University spokeswoman Lisa Ann Lapin assured me that the goal of the new policy is “to curb binge drinking.”
Turner, now 21, is the student convicted for the 2015 sexual assault of a 22-year-old woman too inebriated to consent to sex.
Amid outcries against his light sentence — six months in jail, of which he’ll likely serve only three — Turner vowed to “speak out against the college campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.”
In a statement at sentencing, the victim said: “I don’t see headlines that read, ‘Brock Turner, Guilty of drinking too much and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.’”
Stanford’s Student Alcohol Policy observes that it is not the responsibility of most Stanford officials to enforce state law but that campus police should enforce the law, and Lapin assures me they do.
In 2008, some college administrators signed the Amethyst Initiative in part to reduce binge drinking and spark a conversation about how to prepare young people to be responsible about alcohol use.
Chapman University Dean of Students Jerry Price explained that since the drinking age was raised from 18 in many states, students’ drinking patterns haven’t really changed.
Price knows colleagues who fear a younger drinking age sends the wrong message, but he believes that since the 21-year-old rule “is not going to really reduce drinking,” it might be better to let students drink where campus staff can intervene, if needed.
