Smooooooth criminal. (Bastrop Middle School)

It’s late. I’m walking back through the security check at Lower Quad Gate when I collide with a Specta Guard. She stops me. What’s that in your bag? She’s pointing to a suspicious aluminum can that could be beer. I pull out my V8 .

While I escape, the girl behind me unzips two pieces of luggage. It’s like airport security sans the fancy see-through-underwear technology .

Such are the wonders of nocturnal Quad bag checks, when guards who aren’t equipped to detect alcohol on the underage Penn body resort to other means — namely, backpack pat-downs and profiling. Thank God I’m Asian and female.

In any case, I feel unfairly targeted for a cause that’s ultimately futile. No matter how much they check, alcohol always comes in. In fact, they don’t even check that much. I could have easily sneaked in something under my coat. And unlike with library bag checks , students entering the quad are often entering their own places of residence, where they might expect a little more privacy. Especially for students who are 21, the bag checks hark back to those old days of living at home with the parents.

To curb drinking, it might be more effective to beef up monitoring programs like FlingSafe , which patrols the Quad to ensure safety during Fling. In addition, a lot of underage drinking completely bypasses the Quad and occurs elsewhere on campus namely in frats and other college houses. If students plan to get drunk, they will do so. But often in venues that are not monitored and are, consequently, less safe.

Don’t get me wrong. We shouldn’t just let students carry in armfuls of alcohol willy-nilly. SPEC already gets enough flak for bacchanal, underage drinking. However, the measures now in place do a poor job of restricting alcohol use and do so at an inconvenience to the rules-abiding part of the population.

Instead, save the money that goes into nearly two weeks of bag checks and put it towards campus security during the weekend of Fling.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.