The Alcohol Policy subcommittee of the Alcohol Steering Committee presented its new policy to students for their input this week. Talk about too little representation, too late.
The student representatives on the subcommittee are male and most of them have Greek affiliation. Since this policy affects all students, wider representation is important.
The consequence of underrepresentation on the subcommittee was obvious at Wednesday night?s open meeting to discuss the it?s proposal. Most of the students present at the open meeting were also Greek, with a small number Students? Association senators also present.
A large portion of this campus was not represented at the meeting because there was not a representative sample of UR there to communicate with the rest of the student body and give them updates on the policy progress.
A meeting for student input on university policy is a great idea, but it is difficult to change a proposal after there have already been hours of conversation on the topic and a relatively solid set of ideas have been typed up without wider student representation. Hence, there is a need for more such representation on these subcommittees so a broad range of interests are taken into account before preliminary proposals are floated to the UR community at large.
The new policy begs for clarification of the special approval process it suggests, which should be standard and fairly simple for groups to follow. Furthermore, by asking that registered parties be Bring Your Own, UR complicates the handling of alcohol immensely.
This will further complicate many situations where more than one source could be held responsible for supplying the alcohol. It is much simpler to keep track of an alcohol supply from a single source, such as a keg.
The current proposal has points which must be clarified and it makes potentially negative changes to existing policy. Were there a wider range of interests accounted for in the subcommittee, this would likely have been avoided.
