Students at Anderson University in Indiana aren’t allowed to drink. Not even off campus. Not even if they’re twenty-one. Not even if they’re twenty-one and off campus.

So the day before yesterday a few of them staged an act of civil disobedience.

About twenty-five students left morning chapel services on Tuesday and walked as a group to Kroakerheads, a bar about a mile from campus. (They arrived there at about 10:30, half an hour before Kroakerheads usually opens, but they’d called ahead and asked the staff to open early.)

They entered the bar. Some ordered beers, some ordered sodas, some didn’t order anything. All were in violation of Anderson student regulations, however — the rules bar not just drinking, but also being in the presence of others who are drinking.

The protest was staged by a student group called Students for a Democratic AU. One protest organizer, Caleb Fletcher, said it was not merely about the alcohol policy, but also “how the student body, as part of the institution, has been left out of policy decisions and the decision-making process.”

According to the Anderson student handbook, disciplinary sanctions for first-offenses relations to drinking include probation, medical evaluation, notification of parents, and “educational assignment/follow-up treatment.” Sanctions for second offenses include all of the above plus a fine and loss of privileges, with suspension or expulsion for third offenses.

An Anderson security employee observed and photographed the protest, and a university spokesman told the Associated Press that the university would follow its standard disciplinary process in dealing with the students who participated.

Anderson’s student government held a forum on the alcohol policies last night, and about two hundred of the university’s 2700 students attended. At the forum, Anderson’s president, James Edwards, defended the regulations, noting that they have been in place since the university opened in 1917.

Edwards did open the door a crack to a relaxing of the rules, saying that there may eventually be changes regarding “how the community and our expectations are enforced.” Others noted that other restrictions on social activities At Anderson have recently been lifted, including bans on playing cards and holding hands.

The university’s ban on dancing was lifted in 2007.