Dartmouth Cites Student Misconduct in Its Ban on Hard Liquor

The president of Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., said the school will create new spaces for social activity as alternatives to Greek houses, give faculty members more of a role in residential life and provide students more extensive training on preventing sexual assault. CreditCheryl Senter for The New York Time

With colleges under growing pressure to reduce alcohol-soaked student misbehavior, Dartmouth College said Thursday that it would ban hard liquor on campus, going beyond the changes that all but a few of its peers have been willing to make.

Dartmouth has had a string of embarrassments involving binge drinking, and it has hardly been alone. The sexual assaults, fraternity hazing and hospitalizations that have rocked campuses around the nation have often involved extreme intoxication, like the case of the former Vanderbilt football players convicted this week of raping an unconscious woman, or that of a Stanford swimmer accused of rape this week.

But if Dartmouth is drawing a line in the sand, it will have little company on its side. Many campuses, most of them with religious affiliations, have long been completely dry, but only a handful of colleges and universities that once allowed hard liquor have tried to ban it. Despite Dartmouth’s prominence as a member of the Ivy League, experts say not to expect many institutions, if any, to follow its lead.

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“I loved the residential life proposals,” said Catherine Donahoe, the social chairwoman of Dartmouth’s Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority. But, like other students, she had conflicting views on hard alcohol, saying that it posed a problem but that she feared a ban would drive it underground.

“If I were to design the policy, it’d be pushing alcohol into the open so that it’s as visible as possible,” she said.

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