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Alexander C. Kafka’s article “Colleges Have Anti-Drinking Rules on the Books, but Which Ones Actually Work?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the research that was published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. The conclusions of the study include:

Among strategies that work best, the researchers say, are prohibiting alcohol in public places on the campus (including sports arenas) and at student-organization recruitment events, as well as banning tailgating, drinking games, and alcohol delivery to the campus. Rules like that, the report’s authors say, not only restrict alcohol consumption but also are “likely to influence social norms around drinking.” Banning drinking at events like recruiting events in the fall “sets the normative tone for the school year.”

Also important, the study suggests: Make sure students know exactly what consequences will follow which infractions. And make sure they know that if they’re cited or arrested off campus by the local police, the college will be notified.

Penalties deemed to work best have a “strong, population-wide deterrent effect,” the report says. Those include “student-organization probation and loss of student-organization status.”

Less effective, but still useful as part of a “ ‘package’ of graduated sanctions,” are suspension and probation. “Because of their severity and the extended deliberative process often required to enforce them,” they “become less swift and certain.”

The University of Alabama’s alcohol policy, if strictly enforced, would certainly curtail illegal, under-aged drinking on campus.

Kafka’s article continues:

For students to heed colleges’ alcohol rules, they have to be able to find and understand them. That’s a problem. Alcohol policies for colleges in the Maryland group could generally be found by students within 30 seconds, although the rules were spread out across multiple locations instead of just one web page.

But colleges need to simplify the language in those policies. Even the clearest rules, the study found, “would be considered difficult, confusing, and best understood by someone with at least some college education.”

He points out that the success of enforcement strategies was “deemed beyond the scope of this study.”

This nationwide problem will only be successfully dealt with when individual educational institutions begin to access how they are enforcing their own policies. Alabama’s Capstone of higher education has an opportunity to be a vanguard by enforcing its own policies.

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An Atlantic article “Why It Matters Where College Students Binge-Drink” by Ashley Fetters claims that “hot spots” where binge drinking occurs are associated with campus date rape.

Some might argue that individual students’ misconduct is more to blame for sexual assault than any frat house or party hot spot. But according to a new study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, party locations do play a role in increasing the frequency of sexually aggressive behavior. The study followed the partying and hookup behaviors of more than 1,000 straight men over four semesters, from the beginning of their freshman year. It found that men’s attendance at “drinking venues”—that is, bars and parties—was a better predictor of their sexual aggression than simply binge-drinking or enthusiastic attitudes toward casual sex.

The study’s authors “point to the need for better supervision—and enforcement—on the parts of bar owners and university administrators.”

At the University of Alabama where most students are too young to legally drink and there is a strict alcohol policy you might expect that fraternities would not become “drinking venues.” The question would be: Is there any significant enforcement of the Capstone’s policy on under-aged drinking and alcohol on campus?

On other campuses quite often action has been taken by University administrations only when a death due to “hazing” has resulted from alcohol use. But sometimes sexual assaults are involved as well as in the case at the University of Texas where a moratorium on all social activities by fraternities and sororities was issued.

CNN‘s 2015 documentary “The Hunting Ground” provided a harrowing look at campus sexual assaults. Indiana University’s Elizabeth Armstrong said, “Clearly there are men who think it is OK to have sex with a woman who is very intoxicated, even passed out.”

Banning fraternities outright would be one way to cope with the epidemic of college date rapes.  Swarthmore, after protests by its students over a “rape attic” and a “rape tunnel” at a fraternity on campus, has recently closed all of its fraternities. The Pennsylvania college has yet to end its leases with fraternities.

At the University of Alabama, where its Greek life is such an important campus tradition, such a ban would irreparably damage the school’s character. A better idea would be to increase enforcement of the University’s own policies and also the city codes on under-aged alcohol use.