Campus Crackdown: P.C. College Administrators get something right.

Campus Crackdown: Is the party over?

'Alcohol can irritate the lining of your stomach enough to produce nausea or vomiting." So says Positive Norm, a talking blue cartoon lava lamp that hosts Alcohol 101, a CD-ROM game passed out to 25,000 college freshmen last year. The game, which is supposed to instruct students in alcohol and its dangers, is another indication that college administrations are returning to a bygone age- when they treated students as something less than mature adults.

Not so long ago, administrators acted in loco parentis, trying to protect the welfare of their students by setting down rules of conduct, ethics, even dress. But in the aftermath of the '60s rebellion, all that changed. Students demanded to be treated as autonomous adults, and administrators obliged: "If it's behind closed doors," the new code seemed to say, "there's nothing we can do about it."

It was fun while it lasted. But now colleges increasingly find themselves in court defending the sometimes dangerous environment they provide for students. With legal liability rising, colleges have been forced to reclaim their parental authority even if it flies in the face of student demands. The current crackdown on student freedoms is meant to protect students' safety rather than their moral well-being, and it often comes in laughable forms (witness Positive Norm). Still, it's better than the alternative.

Yet the turn away from campus permissiveness has sparked the opposition, oddly enough, of conservatives. Dartmouth president James Wright recently announced that the college would end the Greek system "as we know it," first forcing the houses to go co-ed and ultimately eliminating them altogether. In response, an article in the (conservative) Dartmouth Review railed that "Dartmouth's paternalists are at it again." The article even quoted approvingly the executive director of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union: "The young people who attend Dartmouth College are adults. Their choices-and their right to make choices-should be respected. They should not be subjected to the dictates of administrators." (Legal questions aside, there is something to be said for Mom's old policy: "We'll treat you like an adult when you act like one.")

Conservatives have reason to be suspicious. The Dartmouth administration, like others around the country, sells its new policy in typically mushy terms. "The Trustees are giving students the opportunity to reimagine social life and residential life at the College," Wright told the school's mainstream paper, The Dartmouth. Then there is the hypocrisy of liberal administrators, who disapprove of Budweiser but happily hand out condoms. But opposing the new campus paternalism means ignoring the consequences of the excessive drinking on college campuses, something administrations can no longer do because of an explosion of lawsuits.

MIT freshman Scott Krueger had been participating in "Animal House" night at his fraternity in September 1997, during which "pledges" were required to drink preposterous amounts of beer and hard liquor. He lost consciousness and was abandoned on a couch to die. An autopsy revealed that his blood-alcohol level was five times the legal limit. A grand jury concluded that "the cause of Scott Krueger's death-in real terms-was the wanton and reckless conduct on the part of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity" (alone). No doubt. But the family has filed a civil suit against the larger university anyway.

Similar cases abound. By 10:30 one night in August 1997, more than $2,000 worth of alcohol had been served to Benjamin Wynne and his fraternity brothers in a bar near Louisiana State University. More than 24 of those drinks were served to Wynne before he passed out and was pronounced dead the next morning at his LSU fraternity. Matthew Garofalo, when a sophomore at the University of Iowa in 1995, died under similar circumstances at the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house. Like Scott Krueger's parents, the Garofalos and the Wynnes are suing.

Then there are cases involving drunken sex. Boston University student Jessica Smithers alleges that a university fraternity served her alcohol at a party and that, feeling intoxicated and without money for cab fare, she went to sleep in a spare fraternity room, awaking to find one of the fraternity brothers having sex with her. She claims that she was too drunk to fend off her attacker. She is suing BU because its fraternity served her alcohol despite the fact that she was only 17. At MIT, Angela Colt has filed suit not only against Matthew Keller, her alleged rapist, but also against MIT, the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and its national corporation for allowing underage drinking to occur.

All of these suits tend to deflect responsibility from where it truly belongs, but they have at least forced colleges to take a second look at their policies. Limiting access to dorm rooms of members of the opposite sex, for example, has resulted in fewer complaints about "unwanted guests" in dorms at Boston University. Beginning with the class of 2002, MIT freshmen will be required to live on campus. Cornell University, a school dominated by fraternity life, is also changing its campus housing policies, and building more dorms, as part of an effort to require freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. Princeton too has been drafting a new alcohol policy designed to monitor more closely its students' activities.

Of course, this doesn't represent a full return to the old world of in loco parentis regulations. Positive Norm and his video-game partners tell us only that excessive use of alcohol can lead to unwanted pregnancies, disease, injury, and even death. Moral education isn't an intended part of this program. But it may be a happy by-product.