Students at Cornell University who party a little too hard are lucky to have people like Shane Moore and Jenna Zitomer looking out for them.
A sophomore, Zitomer was at a mixer on campus a few weeks ago, where she remembers her fellow students behaving themselves — for the most part. “There were a handful of unwanted sexual advances that I personally had to break up, both in private and on the main dance floor,” she recalled.
Zitomer was actually on the clock at the party, working for an on-campus nonprofit organization known as Cayuga’s Watchers. Trained student employees, called Watchers, attend campus parties and aid partiers at the request of group or students holding the event.
Over the past three years, Cayuga’s has trained more than 10 percent of Cornell undergraduates to be Watchers like Zitomer. The organization aims to change the party and drinking culture at the university by educating students and campus groups on the dangers of alcohol and how to treat students who have had too much to drink.
Cayuga’s was created in 2011 by three Cornell students and for the past two years Hopewell native Shane Moore has served as the organization’s president.
“Many times, students do not know how to help their friends who have had too much to drink or they do not have friends looking out for them to begin with,” Moore said. “We want a campus where people can go out and not be concerned that their friends are going to be in the hospital [the next] morning.”
As president, Moore has been the face of Cayuga’s Watchers. He has held individual meetings with administrators and student leaders on Cornell campus.
“We get to give feedback that Cornell otherwise wouldn’t normally have on the social scene,” Moore said. “We have a lot of really interesting insight, but at the same time we get to be confidential.”
The other aspect of Moore’s role is building connections with potential donors and managing projects that the Watchers are running.
Cayuga’s works to both educate students on the dangers of alcohol facilitate others to step in and and help. The organization aims to reduce or eliminate “pluralistic ignorance,” which is the idea that someone else will help the situation and that you are not responsible for what happens.
Moore grew up in Hopewell Valley. His mom is the advanced level math teacher at Stony Brook Elementary, where she has been teaching since Shane transferred there in third grade. His dad is an administrator at Children’s Specialized Hospital. They divorced when Moore was at Timberlane but both parents stayed in Hopewell.
At Hopewell Valley Central High School, Moore was on the swimming, rowing and cross country teams. He graduated in 2012 and majored in computer science at Cornell. Moore graduated early last winter in order to dedicate the spring to Cayuga’s and his research at Ithaca College.
Moore is currently studying Music Information Retrieval to create an online personal radio app similar to Pandora, which they will call “Meg’s Radio.” As lead developer of the research group, Moore focuses on applied machine learning, front-end web development and back-end software engineering.
In high school, Moore prioritized schoolwork and spending time with friends. He was never a drinker in high school or college. His friends in high school didn’t begin drinking until the latter part of their senior year and at Cornell, Moore was never interested in alcohol.
“I don’t feel that [not drinking] ever provided any sort of barriers for me to social or to join any social groups here or in high school,” Moore said. “I’m fairly comfortable being around people and being sociable regardless of alcohol and whether other people are drinking or not.”
Moore still chooses not to drink, a decision that he thinks has not had a large impact on his experience with Cayuga’s.
“What being a part of Watchers did to me was make me more sympathetic to people who get caught off guard by alcohol,” Moore said. “Most of the time, most of the blame can’t be placed on that person.”
Moore first became interested in Cayuga’s Watchers during his freshman year, when the organization began hiring students. His resident assistant at the time noticed that Moore would often come back after a night out taking care of hallmates. He recommended that Moore inquire about Cayuga’s because Moore was essentially already doing what the organization was created for.
He was accepted into the organization and trained to be a Watcher, but he has never worked as one. Soon after he joined, he successfully applied to be the Executive Board web director. By the following spring, he had moved up to vice president of scheduling. In the fall of 2014, other Cayuga’s members asked if Moore would consider running for president.
All of the interventions that Watchers performs are nonconfrontational, meaning that they never directly address that a student may be drinking too much. Instead, Watchers will do subtle moves to distract party goers from drinking too much, like sneakily replacing someone’s cup of alcohol with one of water.
Over the past three years, 2,000 Cornell students have been trained as Watchers, Moore said. By the end of this semester, every Greek organization campus, a third of the campus, will have received training as well.
The organization, founded in 2011 by Cornell students Eric Silverberg, Adam Gitlin and John Mueller, was born from the realization that most students are not properly informed on how to take care of their intoxicated peers.
At the time, Cornell was involved in the National College Health Improvement Program, or NCHIP, which took a data-driven approach to dealing with health problems linked to college drinking, Moore said. The program examined student bystander intervention, a concept that inspired the Cayuga’s founders, but it disbanded once Cayuga’s became operational.
“I’ll never forget the first time I had to call 911 for a fellow student who had too much to drink,” Silverberg said. “I was terrified that an entirely preventable situation could snowball into such a dangerous one so quickly. Thankfully, that student ended up being OK.”
Most of the nonprofit’s resources are dedicated to training. Cayuga’s also co-sponsors the sexual assault awareness week on campus, which takes in the spring each year.
“We thought that the peer-to-peer, nonconfrontational model would be effective because high-risk drinking, particularly among college students, is driven by social norms,” Silverberg said. “College students tend to overestimate their friends’ willingness to drink in excessive quantities, and so they adapt their behaviors to conform to perceived social pressures.
Watchers are required to create records of the situations they encounter at events; this is done in order to test the effectiveness of the training as well as assess how well the organization’s model performs.
Cayuga’s offers information to the University that it would otherwise be unable to collect. The school year at Cornell is broken down into quarters and each quarter has its own guidelines for how freshman can interact with Greek life on campus. At the end of the third quarter, known as “new member education period” — also known as pledging — new members are allowed to attend social events with alcohol present.
The first week of this quarter, this year its late February, is characterized by countless parties. Watchers took 115 intermediate interventions during about 16 events over the course of this week. Data like that shows how many times intervention was necessary to keep students from needing emergency services.
Moore said that the organization is also looking to compile some form of map that includes different types of events and how risky each event may be, based on who is hosting the event, where it’s being held and what amount and kinds of alcohol will be available.
“It is not just obviously that it’s incredible how students [are] helping each other, but I think what makes it the best idea is that you can make the world a better place just by educating people and actually implementing that,” Moore said.
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