Even after sexual violence within the campus community gained national attention, the University of Southern California has yet to engage in serious dialogue with its students about party safety.

There needs to be a campus-wide conversation about how to stay safe on The Row. (Graham Clark, Neon Tommy)

But I thought perhaps this time, after a student from another university was seriously injured at a party hosted by a USC fraternity, would be a little different.

I thought this might be an opportunity for some real honest discussion between university administrators and Greek student leaders about making this community a safer place to party.

Instead, however, USC has grounded The Row.

SEE ALSO: USC Cracks Down On Frat Row As LMU Student Continues In Serious Condition

Granted, USC’s Greek Row has a pretty troubling history of incidents that make one start to see where such severe sanctions might be coming from: injuries, sexual assault allegations, hazing problems, violent emails and a lot of probation time.

And just about every weekend, someone gets alcohol poisoning.

But solutions to these very serious issues will not come from cracking down on fraternity parties for another couple of months and then sending students on their way with nothing more than a one-page letter.

There needs to be a campus-wide conversation started about how to stay safe on The Row. 

Shut-down policies simply aren’t effective here. They leave students feeling angry, insulted and eager to find a loophole. The reality of the matter is that the Greek system and its parties aren’t going anywhere soon and there are more than enough Trojans who will fight tooth and nail to make sure their favorite social pastime maintains its party-hardy honor. 

But there are plenty of reasonable steps that can be taken to ensure that students who party on the Row stay safe, or safer at least, while doing it.

One of these, the university has already suggested. This is the conducting of fire inspections in buildings where Greek events will be held, to ensure compliance with L.A. city ordinances, and in particular, specifications for fences, decorations and stages.

As of now, USC has imposed such sanctions as a condition of registering an event, however a better idea might be to make these inspections mandatory every semester for every House on the Row. This would ensure that the unregistered parties that will inevitably happen, not to mention the day-to-day activities of the students who live in the house, will not take place in a hazardous space.

Party capacities could be enforced. Bringing in outside liquor could be banned and bartenders could try harder to look out for students who’ve had too much. Better lighting could be installed in hard-to-navigate areas of frat houses—or glow tape, for a quicker fix. Bouncers could even pass out miniature Sharpie pens at the door to encourage students to keep track of their drinks. 

Greeks could also appoint a certain percentage of their members at every social event, including the unregistered ones, to stay sober (and awake) to monitor the environment and address any situation that gets out of hand, something I have seen work wonders at parties I have been at off The Row. Similar to driving a car, welcoming 500 wasted college kids into your home at one time takes a certain level of awareness and good judgment.

None of these are magic bullet solutions, but they can still do a better job of promoting safer partying than sanctions and, taken together, might make a real difference in reducing trauma on The Row.

Ultimately, it’s about starting the conversation. Even creating a forum on campus where Greek students—particularly fraternity brothers, who usually organize the craziest (and therefore most disaster-prone) parties at USC—can swap ideas and discuss solutions on how they themselves can make USC parties safer could go a long way.

Student-generated solutions to party safety might sound like a delusional fantasy to some, but why is it so hard to imagine that students at a university, who admitted them under the pretense that they could act like reasonable adults, be capable of acting like reasonable adults?

Because if you don’t think they’re capable, you might as well just delete the Row entirely because nobody who can’t engage reasonably in a simple conversation about party safety on the Row should be organizing a party on the Row.

USC can’t treat its fraternities and sororities like professional organizations on their website but like five-year-old children when something goes awry. It’s not honest and it’s not productive.

If USC takes its Greek community seriously, it must treat it seriously. That means individual holding members and houses accountable when they’ve done something wrong and dealing with them fairly when an event happens that is largely out of their control. 

But if they won’t, then perhaps it’s time the Greek community itself took up this issue. The Greek community is ultimately a community of students and students dictate its culture. We don’t need the administration’s blessing to start a conversation about safety.

We just have to want everyone to have a good time.