Wet campus will lead to drunken tomfoolery, rape

Editor’s Note:
There is no Notice of Application for a liquor license in the SUB.

Editor,
I wrote the following letter in response to a Notice of Application I saw at the SUB. I acknowledge, after writing it, that the application may not have been solely Chartwells’ initiative, and I am disappointed with the regents if they approved it. I encourage others with similar views to write to the director of the N.M. Alcohol and Gaming Division before July 19:

I am a student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and I object to the proposed sale of alcohol on my campus. The following are the reasons for my objection:

The presence and consumption of alcohol are not conducive to an academic environment. I only have to drink one Fat Tire before my ability to read and comprehend even the newspaper is hampered.

The Student Union Building, where I assume the sale is proposed, is often crowded with noisy and obnoxious young people, especially during the lunch hour, and the presence and consumption of alcohol would only intensify this noisome environment and further reduce the ability to study in the building.

It would be too easy and too tempting to buy alcohol for underage students.

It would be difficult or impossible for campus authorities to ensure that only legally aged drinkers drink the alcohol after it’s purchased.

At least one of our campus fraternities has been accused, with supporting evidence, of providing alcohol to underage girls. Our campus is full of young people who are at an age and mental capacity that their moral standing might be jeopardized by the slightest temptation.
It would destroy the bastion of traditional Puritan-Communist philosophy that informs the current “dry campus” policy.

A number of new alcohol-serving establishments have opened in the UNM area to supplement the ones that were already there, and I assume that application is being made for the sale of alcohol on campus solely by the initiative of Chartwells (our food-service management company) because the alcohol-serving restaurants in the area are competing for student business.

Our current “dry campus” policy values moral principle, academic interest, and the safety and security of our student population above the “evil” and indiscriminate interests of capitalism. Abandoning the current policy would support Chartwells’ profits at the risk of increasing the number of rapes of our city’s young women, dishonoring our Christian heritage, impeding our ability to study and contributing to a noisome environment in a communal area.

I entreat your honor to hold public hearing of this matter at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and not in Santa Fe or at any other location. It is of greatest importance that the citizens who will be most affected by this policy are able to present their cases and views at the most convenient location, which would be here at UNM. If the hearing is held in Santa Fe, the invested lobbyists would have an easier time attending than our citizens would, and the hearing would not be representative of the people’s will.
Thank you for your audience and Christian judgment.

Corey S. Davis
UNM Student