Also newly banned is consumption of hard liquor by undergrads at all campus parties, regardless of container size or students’ age. Straight shots of hard alcohol are never allowed at any party. Students will only be allowed to buy bottles of liquor that are a pint or smaller. “The University is especially concerned about the misuse of distilled alcohol products (“hard alcohol”), and the dangers that arise from that misuse”. “Our intention is not a total prohibition of a substance, but rather a targeted approach that limits high-risk behavior and has the backing of empirical studies on restricting the availability of and access to alcohol”. The case caused a national furor when a judge sentenced Turner to just six months in jail.
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In June, Brock Turner, a 20-year-old swimmer on scholarship at Stanford, was convicted of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object. The light sentence led to calls for Persky’s ouster.
The role of alcohol in the sexual assault drew scrutiny, particularly because Turner’s defense cited his impairment because of heavy drinking the night of the assault. “I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone”. I stupidly thought it was okay for me to do what everyone around was doing, which was drinking.
“It does not emanate from the Brock Turner case”, university spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said on Tuesday. Two other students passing by on their bicycles saw him and yelled out. The woman was unconscious and taken to a hospital.
Organizers of an effort to get Persky removed from the bench say they will begin collecting signatures in April to qualify the issue for the November 2017 ballot.
In a March email to students, Stanford President John L. Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy observe that “colleges and universities across the country continue to wrestle with alcohol and the high-risk behaviors that can result from its misuse”, claiming that Stanford is no exception.
Stanford made an update to its student alcohol policy in a website post Monday. Last spring, in a campuswide referendum, 91% of voters said they opposed a ban on hard alcohol, The Stanford Daily reported.
“Among the concerns we hear are that some students drink alcohol as a means to overcome social anxiety and others feel alienated by their peers’ drinking, sometimes to the extent that they do not feel welcome in their own houses or organizations”, he wrote. “These include alcohol poisoning, sexual assault and relationship violence, organizational conduct problems, and academic problems”.
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Screenshots of the deleted language have drawn more criticism for the university, accusing it of blaming alcohol rather than aggressors for incidents of sexual assault.
