions will be increased for the first offense.”
As USC administrators have wrangled with opposing desires to increase sanctions and to improve alcohol education, schools elsewhere have faced similar dilemmas.
At the University of Florida, said Jeanna Mastrodicasa, its associate vice president for student affairs, enforcement by the City of Gainesville has cracked down on underage drinking in bars, and such activity has dropped 66 percent. The university, meanwhile, has recently created a “medical amnesty” policy that exempts students who are dangerously drunk and their friends from sanctions if they get help.
USC has a similar policy, called the “Care-olinian Provision,” though the university does not grant amnesty to students.
“We believe that (amnesty provisions) usurp the university’s ability and responsibility to address these dangerous behaviors one-on-one with the students who may be unknowingly in the most jeopardy,” USC’s Behavioral Intervention Team website says.
Throughout the SEC at large universities, football, tailgating and the drinking that tends to surround them dominate life and schools’ atmospheres, and universities have taken measures to crack down on underage drinking.
Florida, Mastrodicasa said, plans to create alcohol-free options available before games and has implemented policies banning communal containers, like kegs or handles of liquor, from tailgates.
The latter is a unique policy among SEC schools, one Saichuk said LSU wants to eventually implement to curb underage drinking, as the university continues to grapple with an issue that riddles many of its colleagues.
“They have some really interesting guidelines for what types of alcohol can be at tailgates, in what size containers and those kinds of things,” Saichuk said. “Our hopes are to one day get to that point as well ... We’re not trying to keep people from enjoying their tailgating, but we are trying to curb some of the high-risk behaviors.”