James May
Senior Writer
James May ’16 attended party monitor training last week. Since he knows many of you are either angry about the policy or simply don’t care, he took less effort to keep some instinctual sarcasm out of his report. While this article is written in a style meant to entertain, the facts reported herein are accurate. Although James treated this subject lightly and clearly didn’t agree with various aspects of the policies, he encourages everybody who has legitimate questions or concerns about new regulations to attend a party monitor training session. It is important to have a full understanding of the administration’s perspective, especially if you disagree with it, and equally important to be aware of current College policies. The session also revisits important information about alcohol awareness and responsibility that, regardless of your opinions on drinking, is valuable knowledge to have.
The party monitor system, revised and implemented last school year, is the administration’s attempt to raise safety and awareness about drinking without directly curtailing parties on campus. Included in their new policies are various rules about event location and capacity, which effectively ensure that you will spend every weekend alone this year.
Party monitors, or any student who shows up to a training session and doesn’t forget to sign in, are intended to be the eyes and ears of security at events that involve alcohol on campus. It is their responsibility at parties to guard against, among other things: underage drinking (State ID’s are now required at all parties, not just the UG); alcohol poisoning; students leaving an event with open containers (drinking outside is still illegal, kids); and belligerent drunks (or, to use the vernacular, morons).
The training provides information about alcohol facts and statistics, a description of party restrictions, policies and tips on how exactly to manage a 3 vs. 100+ game of Who Has More Power: Party Monitors or Alcoholics? Naturally, most students in attendance were more concerned with the new party regulations than how to tell if their vomiting friend was drunk (answer: yes), and collectively flew through the “How to Detect Inebriation” questionnaire lightning round.
The official policies outlined at the training were (summarily) as follows:
• If you live in a house and are over 21, you can drink as much as you want all the time (but you shouldn’t, because that’s unhealthy and dangerous) if the only participants are house residents.
• If you are having a small event in a house, the capacity cannot exceed 34 people, all of whom must be invited and the guest list submitted for approval to Campus Life (yes, the official term is indeed guest list). In this instance, a party monitor is necessary.
• Large events can be held in one of few official designated spaces on campus: Douglass basement, Luce multipurpose lounge, Bissman eighth sections lounge, the UG or Gault Schoolhouse. These spaces must be separately reserved for the evening, and each has a specific time frame in which parties can occur. Freelance raging void where prohibited.
• For these large events, if the capacity meets or exceeds 35 people and alcohol is provided or consumed, at least two party monitors are required to supervise (with an additional monitor required when capacity exceeds 99 people). All entrances and exits must have someone to check IDs and shoo away loiterers, and if drinks are provided, that process must be supervised.
• Let me repeat that — the distribution of drinks must be supervised, and drinks cannot be served from an open container. Among other reasons, this is to strictly curtail tampering with drinks, which is a totally legitimate problem and one I want to highlight by not making some stupid joke about it.
The session also covered party planning procedures and people management skills. Among these, the requirement that the sponsor organization clean the space immediately seemed to create confusion among the trainees. On behalf of the custodial staff, I would like to try to clarify this: immediately after the party, pick up and put away EVERYTHING in the room that was not there before the party, lest thee incur the wrath of Julia Zimmer. Amen.
No word was given on whether party monitors would be armed while supervising.