Editor's Note: This is part one of a series chronicling College President Jim Yong Kim's first two years at the Dartmouth.
Since arriving at Dartmouth two years ago, College President Jim Yong Kim has worked with students to implement initiatives to reduce alcohol harm and sexual assault, including bystander intervention programs and student-run committees. These issues have been at the forefront of Kim's presidency, and College officials plan to continue developing programs to address alcohol harm and sexual assault at Dartmouth.
"This comes from President Kim's background as a public health physician," Chief of Staff David Spalding said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "In his first six months at the College, he identified these as two major issues on the campus that were public health issues, and he decided we needed to address them."
In March 2010, Kim formed two student committees the Student and Presidential Alcohol Harm Reduction Committee and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault to involve students combating the issues. Each committee was charged with studying an issue and proposing a policy change to reduce alcohol-related harm on campus.
"From the beginning, he realized that these were problems that students were going to have to be engaged in and students were going to have to solve," Spalding said.
In May 2010, SPAHRC recommended a slate of proposed policy changes, including the formation of a student monitoring initiative to ensure Greek houses comply with College alcohol policies, the creation of an alcohol coordinator position and the limitation of beer cans through a more liberal keg policy, The Dartmouth previously reported.
The following January, the Dean of the College's Office announced a revised Social Events and Management Procedure.
Under the new SEMP guidelines, events are categorized as Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3 based on the number of students attending each event and how many attendees are members of the host organization, the type of alcohol served and designated requisite registration procedures. Each tier corresponds to a different level of monitoring needed.
"The thing that is going to change is that dealing with alcohol is not a matter of sitting around for years and coming up with the perfect policy and then putting it into place for decades," Kim said in a previous interview with The Dartmouth. "So we're approaching this more as a quality improvement initiative. We're going to continue to improve what we're doing every month, every term, every year, so that we come upon something that really works."
William Schpero '10, former presidential fellow and co-chair of SPAHRC, said Kim's efforts have "cut across the whole College" by "leveraging" the College's public health resources, including The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
Schpero is a former member of The Dartmouth Senior Staff.
Kim has applied his knowledge of health care delivery to implement harm reduction programs on campus, Schpero said.
"As a physician and a president, I think he feels he has moral and ethical obligations to do everything he can to address [alcohol harm and sexual abuse]," Schpero said.
In reaction to SPAHRC's recommendation for a bystander intervention initiative, Kim voiced his support for the Green Team program, which began operations in February.
"We wanted to put in a bystander intervention program, but it's really hard to put together a bystander intervention program that is spearheaded by administrators because they're not bystanders," former Student Body President Eric Tanner '11 said, adding that Kim played an active role in planning the program.
"When it comes out, it looks like the students came up with it and the president approved it, but President Kim was very much in on conversations," Tanner said.
Green Team members are trained to intervene in high-risk drinking situations, and members are reimbursed $11 per hour for each party they monitor.
Funding for Green Team and other alcohol harm reduction programs comes from financial donations to the President's Office made by parents and alumni, who are concerned with reducing alcohol harm, Spalding said.
In his most recent initiative, Kim worked with Schpero to create the Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking, which Kim announced in May. The Collaborative is a teaching effort that brings together 32 colleges and universities to reduce alcohol harm on college campuses nationwide. Representatives from the member schools met for the first time in late June to discuss methods for evaluating initiative effectiveness and guidelines for enacting change, The Dartmouth previously reported.
The member schools will meet two more times to discuss the effectiveness of their policies, Spalding said.
Last year during First-Year Orientation, Kim worked to educate the Class of 2014 to reduce alcohol harm by communicating with parents and directly addressing members of the freshman class, Spalding said.
Parent involvement in "working with their children on their issues" has yielded positive results, Spalding said.
Sexual assault reduction and alcohol harm reduction are closely related, Student Body President Max Yoeli '12 said.
"The one undeniable thing is that sexual assault and alcohol abuse are very closely intertwined," Yoeli said. "They both benefit from bystander intervention."
College officials created a position for an on-campus sexual assault counselor and are currently conducting a search to fill the position full-time, Spalding said.
College officials initiated Safe Ride to shuttle students at night in January and provided additional resources to the Mentors Against Violence and Sexual Abuse Peer Advisor programs in an effort to reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus, Spalding said.
"Overwhelmingly, this service is used by women," Spalding said.
At the outset of the shuttle program, many students said they believed their peers would request Safe Ride transportation in order to escape the cold, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Many students also said they were confused about the shuttle's function.
"Honestly, I don't know the difference between Safe Ride and Safety and Security," Anna Leah Berstein-Simpson '13 said in a previous interview with The Dartmouth.
Kim is still working with students and professional advisors to develop a sexual assault bystander intervention program, Spalding said.
Yoeli praised Kim's open-mindedness toward new initiatives.
"He seems very enthusiastic and open to new ideas," Yoeli said. "He moves fast, he loves data and he won't hesitate to embrace a solution even if it requires thought, power, thinking, money. If he sees something he thinks will benefit the College, he tries to go after it."
Yoeli acknowledged that Kim appreciates student input, but said working with the President's Office can often pose a challenge to student leaders.
"The largest frustration or dissonance working with the President's Office is that students and administrators have different timeframes," Yoeli said. "Students have weeks, terms, maybe a year. Administrators have to plan for a broader future. Occasionally there's a little bit of friction there."
Staff writer Jay Webster contributed reporting to this article.
