The head of the Syracuse University office that oversees student conduct says students get dangerously drunk too often.

“We want students to be safe, and students sometimes … are not safely engaging in activities,” said Pam Peter, director of the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities. “They are taking things two steps too far, and that’s the last thing you want. I don’t want to hear about students being injured. I don’t like it.”

While noting that she “doesn’t get invited to parties,” Peter demonstrates a deep familiarity with the drinking culture at SU.

She acknowledged that drinking will happen, and expressed deep concern for the threat it presents when it gets out of hand.

What scares Peter is not that students drink. Rather, she thinks some students drink with such abandon that it risks their lives. She said dangerous drinking is on the rise at SU, and it’s a formula for tragedy.

“It’s one thing to say that students are underage drinking and they’re having a couple of beers, or doing a couple of shots,” Peter said, taking pauses to consider her words. “It’s a whole ‘nother thing when students go to the hospital with 0.4 BAC. And as a person who’s been to the hospital, and sat and held a student’s hand while there’s a machine breathing for them, that’s what I worry about.”

Students, she said, “don’t think it ever gets that far.”

Peter said the severity of the incidents is increasing based on her personal experience with five years in the office, three of which have been spent as director.

Peter said the university is somewhat limited in how it can respond to the problem. She said educational programs like “Know the Code” help. But students are “quick-witted and smart,” and it’s hard to keep up with them, she added.

She said the quality of fake IDs is “amazing,” with students ordering them from Canada. But she fears that a campus crackdown would just push more partying off campus, where the “behavior becomes more dangerous.”

During the interview, Peter provided clear answers to some common questions about the code of conduct. She said if students are on probation and get busted for alcohol a third time, they’ll be suspended.

“The whole process is meant to be educational, and if you continue to violate the same policies over and over and over again, clearly you have not learned anything,” she said.

Peter was adamant that the university does not punish students who call an ambulance for a friend in need. In fact, she said she’s proud of those who do. Peter said she never even meets with those who call an ambulance for someone in need. She said in rare instances the caller is actually someone who assaulted the person, and that’s a different story.

Other than those rare occasions, Peter said she’s only met once with a group of students who called an ambulance for their friend, and that was to tell them “how proud I was of them for making the call.”

“I know that’s the perception,” she said of her office’s reputation for not honoring the Good Samaritan law. “That perception is false.”

Peter talked about students abandoning other students in need, students taking advantage of drunken students and students hurting themselves or others.

“Sometimes their BAC isn’t so high, but they are passed out without shoes on somewhere in the middle of winter, or they get left on a lawn somewhere by their friends,” Peter said. “Alcohol influences all of that behavior.”

Alcohol’s ability to cause people to abandon core principles of friendship and decency clearly bothered Peter.

“Alcohol. It gets in your head, right? It gets in your bloodstream. It gets in your head. It makes a mess of your decisions. You don’t think clearly. So, going to this party over here where you think that … it is going to be a better party … becomes more important than making sure that your friend, who has had more than you, gets to where they are going safely,” she said.

She urged at least one friend in a group to stay “somewhat” sober to pay attention to what is happening.

“But really,” Peter continued, “I understand that students want to experiment while they’re here, that they are going to participate in underage­ drinking regardless of what I think about that, or regardless that it is against the law and against university policy.

“But,” she said, “you should be able to survive that experience.”

Editor’s Note: Over the past month, The Daily Orange has collaborated with the Department of Newspaper and Online Journalism at Syracuse University on a series of stories relating to alcohol culture on the SU campus. Multiple stories will appear in The D.O. in the coming days.

Published on April 8, 2016 at 8:11 pm

Contact Mikey: mlight@syr.edu