I've gotten an interesting note from a reader in response to my post on Boalt professor Linda Hamilton Krieger's San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. Last Friday, Krieger published a piece arguing that Berkeley needs to tighten up its harassment policies, do sexual background checks on administrators, and either ban or "strongly discourage" sexual relationships between faculty and students. Noting Krieger's demand that Berkeley investigate whether anyone knew of Dwyer's "propensity to engage in risky sexual acts," the reader suggests that students who bring charges should be "held to the same standard." Specifically, this reader notes an aspect of the Boalt scandal that has been given short shrift by commentators who see the allegations against Dwyer as proof that Boalt is riddled with sexism and constitutes a hostile environment to women: alcohol abuse. Any discussion of Dwyer's "propensity to engage in risky sexual acts"--what "risky" means, she notes, is never defined--should be balanced by a discussion of Jennifer Reisch's "alcohol abuse": "drinking till you pass out is RISKY--and stupid." (I identified Jennifer Reisch as Dwyer's accuser last Friday.)

This is an issue I've been thinking about for awhile now. Media coverage of the story has definitively established that Dwyer's alleged assault took place while Reisch was passed out on her bed after a night out drinking with fellow Boalt students and faculty. The media has also established that this evening of heavy drinking was in celebration of a successful Boalt-based philanthropic endeavor, that it began at a Berkeley restaurant, and continued, after the restaurant closed at 11, at an Oakland bar. We know Dwyer had had so much to drink that a sober male student offered to drive him home. We know he declined, and that he then drove the drunken Reisch home. We also know from Boalt students quoted in the papers that parties of this sort are part of Boalt culture; Dwyer and other Boalt faculty regularly invited Boalt students to parties in their homes. In her Chronicle piece, Linda Hamilton Krieger characterizes the drinking party as a "school-related event."

So why isn't the issue one of Boalt's alcoholic culture, rather than its allegedly sexist culture? While it seems a long, hard stretch indeed to move from Dwyer's drunken peccadillo to Berkeley's institutionalized sexism, it makes perfect sense to suggest that what's gone wrong at Boalt is substance abuse. Not factoring the role of alcohol--or of an alcoholic culture in which students who wish to network socially must drink to do so--into the equation is disingenuous in the extreme, and only serves to underscore the extent to which agitation such as Krieger's is motivated not by a desire to identify and resolve a problem, but to advance an agenda. Demanding that faculty-student relationships be banned does not even begin to address what happened between Dwyer and Reisch, which was not a relationship, and which, in their respective inebriated states, would hardly have been averted by policy. The grope was secondary to alcohol; alcohol, and not the oppression of women, is the real issue here.

Some damning statistics: "75% of college men and 55% of college women involved in acquaintance rape were drinking or using drugs just before the attack" (this was, ironically, published in 1990 as part of UC Berkeley's own official literature on the connection between alcohol and date rape on campus). Also part of that report: the U.C Berkeley Police Department's finding that over a two-year period every reported date rape on campus involved alcohol. Also part of that report: the information that the "use of alcohol and other drugs tends to blur sexual decision-making, prompting people who would not otherwise do so, to engage in sex without precautions against conception or sexually-transmitted diseases." I think it's safe to say that what happened between Reisch and Dwyer would not have happened if they had been sober.

If there is to be an investigation into the culture at Boalt, it might as well be into whether--and how much--alcohol abuse figures into it. Accusations of rampant gender discrimination are not only not appropriate in this instance, but positively misleading. In manipulating the issues, such accusations do less to expose institutional problems at Berkeley than to cover them up.