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Elissa Nadworny/NPR
Preventing College Parties? Shame And Blame Don't Work, But Beer Pong Outside Might
August 31, 2020
Elissa Nadorny
As the fall semester gets underway, college students are reuniting with
their friends, getting (re)acquainted with campus and doing what
college students often do: partying. But in the time of the
coronavirus, as more parties surface university administrators have
been quick to condemn — and even berate — the behavior of students.
"Be better. Be adults. Think of someone other than yourself," pleaded a
letter to students at Syracuse University following a large gathering
on campus.
"We are terribly disappointed," leaders at the College of Holy Cross wrote to students before remote classes had even started.
"This is the kind of reckless behavior that will put an end to our
in-person semester, and it must stop," wrote the president of St. Olaf
College, a small school in Minnesota after an off-campus party.
For many students, this scolding feels like a bait and switch: Didn't
those university administrators, many of whom brought students back to
campus knowing full well the challenges, share in some of that poor
decision-making?
Students at The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shared their thoughts about this when
we visited their newsroom a week after that university moved its
semester online, citing coronavirus clusters seeded by student parties.
"If the success of your plan relies on 18- to 24-year-olds being
responsible, then maybe it's not a very good plan," says Anna Pogarcic,
a senior at UNC and the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. "The
power dynamics of an 18-year-old versus this big university with its
million-dollar endowment, you can't argue with that."
"I will give students a smidgen of the blame, just a smidgen of it,"
says Brandon Standley, a senior and managing editor at The Daily Tar
Heel. "I think that the university gets the most blame, because they
brought back thousands of students."
"No one should be surprised," says Maydha Devarajan, a junior at UNC
who spent the summer editing stories that challenged the university's
plan to bring students to campus and hold in-person classes. "We've
known this would happen all summer."
According to a UNC survey from early summer, 28% of undergrads said
they were "extremely or somewhat likely to go to parties or other large
campus gatherings." And colleges have been openly anticipating it. In
July, the dean of students at Tulane University sent an email to
students about behavior. In the third paragraph, in boldface and all
caps it said: "DO NOT HOST PARTIES OR GATHERINGS WITH MORE THAN 15
PEOPLE, INCLUDING THE HOST. IF YOU DO, YOU WILL FACE SUSPENSION OR
EXPULSION FROM THE UNIVERSITY."
Fast-forward to late August, when many students returned to campus:
Those parties and large gatherings happened, as expected. Across the
country, from Tuscaloosa to Iowa City, students socialized — indoors
with lots of people without masks — helped in part by many campuses'
active Greek life.
"It breaks my heart to see this," says Anna Song, an assistant
professor of health psychology at the University of California, Merced
who studies decision-making by young adults. "It's like asking people
to go on a diet. Putting them in a candy store and saying, good luck.
And then if they break that diet, we say, 'Why'd you break the diet?
And, you know, we're going to punish you for it.' "
The Wild Card For An In-Person Fall: College Student Behavior
Many college students still have developing brains, so it's not that
they aren't informed or that they don't understand the risks — it's
that they're wired differently. "Peer networks and having connection
with other people is absolutely critical in terms of development for
young people," Song says. "There is a lot going on in the brain to
reward those kinds of interactions."
Of course, not all students are partying. Many are following the rules
and encouraging others to do the same. "I'm not the only person that's
frustrated," says Reagan Griffin Jr., a sophomore at the University of
Southern California. He moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles to be
closer to campus, despite the fact all his classes are online. He says
he's been hunkered down, even though many of his fellow Trojans haven't
been. USC reported an "alarming increase" in COVID-19 cases last week.
"Clearly, other people have faulty priorities," he says. The case
increases are "the fault of people who either don't know or don't care,
and neither of those things are excusable."
Unlike other types of public health issues, the coronavirus is highly
contagious, so the actions of a few can affect an entire campus. "With
this kind of virus, you can't have 60% compliance and be like, 'Hey, we
did a great job!' " says Song. "You need to have near complete
compliance for this to work."
She adds that university leaders must recognize what's driving behavior
among their students. "You can't deny that the pull for social
interaction is incredibly strong for this group; it's formative for
them," Song says. "So asking them to deny that is a Herculean
challenge."
In June, she raised an important question about asking students to
refrain from partying when they head back to college: "Are we asking
them to do something that is almost near impossible?" Now, she thinks
the answer to that question is yes. "I do believe it's not fair to ask
them to do this," she said this week.
With desperate pleas and social contracts failing to curb these events,
some schools have turned to punitive measures. At several campuses,
including Syracuse University in New York and Purdue University in
Indiana, students have been suspended for attending and hosting large
gatherings. In Chapel Hill, town officials charged students with
misdemeanors in connection with off-campus parties at UNC. At the
University of Connecticut, students were kicked out of on-campus
housing for hosting a party in their dorm room.
But will this harsher approach work? Public health experts aren't convinced.
"We know shaming and blaming people for public health interventions
doesn't work, whether you're talking about sexually transmitted
diseases or you're talking about drug use and drinking," explains Dr.
Celine Gounder, an infectious disease physician and public health
expert. "You never want to do something that will drive behavior
underground and make it more risky."
Song agrees. "My first thought was I bet what some students will think
is 'Well, then I just can't get caught,' " she says. "So it becomes a
game."
She's hopeful that enforcement from other students might be more
successful than punitive messaging, since young adults value peer
connection.
"The best hope is that the students are vigilant with each other," she
says, "because it's coming from a peer who's saying, 'You are hurting
me, you are hurting our community and as a member, as your peer, as a
person in your social network, I am not standing for that.' And I think
that probably weighs more than everything else."
Alternative options
Another important aspect of regulating behavior is providing
alternative programming. "We have to figure out how to help students
meet some of those socialization needs, but in a safe way," Song says.
Offering outdoor, socially distant activities, she says, will help
schools "fare way better than just to say, 'Hey, just don't party.' "
Figuring out what a social life looks like on a college campus is
Connie Carson's job at Furman University, a liberal arts college in
Greenville, S.C. As the school's vice president for student life, she
has leaned heavily on student organizations during the coronavirus
pandemic.
"They are the lifeblood of any campus," she says. "Students are so much
more creative, honestly, than we are." She points to a recent outdoor
movie shown on the Furman campus, where students used hula hoops to
enforce social distancing.
The school is working on ways to use outdoor venues to have
"appropriate gatherings" such as trivia nights or dance parties to keep
students on the grounds, rather than having them tempted to head
off-campus, to downtown Greenville.
This responsibility sits firmly on the shoulders of the college, not
the students, says David Paltiel, a professor at Yale who studies
public health policy. "As the university, you've got the responsibility
to provide students with imaginative, compassionate, realistic,
low-risk options for staying socially connected," he says.
Administrators need to be upfront with students about the challenge
they're facing with enforcing student behavior, he says, and some
infractions may be worse than others.
"If you have to turn a blind eye to a game of beer pong that is
happening on the quad or in a driveway, that's well worth it," says
Paltiel. "What you're trying to prevent is the superspreader event
where 150 unmasked kids get way too close to each other in the basement
of some frat house with no windows open. That's what you're trying to
prevent."
Paltiel isn't expecting administrators to actually know what's cool;
that's why he says involving students, especially those involved with
fraternities and sororities, is essential. He suggests this script for
administrators, who are being upfront with students: " 'Here's the
money. Here's the party tent. Here are the outdoor space heaters.
Here's the pigs in a blanket. Here's the keg. What I can't have you
doing is having these things indoors, unmasked. I can't have too many
people in a single space.'"
And remember, he says, what schools are asking students to do is hard,
so a bit of empathy and compassion can go a long way. It hasn't been
easy for many adults either.
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