The Bud Stops Here

"We don't shy away from our reputation of strictly enforcing the laws."

Their job would be easier, in Barnes's mind, if there were more coordination between their department and the rest of the school. An intoxicated student can end up being cited by the housing office once, by the dean's office on another occasion and by police a third time. Each agency has its own way of handling violators and they don't always agree on approach.

At Barnes's suggestion, representatives of the various departments now meet every Monday morning to discuss the events of the weekend just ended. Their goal is the same: to stop underage students from drinking or at least help them learn how to drink responsibly. Their approaches, however, differ.

The police believe in shaking students up to get their attention and then teaching them about alcohol in classes run by the department. The deans and housing officers lean toward counseling students into making better decisions. "The academics," says Barnes, "want to be the students' 'friends.' " He crooks the first two fingers of both hands as he says the word "friends."

Dean of students Pam Patterson resists commenting on the police department's new enforcement strategy. She acknowledges, however, that her office takes an educational, as opposed to punitive, approach to student drinking. A first or, perhaps, even a second offender referred to her office is connected to the university's director of alcohol education. Attempts are made to establish the student's drinking history and the reasons for it. "It's difficult to know which is best, counseling or a criminal charge," Patterson says. "Each person is an individual and each situation is different."

Patterson feels any increase in drinking at Mason is a result of the growth in enrollment, not of a change in the character of the students. She admits to having reservations about the new law. "I don't know if it's a good law," she says. "We're a learning environment for students and part of that is social learning. People have to be in a position to make some mistakes and to learn that mistakes come with consequences. Ask me in six months how I feel."

David Hoffman, assistant dean of students at Truman University, a small, public institution in Missouri, knows how he feels. In August 2005, a mandate similar to the new Virginia statute went into effect. Anyone younger than 21, if visibly intoxicated or registering at least .02 on a breathalyzer test (basically, one beer), could be charged with illegal possession of alcohol. If found guilty, the youth would lose his driver's license for 30 days with a first offense, 90 days for a second offense and a year for a third.

Though a less punitive measure than Virginia's, it doesn't have Hoffman's support. That's partly because Missouri legislators didn't foresee that with even a 30-day license suspension, students' annual car insurance payments could increase by as much as $5,000.

The result? "I'm seeing considerable expense spent by students or their parents on hiring lawyers," Hoffman says, "and a bigger chip on the shoulders of student violators when they come to meet with me."

It's too early to tell whether that experience will be repeated at Mason, but Barnes is hoping it won't. He genuinely likes students, and knows he needs their cooperation. He has put in 12- and 14-hour days since school started, talking to dorm advisers, fraternities and sororities, athletes and groups of freshmen. He hands out his cellphone number and wears a tiny wireless headset around his ear so he can take calls regardless of what he's doing.

After midnight on the night of Yun's arrest, he heads over to a Comfort Inn, where a couple of hundred freshmen are being housed temporarily. He spends a few minutes talking to student Katie Morrison, a slender young woman with long, curly spirals of light brown hair. So she wants to go to medical school? What is required for that? Oh, her parking decal doesn't work on the main campus? How does she get to her job?

A couple of weeks after their conversation, after she has gotten the runaround from several university departments, he takes her to the right office and waits while her problem is corrected.

Does he do this out of the goodness of his heart or because he needs another snitch? He smiles and says nothing. It's probably a bit of both. The truth is, he needs "buy-in" from students if his get-tough policy has any chance of success.

The night she meets Barnes, Morrison, 18, rejects the idea of being a tattler.

"Ratting out other kids is not cool," she says. "I'm not going to be the one to get other kids in trouble. Then I wouldn't be invited to the parties."

Barnes has critics who say he's going about enforcement the wrong way. Byong Yun, Alexander's father, is one of them.

"I find the whole incident [with my son] rather disgusting," says Yun, an architect in McLean whose son declined to talk about the arrest. "Alex had, like, one beer before going onto campus. I mean, we're seeing 18- and 19-year-olds going to Iraq to get themselves blown up, doing the dirty work for older adults. At the same time, we treat other teenagers like irresponsible children.

"If he had been drinking and driving, it would have been a different story for me," says Yun.

The dilemma that Barnes and other officers face is not unlike that of a parent. Is it better to be uniformly firm about the rules, or to show some understanding of individual behavior and circumstance? Cops, like parents, wrestle with a big gray area every day. Meanwhile, some kids are getting wasted. Or trying to.

Barnes, leaning back in his oversize office chair, has another story to tell. Two of his officers recently received a phone call about a party in Wilson Hall, a freshman dorm. By the time the officers arrived at the room, the students had vanished. But the evidence was sobering.

"There was a trash can with beer bottles stuck in the middle of the trash, a laundry bag with beer hidden under the clothes, and a beer bong table folded up and placed in the closet to look like a dart board," Barnes says.

"I'm trying to change a culture, but this is a culture that is cultivated long before these kids get to college."

He stretches out his big hands and then moves them closer together.

"The gray is shrinking," he says.