Stanford BANS Liquor At Parties, Caps Bottle Sizes

by Blake Neff

Stanford University has totally banned liquor from undergraduate student parties, among a host of other new rules strictly regulating the presence of hard alcohol on campus.

Liquor will be allowed at parties that are exclusively for graduate students, but it will have to be provided in the form of mixed drinks.

“Straight shots of hard alcohol are never allowed at any party,” the new policy says.

Beer and wine, though, will be allowed to flow freely.

In addition to trying to keep hard alcohol away from undergrad parties, Stanford is going to start policing the precise sizes of liquor bottles. While undergraduates may have containers of hard liquor in their dorm rooms, they have to be in a container holding less than 750 mL, the most common size for a bottle of wine. The alcohol must be in its original container, to prevent students from simply subdividing a large bottle of alcohol into several smaller containers.

In a statement, the school said the size limit, an apparent first for an American university, was intended to make hard alcohol more expensive and harder to get.

“Most alcohol retailers only sell large-volume containers — 750 mL and above,” spokeswoman Elaine Ray said in a statement for the school. “Only select retailers sell hard alcohol containers smaller in volume than 750 mL. Therefore, the outlet density of establishments that sell hard alcohol around campus will be greatly reduced. Also, the costs associated with purchasing smaller containers of hard alcohol are higher than the cost per volume of larger containers, which may serve as a deterrent.”

The policy was chosen in lieu of a total hard alcohol ban like the one implemented in 2015 at Dartmouth College. In Stanford’s spring 2016 student election,over 90 percent of voters rejected such a ban.

Though the school’s announcement never mentions a connection, Stanford’s new rules are almost certainly intended to cut down on sexual assault. They come two months after a wave of national outrage regarding Brock Turner, a Stanford student who received a six-month jail sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a Stanford frat house. Both Turner and his victim were heavily intoxicated when the assault occurred.

But Michele Dauber, a Stanford Law School professor who helped engineer the national outrage over Turner and his light sentence, isn’t happy with the liquor ban. Dauber argues the liquor ban is shifting the blame for assault away from sexual predators and onto outside forces like alcohol. She also claims it may increase the danger of alcohol by encouraging students to drink more in private rather than in public at parties.

Sadly .@stanford appears to agree with #BrockTurner that “alcohol” and “party culture” are to blame for his conduct. https://t.co/A9jw82KjsJ

— Michele Dauber (@mldauber) August 22, 2016

.@adriandaub my concern is it makes students less safe by incentivizing pre-gaming and heavy drinking in private rooms rather than at party

— Michele Dauber (@mldauber) August 23, 2016

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