When freshman mechanical engineering major Steve Swern sat down with his Resident Director to discuss the beer pong table and cups of alcohol his RA saw in his Elkton Hall dorm room, he told her the truth.

“She wasn’t out to get me,” the letters and sciences major said. “I wasn’t going to lie.”

Though Swern was put on housing probation and lost several housing priority points, he said overall the alcohol citation process was fairly casual, and that’s the way Resident Life officials want to keep it.

A Student Government Association committee is pushing for a Declaration of Student Rights that would add protections against self-incrimination for students caught breaking dorm rules, but officials from Resident Life and the Office of Judicial Programs argue these protections would interfere with what they consider an educational and character-building process.

Resident Life Associate Director Steve Petkas pointed to informal conversations with RDs as an example of Resident Life’s effort to work with students and educate them about their safety, distinguishing the Resident Life judicial process from a criminal procedure.

But senior business and philosophy major Stuart McPhail, who helped write the declaration, said he thinks the procedure is more punitive than educational.

Faced with these differing viewpoints, members of a University Senate committee evaluating the proposed declaration asked a logical question: Are students who go through the disciplinary process less likely to drink again?

The answer is not so simple.

Resident Life Rights and Responsibilities Coordinator Chris Taylor said the university has a 7 percent recidivism rate for students assigned to complete the online alcohol education program, AlcoholEdu.com, since it began last year.

In other words, of the 115 students assigned to the program, generally because of an alcohol violation with aggravating circumstances, such as noncompliance, fighting or vandalism, only eight were caught violating the alcohol policy again during their time in the dorms.

AlcoholEdu.com, a two- to three-hour online course, mixes surveys and videos about students’ attitudes toward alcohol and how much they drink and information about alcohol issues. It helps students calculate their blood alcohol content based on height, weight and gender and tells them the effects that amount of alcohol can have on their bodies.

Judging from the exit polls, it would seem that students are learning from the process, Taylor said. Last year, 60 percent found the course interesting, 54 percent found it helpful, and 11 percent of students who said they were ready to try to change their drinking habits in the post-survey, compared to only 7 percent in the pre-survey.

Taylor said he did not have data on the recidivism rate for students who violated the alcohol policy but were not sanctioned to AlcoholEdu.com, but he said it is very low.

Other possible housing sanctions include written warnings, personal meetings with resident directors, housing probation and loss of priority points and dismissal from dorms. In extreme cases, university sanctions such as disciplinary probation, suspension and expulsion may apply.

Taylor said while probation may seem to be a punitive measure, it too has an educational aspect.

“It tells a student, ‘You have an opportunity now, you need to engage in good behavior. Here’s your chance not to do it again.'”

Students, however, may have different answers.

“I wouldn’t say the consequences made me less likely to drink, but they did motivate me to be a lot more careful when I did,” said senior journalism major Matt Bowen, who was put on housing probation and assigned to do eight hours of community service in the Denton Community Office after he was caught drinking his freshman year. “I knew if I got caught again I would probably lose my housing.”

“Students are always going to drink,” said freshman letters and sciences major Alex Baddock, who has never received a citation but said he has many friends who have. “They’re not going to stop just because they got in trouble,” he said.

Researchers who have studied college alcohol policies say that while there is no one strategy that works best for reducing dangerous behavior, the most useful policies combine both disciplinary and educational elements.

“What seems to be working the most is environmental programs, where the school is getting involved in the overall atmosphere of the student’s lives, with a little bit of social marketing and social norming,” said Fred Donodeo, who coordinated the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Task Force on College Drinking.

The task force collected information on alcohol policies from colleges and universities across the country and tried to evaluate what programs worked the best.

One of the task force’s recommendations, he said, is one-on-one motivational interviewing with students who have been involved in the school’s penal system, such as conversations with resident directors.

“They consider that to be a teachable moment, in a supportive way, to do some counseling,” he said.

The study also found drinking by college students 18 to 24 years old contributes to an estimated 1,400 student deaths, 500,000 injuries and 70,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape each year across the country.

Both Donodeo and Margaret Sherrer, who conducted a study in 1999 on the role of dorm staff in enforcing alcohol policies said formal legalistic procedures like those proposed for the Declaration of Student Rights could, in fact, get in the way of the procedure’s educational function.

The RAs in her study saw their role as a balance between education and enforcement, with peer counseling cited as a major focus.

“In my opinion, RAs should not be expected to take on the role of police officers,” Sherrer said. “Infractions of university alcohol policies are not criminal proceedings, and I think there is a danger in treating these situations as alleged criminal acts.”

Instead, Sherrer said she would favor informing students of their rights in other ways, something Petkas said Resident Life is actively working to do.

For Swern, this would be preferable to making the process too formal.

“Maybe they could make information sessions about our rights something everyone had to attend,” he said.