At the President’s Lunch (held with all the college and SA presidents weekly), we met with Dean Hutch and talked about the alcohol probation. Yes, more alcohol talk. A lot of the presidents want to understand what the next steps are, because we feel that many students are questioning us on what to do next. We talked with Dean Hutch about how things are going around campus, and we also discussed the Brown public party this past weekend. It turns out that there were a few EMS calls and some freshmen got citations. Some people were upset at RUPD because it appeared that they were directing people to go to the “EMS camp” set up at Brown, but it turns out that these were people that NEEDED help and it was sad that no students were taking the initiative to get help with EMS. Instead, RUPD was doing what was best for the students, and it’s unfortunate that we have slacked in our responsibility to take care of our friends, and instead RUPD has to do it for us.
Dean Hutch explained that he truly believes that our college systems work, and they can fix this alcohol problem we have been facing. It has worked for many years now, and this is just a “hiccup” to overcome. He wants to see the colleges set up college courts and systems of self-governance so that alcohol policy violators (or “people who do stupid stuff”) can be punished by their own college and learn from their mistakes. Also, we need to put in education systems in place to make people aware and learn how to deal with alcohol, so this will be done for the upcoming O-Week.