Covid Thwarts Booze, Party Policies

University of New Haven students can’t have friends visit them in their dorm rooms. Quinnipiac University students are being sent home for attending off-campus parties. SCSU is requiring RAs to double-swipe students’ IDs before allowing them inside buildings.

Those latest measures have failed to stop Covid-19 outbreaks, at least at the first two schools. They do show some of the different ways campuses are struggling to figure out how to keep the pandemic in check.

“We’re building the plane as we’re flying it,” said Grace Kang, a first-year counselor at Yale, quoting a phrase that administrators have repeated to her over and over again.

Each school has made a slightly different calculation for how stringent to make the rules around social distancing and how harshly to enforce those rules.

Those calculations reflect divergent public health philosophies in a debate taking place on campuses nationwide: Should schools take a hard-line stance against group gatherings and unmasked interactions? Or should they anticipate that college students will inevitably defy those restrictions, and gear their policies towards prohibiting the least safe types of gatherings?

The stakes of regulating college parties are higher in this pandemic semester. Social gatherings have been key to the spread of a virus that, even for some young people, can be deadly.

But parties aren’t an unfamiliar challenge for universities. Local colleges have long employed a variety of strategies for deterring alcohol and drug consumption on campus — and those various strategies can offer lessons in how to promote social distancing among college students.

There are two parts to the question of how to prevent Covid-19 outbreaks: how much risk should the rules permit in social interactions, and how intensely should the rules be enforced.

In New Haven, colleges seem to have learned that when it comes to basic needs like social connection, abstinence policies can only go so far in preventing students from behavior that could spread Covid-19. But more flexible social distancing policies need to be properly enforced in order to be effective.

Shame & Blame

If Sam Tapper wants to bring a beer into his North Campus dorm at Southern Connecticut State University, he has to walk up to the desk at the entrance and sign it in. He’s not allowed more than a six-pack at a time.

“They’re really adamant about the limits you bring in,” he said. ​“They do want to know a lot of what’s coming into the building.”

Tapper, a college senior studying journalism, lives in a dorm for upper-class SCSU students who are generally of drinking age. The rest of Southern is a ​“dry campus,” where no alcohol is permitted at all.

Now, in the age of Covid-19, Tapper has another sign-in policy to follow: after a recent procedural change, he now has to swipe his identification card by the front desk in order to go up to his room. That’s because only students who live on campus are allowed inside other dormitories.

At many schools, the systems of regulating alcohol, drugs, and Covid-19 safety are intertwined. RAs, usually preoccupied with substance usage on campus, are now tasked with monitoring social distancing as well.

In the New Haven area, colleges vary in how intensely they enforce rules around drugs and alcohol — and how stringent those rules are to begin with.

Some research indicates that abstinence-oriented strategies like Southern’s ​“dry campus” policy lead to less overall drinking on college campuses. But among students who decide not to follow the rules, abstinence policies don’t necessarily impact the rate of unhealthy drinking behavior.

Alternatively, ​“harm-reduction” approaches to substances intervene in the most dangerous situations. Albertus Magnus, Quinnipiac, and Yale all have ​“amnesty policies” that grant students who come forward with concerns about the health or safety of themselves or a friend freedom from punitive consequences for alcohol consumption. The thought behind these policies is that students shouldn’t hesitate to ask for medical help or addiction treatment resources out of a fear of punishment.

It’s this kind of policy that Julia Marcus, a specialist in HIV prevention at Harvard University who has been a leading advocate against what she calls ​“abstinence” policies for social distancing on campus, thinks colleges should employ when it comes to social distancing. Marcus distinguishes between hard-line, ​“zero tolerance” approaches to social distancing policies and approaches that recognize a ​“spectrum of risk” and guide students away from the most high-risk activities.

“Risky behavior often reflects an unmet need,” Marcus said. Students choose not to social distance because they need social connection and interaction. So schools need to ​“acknowledge the needs that students have around social interaction,” she said, and teach students how to meet those needs in the least risky ways possible.

At Yale, for instance, students can have one unmasked guest at a time inside their dorm rooms — a policy apparently based on the assumption that some college students will be having sex, regardless of what the rules are.

Rather than forbidding sexual activity altogether, Yale offers direct guidance on its Covid-19 website about how to reduce the risk of Covid-19 spread while having sex, including limiting sexual partners, watching for symptoms, and even wearing a mask.

Notably, at the University of New Haven, no guests — even with masks on — are allowed inside students’ suites or rooms. Yet the University of New Haven has had far more Covid-19 cases than Yale, particularly after an outbreak in mid-October.

These different outcomes might largely be attributed to Yale’s twice-weekly testing regime for undergraduate students — which is also what allows for Yale’s more flexible social distancing rules in the first place. If a student has Covid-19, Yale has the infrastructure to detect that case before too many others get exposed. But the differing outcomes also reflect different public health philosophies between the two institutions.

In general, Marcus said she has noticed an element of shame in some universities’ responses to partying and a lack of social distancing. ​“The blaming I think comes from this abstinence-only approach that assumes that when people engage in risky behavior like socializing in a pandemic, it’s because they’re selfish,” Marcus said. This pattern is recognizable in responses to other health crises, like addiction and HIV.

“When shame and blame come into public health … that’s actually counterproductive to public health efforts,” Marcus said. Rather than creating a culture in which students feel motivated to collaborate with public health authorities, she argued, abstinence-oriented policies alienate students and push them to hide their exposures and symptoms.

Quinnipiac’s Crackdown

The day after Halloween, Quinnipiac journalism student Kaye Paddyfote’s Twitter feed exploded with the news that hundreds of local college students, including both Southern and Quinnipiac students, had attended a massive party at Anthony’s Ocean View without social distancing or mask-wearing. 

Paddyfote — who had contracted Covid herself prior to Halloween, and was isolating in her off-campus bedroom — checked her inbox. An email from Judy Olian, the president of Quinnipiac University, carried a stern message: after hundreds of local college students, 20 Quinnipiac students were identified and sent home, the email said.

“The investigation is ongoing, and any additional students identified who attended this event also will be sent home,” Olian wrote. The email implored students with ​“any information about the event or attendees” to call a campus hotline.

The email was the starkest example of a crackdown on social distancing at the college. At Quinnipiac, approximately 130 students have been kicked out of campus dorms due to social distancing violations, according to spokesperson John Morgan. Nearly 500 student conduct cases have been addressed.

By comparison, the University of New Haven has only suspended 12 students after confronting an outbreak on campus.

Since the Anthony’s Ocean View party, Covid-19 cases at Quinnipiac have skyrocketed.

While some students blame their peers for not social distancing, Paddyfote is most frustrated with Quinnipiac, which she thinks could have done more to prevent the post-Halloween outbreak. Administrators could have anticipated the spread of cases post-Halloween, she argued.

“It’s hard to tell college students you can’t go out and party,” she said. She believes that the university should have gone all-remote and limited social interaction immediately the week after Halloween weekend, rather than waiting for an outbreak to unfold. ​“You can’t tell me that the people in that Covid Task Force didn’t think that maybe cases might spike after that weekend,” she said.

”A Larger Significance”

In tandem — and in tension — with increasing crackdowns and blame on students for not social distancing, local colleges have also touted student involvement in efforts to model safe pandemic-era practices among their peers.

Quinnipiac collaborated with students over the summer to develop policies and procedures related to Covid-19, according to spokesperson John Morgan.

“At Quinnipiac, we believe fostering shared buy-in with students before the semester began was critical,” Morgan wrote in an email. ​“We knew we could not just issue a bunch of policies on paper and then simply expect compliance.”

Student input led to a Peer Health Ambassadors program at Quinnipiac, which employed students as promoters of Covid-19 safety on campus.

And Albertus Magnus engaged the men’s Lacrosse Team to demonstrate what six feet looks like — the length of a lacrosse stick — in a PSA video.

“As a whole, our campus has a well-developed sense of community… which motivates each student to think about the folks around them and those they’ll interact with when deciding what behaviors they will choose to engage them,” wrote Sarah Barr, a spokesperson for Albertus.

Grace Kang, a first-year counselor at Yale, also said that a community culture at Yale helps with promoting social distancing. ​“I think part of it is getting close to your peers,” she said. ​“You recognize that you have a larger significance here.”

Tightened Enforcement

Peer modeling and community building can seemingly only do so much to keep Covid-19 at bay, though.

Cases are rising at every college, in tempo with the state and the rest of the country. Quinnipiac now has nearly 300 cases of Covid on campus after the largest viral outbreak among college campuses in the New Haven area.

Over the course of the semester, Yale has stepped up enforcement of social distancing after a relatively lax start to the term.

In the first week of classes, Kang stumbled on a party in the communal lounge area in the basement of the Saybrook College dorm. Around fifteen or twenty first-year students had gathered there to drink together, violating both rules about alcohol and rules restricting the size of a gathering.

Kang recalls not knowing exactly what to do. The first two weeks of the semester, according to Kang, no one was quite sure who was responsible for breaking up parties in dorms. In addition to first-year counselors, who are undergraduate seniors, Yale employs graduate student Public Health Coordinators and has professors living in every dorm.

“During the first few weeks, a lot of those rule-breakings didn’t really come with consequences,” said Kang. ​“I think that was concerning for a lot of the frocos, just because you’re living on campus and you’re living amongst these first years and you have to interact with them.”

A couple of weeks into the semester, however, the administration shifted gears.

Head first-year counselors received an email from Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd outlining a chain of possible responses to an on-campus party. In a new protocol, first-year counselors and public health coordinators had the option of calling Yale Security, who could request backup from the Yale Police Department, for help dispersing gatherings of twenty or more students. (Southern’s campus police are also involved in breaking up parties, particularly off campus gatherings.)

Yale has also joined all of its neighboring schools in sending at least a handful of students home for the semester; spokesperson Karen Peart did not provide a specific number when asked.

On the front lines of enforcing social distancing policies as an RA at Southern, Xiomari Cabań Garcia said she believes that stringent Covid-19 policies are necessary in enforcing social distancing.

“Students and young people are not good at following rules,” she said. ​“If you give them that hand, they’ll go crazy with it and step all over you.”

Cabań Garcia and her fellow RAs break up a large social gathering every few weeks. After each event, students get ​“spooked,” she said. But after a while, another event occurs again, like in a game of whack-a-mole.

While it’s difficult to pin down the repercussions of harsh policy enforcement on campus culture, Cabań Garcia said there’s a stark divide on campus between the students who are attentive to social distancing regulations and the students who aren’t.

“It’s half and half,” said Cabań Garcia. ​“You have the group that freaks the heck out and they judge the life out of people who don’t have their masks on, and then there’s another half that’s like, ​‘Hey, we’re safe, we’re healthy, we’re alive.’”

She takes her role as an RA seriously, partly because the stakes of mitigating Covid-19 spread are high. On October 31st, Cabań Garcia remembers scrolling through social media with a few other RAs. They saw photo after photo of students at Halloween parties, unmasked.

It was stressful — and personal. ​“They were coming back to our dorms,” Cabań Garcia said.

This story was produced with financial support from Solutions Journalism Network.

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