Next stop, election day

Imagine the University as a freight train. Adam Herbert is the conductor, there are passenger cars for the trustees, chancellors and prestigious alumni, and students are the freight -- the coal, the fuel that drives the machine. \nThe IU Student Association oversees the cargo. It organizes and reorganizes, but no matter what it does or says, we still might get burned in the end.\nIt's February again -- time for another IUSA election. Time for a few new groups of dutiful students to consider the question -- How do you win votes from a student constituency so apathetic its idea of "Super Tuesday" is five-cent drafts at Axis?\nYou've got to get people's attention, so campaign, campaign, campaign. Make promises and make them carefully. This year's most eye-catching campaign pledge comes from the Big Red party, which has quite subtly announced its intention to reverse the current University alcohol policy in favor of a "wet" campus. \nHere's how it plans to do it. Ask the administration really, really nicely if it would consider lightening up just a bit. \nGreat strategy. While they're at it, why not try bringing down Mount Everest with a pickaxe? Obviously, somebody forgot who's driving the train.\nHere's a little history lesson for all you kiddies who can't remember the days when drinking on campus wasn't a collegiate taboo.\nTime frame -- the early 90s. College students on the tail end of the Spuds McKinzie revolution are dropping off apartment balconies and residency rooftops like flies ... flies who have had way too much booze to drink. \nSuddenly, underage drinking laws already on the books aren't good enough, University administrations and Greek houses are taking the heat, and IU needs some good press. Time to get proactive.\n1996. The IU vice president of administration drafts a new policy for the distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages on University property. The paragraph most directed at students reads:\n"No alcoholic beverages may be served for any group of undergraduate students of the University, or for any function where it is reasonable to expect consumption by persons under the age of twenty-one years."\n2000. The Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Association ban alcohol consumption in Greek houses.\n2002. IFC and Panhel create the "party patrol." Greek houses police themselves. \nWith residence halls also applying their own restrictions on alcoholic beverages, all on-campus students were hit with anti-alcohol edicts from nearly every angle. \nThus, the PR demons were temporarily exorcized. In the alcohol war, however, there could be no victor, and for the sake of maintaining appearances, compromise was necessary. \nIt's give and take. Students, don't do anything stupid, like dying, that would make the administration look bad, and in turn, they'll go on pretending like we're right in line with the drinking policy.\nThe train is going in circles. The Big Red ticket has to know this. Everyone does. \nIU students aren't so oppressed. They became the nation's top party school in 2002, so why should we fight the alcohol policy at this point?\nIt's great rhetoric to promote something that's on nearly every IU student's wish list; unfortunately, our alcohol policy isn't some wet-dry vacuum that can be reversed with the flick of a switch. \nTo the contrary, it would take a hell of a lot to derail IU's freight train of anti-alcohol support. A few pennies on the track won't cut it; every student on campus would have to be standing in its way, and you can be sure that, by the time the train grinds to a halt, more than a few of us will be smashed in the grating. \nUnless Big Red plans to defy the administration head-on, it should just let the train roll, roll, roll by, and they might not even get burned.