UI Staff and Thinly Veiled Temperance Threats

Thinly Veiled Temperance Threats

Secure in the wake of last week's Iowa City election, the University's neo-Prohibitionists are at it again with. Yesterday's Daily Iowan offers this bit from Wallace Loh, UI executive vice president and provost, and Tom Rocklin, interim vice president for Student Services:

We’re funding alcohol-free social activities. We’re communicating with parents regularly. We also administer sanctions. We suspend students and allow readmission only under strict conditions. With advice of counsel, we’re revising our policies to extend UI jurisdiction over student misconduct that occurs off-campus.

Soulnds like a return to in loco parentis to me. How many non-alcohol alternatives do we have to subsidize before we listen to what 18, 19 and 20 year old adults really want? As usual, the comments are better than the aricle itself:

Here's my radical idea: how about stopping the continued harassment of students? In Europe (and in just about every other country that values personal freedom), cops don't routinely harass students like here, forcing them to drink in large quantities secretly in the corner of Jakes in a short amount of time, causing them to become paranoid and sometimes unnaturally violent, before the cops show up to hand out another PAULA. They don't have the luxury of drinking in peace, so they get drunk in other ways. See the problem here? It's NOT the students, Iowa City city council and the university, and it never has been. YOU are the problem.

Of course, we HAD the chance to change this last week and elect some students to the city council, but their own peers let them down and no grown-ups wanted to go there.

Also from the comments, more concise and to the point:

If you're old enough to take a bullet for your country in Afghanistan, you're old enough to drink a beer. Period.

Loh and Rocklin, of course, make no acknowledgement at all of this critical point. We can't address the very real problem of alcohol abuse until we recognize the rights of legal adults.

Tell your city council members to take the cops from downtown and send them someplace where actual crime is happening.

Tell your state legislators to shove the federal highway money.