UConn Should Back GUARD Dogs

Yesterday, The Daily Campus ran a front-page story detailing Undergraduate Student Government Commuter Sen. Shawn Logue's efforts to get the long-discussed GUARD Dogs program up and running. GUARD Dogs - an acronym standing for Giving UConn A Responsible Driver - is a noble program designed to give all UConn students a safe ride home at night, regardless of their sobriety or lack thereof. Yet since it was first proposed during the 2004-2005 school year, GUARD Dogs has encountered countless funding problems in USG - hindering its development and its implementation. It has also been said to have faced resistance from UConn's administration, as former USG President Derek Olson once said that the university "highly suggested I stop pursuing [the GUARD Dogs program]."

For the sake of the community, and for the health of the student body, these two entities should reconsider their positions on the GUARD Dogs program.

It goes without saying that drinking is extremely prevalent in the Storrs area. While alcohol consumption is a significant part of socializing on most college campuses, it is an especially important part of the UConn social scene - which, according to many students, offers few activities other than drinking on the weekend. (Waiting in long lines at UConn Late Night for snow globes and street signs evidently does not count as weekend recreation.) It seems that everyone drinks on this campus, from the Greeks to the Honors Scholars to select USG senators to certain Daily Campus writers. Those that don't drink are the exception, not the rule, and are often ridiculed and socially marginalized because of their non-drinking ways.

The overwhelming prevalence of drinking on this campus has necessitated a response from the administration. (After all, one would think there must be some reasonable way to cope with this preponderant alcohol consumption.) Thus far, however, the response has been only unreasonably tough love - including designating some residence areas as "dry" and instituting a strict two-strike housing policy. Using such harsh tactics, the administration has earned much of the student body's contempt while simultaneously pushing all substantial partying off campus.

This, of course, creates a problem. Students partying off campus will want to get back to campus at the end of the night, and will attempt to do so whether they've been drinking or not. At the moment, students are only able to procure safe rides from the two prongs of the UConn Husky Watch system - the Escort Service (run by the UConn Police) and the Safe Rides program (coordinated by the Heart House). Regrettably, these two organizations both fail to address the needs of the partying UConn student body. The first, the Escort Service, is flawed in that it outright refuses to transport drunken passengers. This stringent policy makes the program effectively useless for most students when they're out late on the weekends. The latter, Safe Rides, is better suited for students' weekend needs, as it does accept inebriated riders. However, it is limited in its scope - utilizing only a single van, operating from only 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and sharing its telephone number with the aforementioned Escort Service - and thus cannot adequately serve the thousands of students that require its services. (On a related note, the university once also featured a bus, which would pick up intoxicated students at various sites, but that program - mired by mediocre workers, inadequate funding and the nickname "the drunk bus" - ceased in Spring 2001.)

Without any reasonable means to get home, many intoxicated students have resorted to drunk driving - with terrible results. The saddest drunk driving incident occurred in 2001, when an allegedly drunk UConn student struck and killed a pedestrian (another student). That, of course, is not an isolated incident, but the worst offense in widespread trend. In 2003 alone, for example, the UConn Police made 120 DWI arrests. Every week, The Daily Campus Police Blotter is filled with alcohol-related charges - many of them pertaining to inebriated driving. Countless others avoid police detection, meanwhile, getting away with the drinking and driving every weekend. Clearly, the administration's tough love has not adequately resolved this problem.

A better solution to this dilemma would be to recognize the students' habits, rather than trying to (unsuccessfully) change them, and realistically work toward reducing the most dangerous aspects of drinking. GUARD Dogs is a program that does just that - allowing students to maintain their college lifestyle, which they'll do with or without this program, without forcing them to take unnecessary risks behind the wheel. While doing this might not fit in with the university's hard line stance against all forms of drinking, it would ultimately make UConn a safer place for everyone. As such, it is imperative that the administration wholeheartedly support the GUARD Dogs program.

Of course, one question remains: How could the university finance this program? I believe the best means would be a negative check off fee on the fee bill (much like ConnPirg's). If the school were to implement such a policy, the university could offer students the opportunity to voluntarily contribute to a worthwhile program without being perceived as overly supportive of it and what it stands for (again, much like it does with ConnPirg). It would also allow the GUARD Dogs program to circumvent difficulties with USG funding and with generating private funding (which, unfortunately, the organization has had to resort to recently).

GUARD Dogs is a common sense solution to an ongoing problem on this campus. Thus, the administration needs to take politicking out of its decision making process and recognize the needs of its students - without GUARD Dogs, this university will bite.