The judge, who was subjected to a recall campaign after the Turner case, cited “publicity surrounding the case” that “resulted in a personal family situation” in stepping down from the child porn decision, The Mercury News reports. The move follows the outcry over the sentence for the assault, which came after both Turner and his victim drank at a campus party.
Advertisement
Earlier this year, university officials met with students, faculty and staff to discuss ways to address drinking culture on campus and the pressure that students may feel to drink. Any offending student would be sent to the Dean and could be removed from student housing. But the updated alcohol policy, arriving just as Stanford students are arriving back on campus, makes it against the rules to have 750-milliliter bottles (fifths) of alcohol that are 40 proof or above in undergraduate housing. “These dynamics are unacceptable to us, as are the range of problems that are too frequently associated with alcohol misuse”.
Graduate students will still be allowed to consume hard alcohol at on-campus parties, but only in the form of cocktails, and even those may only be consumed at a party at which no undergraduate students are present.
The new alcohol policy allows undergraduate students to have hard liquor in their rooms but containers of 750 ml and larger are not allowed.
“Any group or residence that includes undergraduate members is subject to this policy restriction”, the policy states. The unusual logic here, according to campus booze czar Ralph Castro, is that it’s harder to assemble a huge bar in one’s room if it’s all made of pint bottles, and therefore it will make it harder for students to binge drink.
Straight shots of hard alcohol, the policy notes, are prohibited at all parties.
Ralph Castro, director of Stanford’s office of alcohol policy and education (OPAE), said: “Our intention is not a total prohibition of a substance, but rather a targeted approach that limits high-risk behaviour and has the backing of empirical studies on restricting the availability of and access to alcohol”.
The ban likely will be unpopular when students return to campus in September.
The timing of the new ban makes it impossible not to connect the university’s efforts to curb the risky behavior it alleges stems from binge drinking and alcohol abuse on campus to the controversial rape case that rocked the university not even two months ago.
Advertisement
Boardman, in his letter to students, acknowledged that some of them may try to find a way around the rules. Everyone around you was not sexually assaulting me. “Instead, I ask you to bring your best selves to this endeavor, to consider the real concerns raised by your fellow students, and those articulated here, and to be a part of solving this problem”, he wrote.
