By Jacob Horn

After the Pennsylvania state police raid on Lloyd Around the World at the beginning of the semester, many students wondered how the raid would affect the role that alcohol plays on Haverford’s campus. The above-average number of alcohol-related hospitalizations this year has refueled such inquiries.

Many upperclassmen made comparable claims about the prevalence of alcohol on campus. As Casey Ross ’10 said, “alcohol flows pretty freely here,” especially compared to other colleges with stricter rules. She said that while there may be more alcohol on Haverford’s campus than at other schools, its visibility creates a more responsible drinking culture.

A female junior said that she thinks Haverford’s social life revolves around parties with alcohol and says alcohol is often used as a draw for some events, such as at Lunt shows where beer is available.

A female Leeds resident ’10 said that at Haverford alcohol is “an important social lubricant, whether that’s good or bad,”  but that drinking is usually done responsibly, possibly due to the commitment to responsible drinking put forward by the alcohol policy. Emily Shaw ’10 agreed, saying that not having to worry as much about hiding alcohol from some authority figure allows students to be more concerned about being safe and responsible.

A female senior also agreed that the alcohol policy encourages students to watch out for one another and not go overboard while drinking. However, although the policy states that “the Haverford College Policy of Drug-Free Schools, adopted in compliance with federal requirements, forbids the unlawful possession, use of, or distribution of illicit drugs or alcohol,” it does not keep students from drinking illegally.

None of these students said they had significantly changed their own personal behavior after the Lloyd raid. Ross said she always carries her driver’s license with her now so that she could prove she is twenty-one if the need ever arose. The Leeds resident said that students who are over twenty-one like herself do not need to worry about the legal consequences, so her and her friends’ behavior has not changed considerably.

Yet some students acknowledged that the role alcohol plays on campus has changed since the Lloyd raids. Rachel Oliner, HC ‘11, said events are now advertised more carefully, in less public forums such as mass text messages. She also said that drinking seems to have moved underground and occurs more often during the week.  

One anonymous twenty-year-old junior said that while he didn’t consciously change his behavior after Lloyd, he might have been more hesitant about drinking following the raid. He has also observed fewer incidents of public drunkenness and says that people seem to be following the opaque container rule more closely since the raid.

Several also expressed concern over possible effects the Lloyd raid has had on the class of 2013’s attitudes towards drinking at Haverford. Ross said that the freshmen received “a pretty shitty introduction” to big parties at the college but said she does not know if more underground binge drinking is happening because freshmen are more afraid of being caught.  

Shaw said that she felt bad that “as part of the Customs program, we led our freshmen to believe that drinking had a certain kind of safety around it at Haverford and that trust was broken because [the raid] came as a big surprise.” One Ambassador for Multicultural Awareness said that although many freshmen no longer have any residual post-Lloyd fears, had she been a freshman this year, she probably would have been more nervous to engage in drinking after the raid.

In a survey of one hundred and fifty-seven Haverford and Bryn Mawr freshmen, one eighteen-year-old female Haverford student said that she was surprised to find that, during the first two weeks of the school year, a drinking party was one of the main weekend events. She said that the spike in freshman hospitalizations probably cannot be attributed to these parties since they have been happening for so long. “I really thought those parties, and the sympathetic attitude towards their aftermath, sent the wrong message,” she said.

This freshman also said she thinks there is an expectation to drink. “When I go to social gatherings sober, it almost seems like I would need to be drunk in order to have fun because everyone else is drunk or at least tipsy so it gets pretty dull pretty fast,” she said.

“Essentially, our current policies all but give a green light to underage drinking,” another female Haverford freshman said.

Just over sixty-eight percent of the freshmen surveyed said  they drink alcohol, and eleven percent said they were provided with alcohol during Customs Week. The majority of those who drink said they do so once or twice in a typical week.

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