Pr Crisis Management

AN ISSUE OF SAFETY -Brief

(This paper was written by an administrator in the department of student services at California Stat University, Sacramento. This paper represents administrators and faculty on the Sacramento campus. Address: Department of Student Affairs, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA 95819. Phone: 916/278-8210.)

The Issue: On Campus Student Safety

Recently there has been a student death on campus caused by alcohol poisoning. The student dies during a fraternity sponsored on-campus event. The untimely death of this student has prompted other students to form a new student group EIE, Enough Is Enough. EIE has started a petition and mailing campaign demanding the removal and exclusion of fraternities and sororities from the campus.

Though the campus administration agrees with the EIE’s intent of not allowing harmful influences in places of prominence on campus, the University does not agree that barring fraternities and sororities will help reach this goal. We believe that the death of this student could have happened at any on-campus event in which alcohol was involved.

Deaths, such as our students, have happened at Universities across the United States, such as Dartmouth College and MIT. These colleges did not remove all the fraternities and sororities on campus, what they did do was a proactive approach to the real problem, availability of alcohol on campus. For this reason we will follow the approach of these universities and make our campus a dry campus.

This new dry-campus policy allows students the access of student leadership that fraternities and sororities and other social organizations offer, while in a safe environment that has the #1 cause of accidental related deaths, alcohol, barred from campus. Not only will there be no alcohol allowed on campus housing and eating establishments, all student-organized events will have to by dry. These events include socials, galas, and conferences.

Along with implementing a dry-campus policy, the campus charter of the fraternity related to the death has been suspended for five years. We are also requiring all on-campus student events be to be registered with the student activities