The RHA voted to conduct a series of dialogues among students and university officials on alcohol’s role on the campus at their meeting last night.
Resident Life officials also presented an updated version of the proposal to move room selection online as early as this spring.
The alcohol dialogue resolution would begin discussions in February 2009 with more to follow throughout spring semester, according to the resolution. The resolution aims to build upon the interest in the subject generated by the Amethyst Initiative, which calls for a discussion of alcohol laws, RHA President Alex Beuchler, who drafted the legislation, said. The resolution also aims to generate interest for the Alcohol Forum, which is scheduled for tomorrow.
“It’s important that we take all the good information that we get on Thursday and take it farther,” she said.
Each dialogue will focus on a specific alcohol issue, from alcohol’s role in assaults to general health problems, according to the resolution.
For the dialogues, the RHA will draw upon the issues raised by speakers and students at the Alcohol Forum, Beuchler said. The forum will feature presenters like the director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research and university President Dan Mote. It will be held from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. tomorrow in the Colony Ballroom of the Stamp Student Union.
After February, the RHA hopes to hold one dialogue a month in conjunction with other campus bodies, including the Alcohol Coalition and the University Health Center.
Beuchler said she and RHA Vice President Josef Mensah had already been in contact with these groups and said they were interested in the dialogues.
Also at the meeting, Resident Life officials talked about an updated proposal for moving room selection online.
The new proposal would add a “group move” phase to the approximately three-week online process. During this new phase, which would run after students who wish to stay in their units have made selections, groups of two to six students could make an ordered list of the places they would want to live on the campus. The phase would allow students to apply for suites and apartments or to request to live near one another within traditional dorms, according to the proposal.
The proposal splits the group selection phase from the “preference-based shopping” phase, in which students would be able to specify a roommate and answer a series of questions about where they would like to live in order to receive a room based on their priority numbers. This would run after the group selection phase.
“It was too complicated to do everything at the same time,” Resident Life Database Administrator Tom Lamp said.
Participants in the group move phase would be able to make more specific room requests than students in the preference shopping phase because of the smaller number of high-occupancy spaces available, Resident Life Manager of Assignments and Public Inquiry Erin Iverson said.
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