 "Photo: Michael Rice")
Residential Life could find students in the wrong for possessing empty Keystone Light cans and alcohol funnels in their dormitories if changes in the university residential contract are passed.
Director of Residential Life Scott Chesney is proposing a few new guidelines he would like to see enforced next year. Among others changes, these guidelines have to do with outlawing empty alcohol containers in areas exclusively housing underage students as well as outlawing alcohol paraphernalia.
According to Senior Assistant Vice President for Student and Academic Services Anne Lawing, who works closely with Chesney, the proposed changes in student guidelines are nothing out of the ordinary. The goal of the alcohol-related guidelines is to cut back on confusion between the administration and students when it comes to determining if alcohol has been illegally consumed or possessed in a student's room.
Lawing said that any guideline having to do with alcohol or drugs is put in place or proposed for three basic reasons: to conform to the law, to keep students safe and to keep residential halls as an environment they were intended to be. According to Lawing, these guidelines are meant to uphold UNH's academic mission. While it may seem that UNH is somewhat unrelenting in its proposition of stricter guidelines, Lawing explained that the timing of Chesney's new rules is to give Student Senate and the general UNH population time to analyze them so that by the end of the year, they can be either accepted or reformed.
While administration claims that these rules would be simple improvements on the already well-developed guideline system here at UNH, the student body has not accepted the propositions with open arms.
As a freshman at UNH, Kayla Delman thinks that the rules the university has recently employed and plans to enforce in the future are too harsh.
"College is about people learning their boundaries and having new experiences," said Delman. "There's a lack of warnings for the people who happen to get caught in the act. It's just too strict."
She thinks that because UNH scored in the top ten party schools in the country according to the Princeton Review, they are making an effort to become stricter. Delman also explained that because she is new to the school, the rules seem somewhat daunting and limit the places she goes on weekend nights as well as some of the people she associates with. She was concerned with the idea that a student can be in a room where illegal activity is occurring and still get in trouble without being personally involved in anything illegal.
"It's an example of wrong place, wrong time," Delman said.
Judicial Affairs Council Chair Bryan Fritts, a senior, brought up another valid point against Chesney's proposal. Because empty alcohol containers of any kind would be outlawed if these rules were to be passed, containers used for decoration, including beer-can Christmas trees, would also qualify as a rule violation.
However, Fritts brought to light a more sentimental argument against the proposed changes. He presented the situation where a student has an empty alcohol bottle from an important overseas trip being used as a vase or just simply placed on a desk. Although the bottle may represent a meaningful sentiment to the individual student, the university would potentially see this as a situation where the student is promoting alcohol consumption. To Fritts, this seems unfair to students who want to express themselves, making the line between decoration and alcohol promotion one he doesn't see clearly.
Stoke Residence Hall Director Jamie Depelteau thinks, like all policies, it should be important to make sure students know what these new guidelines mean if they are passed and how they impact residents in university housing. He said that the Student Rights, Rules and Responsibilities handbook is something that every student is expected to abide by. Having worked for other institutions, Depelteau believes that UNH is on par with other schools when it comes to strictness, saying that the policies present in residence halls are much like what one would find at any other college campus.
Deputy Chief of the UNH Police Dept. Paul Dean said that although these new policies may cut down on confusion for RA's and administration, they would not have much impact on UNH Police.
"There's no law against collecting beer cans," Dean said.
He went on to explain that these rules would concern mostly administration because if there are beer cans in a room with nothing in them, there is not much police can do about it.
According to Lawing, the university is in "the middle of a public conversation" regarding these rules, and if accepted they should be seen in action by the beginning of next school year.
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