I was going to use what might be my last chance to make all of Stanford listen to me with a very pseudo-intellectual rumination about the cultural history of the hot prowl and its ubiquity as Stanford’s latest party theme, but I just so happened to open The Daily on Monday to discover that my entire tenure at this great Western university has existed in violation of the Fundamental Standard, a public service announcement courtesy of Clifford Nass, Otero resident fellow (“Op-ed: Time to stop the alcohol nonsense,” Jan. 24).

Fuck that, and here’s why: this intelligent professor claimed that “there is evidence that ‘approximately 50 percent of all people with a BAC of .40 or higher will die’” and that unnamed Stanford students without integrity narrowly avoided murdering someone. I have found from Internet sources that I’m sure are as reliable as the ones he quoted in his op-ed that approximately 25 out of 12 million college students die from alcohol-related incidents (which may include more than straight alcohol poisoning) every year. I am quite willing to bet that more than 50 college students reach a BAC of > .40 every year.

The reason the report of this student’s BAC came from the hospital and not the morgue is that those same Stanford students who drink in a self-serving manner called 911 when they suspected that their friend had drunk too much precisely so he/she/ze would not die, despite the administration’s inevitable knowledge of it and all the fallout that might result. That student’s survival was most certainly not a coin flip.

Despite the fact that alcohol is a drug, and that no one blames the dealer whenever there’s a cocaine overdose, the exceptionally learned Dr. Nass still chastises students who “knowingly” provide “a dangerous amount of alcohol to the student who becomes intoxicated.” With the exception of some pledge horror stories, no one at Stanford gives people drinks that will take someone to .40. (For the record, that’s eight shots in an hour for someone who’s 90 pounds.)

A more likely culprit was some unattended hard alcohol that the hospitalee, who had pre-gamed beforehand, was still fiending for when he/she/ze showed up at the party. I think I missed the part in the SAL Party Guide that requires breathalyzer tests upon entry and that the hosts conduct regular sweeps for hard A, so where was the Fundamental Standard violation again?

But the provider should be irrelevant, because in your worldview, all people with integrity would have called the RF after they saw this person “drinking extremely large quantities of alcohol over a short period of time” (because I’m sure you really want to be called every time that happens to one of your residents), and upon notification, what exactly would this clearly more knowledgeable professor have done? Probably call 911, which is what happened to the student in question in the first place. It is not the job of every party attendant to babysit everyone else. At the very least, don’t hate on the kids who are doing the right thing by walking their friend home.

And if his affinity for the word “nonsense” hadn’t already done so, his plagiarism analogy fully betrays his perspective as Angry, Out-of-Touch Old Man Yelling at Whippersnappers. First off, no one plagiarizes from a book anymore, unless it’s been uploaded to the Internet. Second, the fluid and mobile nature of parties means that usually no one is aware of the entire contents of someone’s stomach on any given night. According to his logic, though, upon witnessing someone copy and paste two sentences from Wikipedia, I should be able to claim with authority that he/she/ze plagiarized the entire paper.

I’m sure Dr. Nass is a competent and fair RF. In a profile in 2008 he admirably said that his residents “need to feel that they’re not going to be yelled at.” In Monday’s op-ed, he’s yelling at them and the entire student body and throwing around his authority as a University-designated parent who deserves to know about every drop of alcohol consumed by his residents.

As long as there’s an environment where the oh-so-nebulous Fundamental Standard gets brandished as a blunt weapon and where the only people whose job it is to watch residents (i.e. the RAs) can’t do so in drinking environments, that’s not going to happen. I know it’s easy to sit in one’s cottage and make broad moral judgments about students at some of the more vulnerable moments in their lives, but I wish that the next time he’s feeling curmudgeonly, he just channels it into more research about how kids are dumber today because they like to multitask. I really would rather be writing about hot prowls this week, but when all my classmates and I are told that we lack integrity, I feel the need to defend them.

Shots, shots, shots shots shots, shots, shots, shots shots shots shots, everybody. [email protected].