St. Thomas University is considering instituting a ban on pub crawls or pub tours on the heels of the University of New Brunswick ban late August.
Jeffrey Carleton, director of communications at St. Thomas, said the university has a new director of student services, Brock Richardson, who will sit down with other student services staff and student groups to conduct a review.
“Right now our student services leadership, Scott Duguay and Brock Richardson are looking at the file themselves,” Carleton said. “They’re looking at what would be the reasons you’d want to do a ban. They’d also look at mechanisms on if you’re going to put a ban in place how effective would it be and what would the mechanisms be for managing a ban.”
He said they expect to come to a decision within several weeks.
UNB cited liability, lack of insurance and risky behaviour as reasons for placing a ban on pub crawls held on its campus, since the activity involves drinking and moving to different bars and clubs over the course of the night.
Brianna Matchett, vice-president student life at St. Thomas University Students’ Union said generally pub crawls organized by clubs and societies on campus are done to raise money for either charities or to sustain the club itself.
“From a direct STUSU link, the grad class committee uses pub crawls to fund a large number of activities for the grad class, because the grad class has no budget besides what they are able to raise for themselves,” she said.
Matchett said if the ban is instituted it would present some challenges.
“I think the students would be disappointed, because it would make fundraising for different events more difficult,” she said.
She said pub crawls have been an effective way to fundraise because they have so little overhead.
“If a group wants to do a bake sale, then it involves more legwork and supplies. Besides the cost of the T-shirts, the majority of the money can go into the cause.”
She said she doesn’t have the exact number of pub crawls held last year, but she can estimate around 12.
“I know that residence held four, grad class did two, I am going to ballpark clubs and societies at four, and probably two done solely for fundraising. But that’s an estimate.”
Carleton said the student services will also be reaching out to STUSU to see what they have to say.
“This doesn’t seem to be an urgent issue in the sense that I’m not aware of any pub crawls that are scheduled or are going in the near term.”
Carleton said some of the factors that will be considered when reviewing the pub crawl policy would be liability, risky behaviour and drinking culture at the university.
“One of the issues is that it could be dangerous. And when you look at things you can do to deal with issues such as over drinking or binge drinking, a pub crawl sort of goes counter to that.”
Matchett said in previous years, no pub crawls were organized until after midterms, just because of organizing and getting back to school.
“I don’t see it as a pressing concern at this moment, just because in the coming weeks, people will still be getting used to a new school year,” she said.
Have something to say about this? Email [email protected] to share your side of the story.
