OctToser 25, 2005

THE CADRE @ 8

Rob Walker Copy Editor

Like every other student ies in residence this year, my parents recently received a letter from the school detailing my apparent drinking exploits. The letter, if you haven’t read it, was addressed to both my parents and goes from the typical ‘hard to believe it’s almost exam time’ bs that reads like a junior high school newsletter to ‘drinking on campus is a problem’ in about two seconds flat.

You know what, let’s ignore the fact that UPEI sent a letter to my parents that talks about underage drinking

Right Here and Now

without my permission. We’ ll set aside the realization that the only way they even have my parents address is by taking it from the emergency contact list I filled out when I first applied to school here. We’ll also ignore the possible privacy law issue that, as a 23 year old adult, may have been breached by sending this sort of letter to my parents, who have had nothing to do with my education in five years. We’ ll let all that slide.

Because let’s be honest here, the percentage of people who are abusing booze on campus is fairly small. I do understand that some people have issues with alcohol. Binge drinking and the like has always been the purview of new, young college students everywhere. Maybe if people had been raised with laws that made sense and were able to slowly explore the world of alcohol, rather than ee it thrown in their face with no context

or restraints (except their own), there wouldn’t be these issues. But I digress.

I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a serious problem, but it’s something that has to be handled on an individual basis. You can’t cure alcoholism with a pamphlet. I have no solutions of my own to give, this isn’t that kind of editorial. Besides, most of my suggestions would probably involve “drinking training’ or something.

And what about the rest of us, who enjoy some beers in front of a hockey game, as is our legal right as Canadian adults? I mean, we are all adults here, right? I was told that’s the premise of this whole ‘paying through the ass for your education’ thing. So why isn’t the

ee meee us like adults, and

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tattling on our parents? This seems like a very junior high school plan to me.

And what happens when some poor innocent student gets home to a smack in the face? Or angry phone calls that last for hours? This time of year is stressful, the letter even says so itself. Do all theses students really need, or deserve, to be yelled at (or worse) right in the middle of a crunch time?

Think about it. A parent gets this letter, opens it up, boom it’s talking about underage drinking and alcohol abuse. A lot of these parents are already worried and kind of freaked that their precious darling is away at school, and then they getthis. It basically implies that their son or daughter has been getting drunk (possibly while underage) and in trouble regularly. There are going

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