“Stanford, CA” is a postal location, but postal locations are not necessarily cities. Most of the Stanford campus is in unincorporated Santa Clara County; some of it (the hospital and medical center) is in the city of Palo Alto. However, the medical parts of the campus at 300 Pasteur Drive use “Stanford, CA” as the postal address, as do the non-medical parts of the campus.
https://rde.stanford.edu/contact-us
https://stanfordhealthcare.org/search-results.clinics.html
Is Sheldon Cooper participating on CC these days?
Stanford has the right to make rules that are more restrictive than the city, county or state laws on its properties or at activities where student clubs or official business is conducted.
I don’t find it unusual that Stanford is making these rules.
Is the right response to post #41 “Bazinga!”?
I can see where in some cases the legal intricacies of city limits, unincorporated areas, etc. might play a role in the discussion. However, I STRONGLY suspect that, as a private university and under California law, Stanford has the right to control this issue on anything that is its property, regardless of technical location, as long as it doesn’t contradict codified law. In other words, Stanford has the right to be dry, for example, even if the rest of the county and state is not. Just like any person has the right to forbid alcohol from their homes. So let’s not get bogged down in postal codes and city limits.
Any move by any college to put restrictions in place to curb under age alcohol consumption is fine with me. This happened at my son’s college as part of a state grant geared at curbing underage drinking on the state unis campuses. From what I can tell years after this went into practice it has definitely had a chilling affect especially with freshman who are required to live on campus. It did not preclude kids from leaving campus but cut way down on kids pre-parties in dorms. Stepping up the issuance of MIP tickets consistantly for kids caught staggering around a campus works well also. No one on college campuses “likes” to put a legal blot on a kids record like an MIP, but I believe the time has come where colleges are now in a position to have to use a firmer hand to protect themselves from alcohol involved lawsuits where the students are often breaking the law to begin with. I doubt that boundaries have anything to do with what a college (or a business) regulates relating to behavior. As a country we’ve seen this in practice around smoking restrictions which can be different, generally stricter in most cases, than local regulation.
“I don’t think the good vs bad choices are about the kind of alcohol available, I think it’s about whether people want to get pleasantly silly or happy and then stop vs whether people have decided the goal of the evening is getting completely wasted.”
Yes, the intention to get wasted is a big part of the problem. But it’s a lot easier to make mistakes about how much you’ve had when people are doing shots.
“First off lets have a zero tolerance regarding sexual assault on campus. All cases should be referred to and investigated by the local police department, not the college police. If there is a case to answer the student should be suspended, if subsequently found guilty they should be expelled.”
If you only suspended/expelled students who were charged with criminal acts, you would have a lot less enforcement than you have now.
I don’t agree at all with suspending or expelling a kid for an MIP. You can have zero tolerance without devastating punishment…look how well that has worked in some elementary and high schools where kids have been expelled for having Tylenol or sandwich knives in their backpacks because administrators “hid” behind rules and regulations to protect themselves rather than the population they were in charge of. Common sense among administrators absolutely needs to prevail.
“Common sense among administrators absolutely needs to prevail”
And therein lies the problem.
If you give them discretion, then there will be claims of discrimination on the basis of race, SES, etc. when different people get different punishments for similar violations.
Obviously, in the absence of discretion, there will be incidents of ridiculous overpunishment as described previously.
Neither is good.
I think snarlatron is right (back on the first page): it would be a good idea to lower the drinking age to 18. I went to a large state school when the drinking age was 18. In my observation, there was a lot less “extreme” drinking then. There was more social drinking. A group of friends would share a pitcher of beer, legally. Also, in those days, a lot of students turned 18 while they were still at home, and they stayed safe as they became of legal age to drink. Now there are problems with students endangering their lives by drinking multiple shots when they turn 21.
I am not sure whether the excessive drinking reflects an “in for a penny, in for a pound” thought among students that they might as well binge drink if they are going to drink illegally, or whether the stresses are just so much greater than they used to be, or whether there is some other explanation.
Is it possible for a residential college (that is not a college appealing to specific demographics who avoid alcohol in the first place) populated mostly by traditional-age students to find any good way to deal with high risk drinking among the students when the drinking age splits the traditional college student age?
Not gonna happen, so not even worth discussing.
But more importantly, Stanford is in the the state of California which has had a drinking age of 21 since prohibition ended. So, any increase in “extreme” drinking on that campus has nothing to do with the age limit.
" Also, in those days, a lot of students turned 18 while they were still at home, and they stayed safe as they became of legal age to drink." Uh no. They were supplying and serving alcohol to minors. Nothing safe about that.
I wouldn’t want to go back to the days of having high schools full of alcohol that could be easily and legally bought by seniors and served to the younger kids without their parents’ knowledge or approval. Nor of having 14 year olds hanging out in bars because they could pass for 18 in dim light with a fake ID. At least now more of this has been kicked up into the college scene where at least the kids are legally adults even if they choose not to act like it.
There’s plenty of high school drinking go on and PLENTY of fake ids. I see no less of it now than I did in my high school days. What I do see are kids more aware of not drinking and driving but that is more based on education, IMO, than on drinking age.
"http://responsibility.org/get-the-facts/research/statistics/underage-drinking-statistics/
8th grade students who reported drinking in the past month declined 61% from 1991 to 2015
10th…declined 50%…
12th…declined 31%:
If the drinking age has no effect on limiting kids’ drinking, how do you explain this? If the drinking age has no effect on limiting kids’ drinking, why bother to have one at all?
@mathyone that’s the conundrum isn’t it? All the statistics seem to indicate that raising the drinking age as been effective big time. All the anecdotal evidence suggests that the way (some) kids drink has changed and not for the better. It’s certainly possible for both to be true.
Every year kids from my (private) high school got expelled for drinking. It never seemed to stop the girls who wanted to drink from drinking. Plenty of my kids in our high school take to the local woods to drink, if they don’t have parents who turn a blind eye to what is going on in the basement. But the move to shots and getting drunk as fast as possible, does seem like a real difference in the way kids are drinking.
Of course lowering the drinking age is worth discussing. The USA is in a crazy minority with such a high drinking age.
115 countries have a 18 or 19 minimum drinking age:
21 countries have drinking age at 16 or 17:
These countries aren’t imploding just because their citizens under 21 can buy a beer.
As I’ve said before, my personal proposal is that the beer/wine drinking age be lowered to January 1 of the year following the year in which you turn 18. Booze stays at 21. So the legal limit stays outside of high school and outside of first semester of college.
The college hard liquor bans come pretty close to my idea (other than the first semester part). The college, as a practical matter, considers beer and wine as de facto legal for students but not booze.
The colleges and the local police can’t change the official state law. But they can change their enforcement and other policies so that they get to the same place. That’s exactly what I would do if I were a college president or a college town police chief.
FYI, 60 percent of college students ages 18–22 drank alcohol in the past month, and almost 2 out of 3 of them engaged in binge drinking during that same timeframe.
So the success of the 21 age on HS students is accompanied by a failure of that same policy among college students.
Here’s a recent article about a decline in teenage drinking in the UK, a country who has not had a change in drinking age. They point to a lot of potential reasons. Perhaps one cannot assume any decrease shown in drinking statistics is directly correlated to a change in drinking age and that other factors might come into play.