This time last year, the incredibly violent University of Massachusetts, Amherst – a university which seems to have a gang-legacy admissions category – was the scene of extensive back-to-school bloodshed.

It’s exactly the same thing this year, with party/riots so massive and attacks on police so vicious that the poor little town of Amherst, once host to gentle Emily Dickinson, now host to hordes of scary drunks, has begun considering its options.

It wants, to start with, to know just how seriously the university is disciplining its large numbers of remarkably vile students. UD isn’t sure what Amherst intends to do once it gets this information, but considering the long history of U Mass student riots (read that history here), the town has been astoundingly forbearing.

UD has proposed shutting the school down and making it an online institution. The negative here is obvious – Amherst currently enjoys a captive audience of thousands of thirsty alcoholics, and that’s got to be great for its bottom line. But gradually the whole Zoo Mass phenom is costing Amherst – and all Massachusetts taxpayers – more than it’s bringing in.

It’s humiliating enough that Massachusetts taxpayers subsidize absurdly overcrowded lectures; they also have to pay for the consequences of U Mass’s large number of violent drunks. These guys like to get together on a regular basis and destroy the campus and attack people and shit. So taxpayers pay for cleanup…

But now look. After a round of student arrests and expulsions in the wake of the last riot (I think it’s the last; I need to put a Google News Alert on this one), one of the expelled is suing for damages. If he can help just one other guy avoid the drunken mayhem to which he was driven by that school, it’ll be worth it.

But much as we can sympathize with this particular litigator, UD‘s main point is a hard-nosed financial one. Shouldn’t the state legislature be asking how much it’ll cost when all thirteen (there are only thirteen now, but the police are looking for many more) arrested students sue for damages? Time to put the school out of its misery. The glories of online education (we’re assured by many people that it’s better than face-to-face) stand ready to solve this problem.

As faithful readers know, UD designated the University of Massachusetts Amherst one of her first ‘Online Makeover’ schools – schools so violent, such a direct threat to their neighborhoods, such an insult to the word university, that they should be shut down as physical entities, and reopened as exclusively online institutions. The U Mass student’s comment in this post’s headline says it all, as does the long review, in this article, of the history of student riots there.

At U Mass the drunken shits have won; it’s their traditions that dominate and define the campus. The school has proved incapable of taking itself back from a powerful bloc of vicious fools, which means that it’s no school at all. For the sake of public safety, the image of the state, and the reputation of the university as an institution, the legislature should put it out of its misery.

… the University of Georgia the worst university in America (scroll down). But the grotesquely violent University of Massachusetts Amherst - a sort of baccalaureate Beirut – certainly holds the number two position. Do they have gang-legacy admissions? UD wonders how they manage to score, every year, the biggest baddest bandits among the country’s undergraduate pool.

It’s not merely the drunken riots – a staple of many large state schools. It’s things like this – home invasion, assault, and robbery – that distinguish U Mass. How many universities boast groups of hardened criminals among their undergrads?

From Idaho to Indiana to Florida, recently passed laws will radically reshape the face of education in America, shifting the responsibility of teaching generations of Americans to online education businesses, many of which have poor or nonexistent track records. The rush to privatize education will also turn tens of thousands of students into guinea pigs in a national experiment in virtual learning — a relatively new idea that allows for-profit companies to administer public schools completely online, with no brick-and-mortar classrooms or traditional teachers.

… “Why are our legislators rushing to jump off the cliff of cyber charter schools when the best available evidence produced by independent analysts show that such schools will be unsuccessful?” asked Ed Fuller, an education researcher at Pennsylvania State University, on his blog.

Uh, because they don’t care? Because they get insane amounts of money from the online education industry?

Hapless, high-security, high-tech, humongously overcrowded University of Central Florida keeps piling on. Its response to manifold cheating scandals (UD will quote herself here: A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you. ) is to flay students with doubleplusgood PowerPoints. This is so the answer to your problems, UCF!

… physical campus. It is one of her Online Makeover schools, schools so laptopped, over-crowded, and adjunctified that they should admit the obvious and fold as non-virtual locations.

But there’s a special additional reason for U Mass Amherst to cease operations. It is extremely violent and dangerous. It’s been a markedly nasty campus for years (UD has followed the riots), but now, just three weeks into the new school year, things have gotten totally out of hand.

The first weekend of school, police tried to disperse a large party, at a house on Meadow Street, and the students responded by throwing bottles at the cops.

The following weekend, one man was beaten and two students were stabbed at a party …

This weekend, police made 168 arrests and broke up a party of 500 to 700 people …

How long do you keep pretending you’re a university, when what you are, mainly, is a strain on police resources?

Regular readers know that UD has a category – Online Makeover – singling out American universities whose campus life is so sordid, so sodden, so stupid, that it is time for them to shut down their physical plants and reopen as exclusively online institutions.

West Virginia University, whose new coach (the state’s highest paid employee) appears to be a seriously obnoxious drunk, is a perennial Party School winner (it’s number four on the latest list), and is – just to top things off – likely to decide in the next few weeks to sell booze at its football games.

In short, WVA is a Purveyor of Fine Wines and Spirits, and should be allowed to spin off its course-offering component and ply its trade unimpeded.

A local opinion writer describes perennial top party school, SUNY Albany, and its latest drunken riot. When towns begin to think of local student populations as marauders who threaten their way of life (the SUNY student ghetto “was once a solid middle class neighborhood where people raised their families.”), things haven’t taken a very good turn. The New York Daily News also describes a “debauched and destructive” student culture.

As I note here, SUNY has dumped programs in French, Russian, Italian, classics, and theater, rather than cut back on its sports program – a program as deadbeat as hundreds of SUNY’s students.

Here’s some advice a SUNY Albany student recently gave the university — before the latest student riot:

[E]xercise some sense when admitting students. Stop wasting money on [campus] posters telling me that UA students don’t get drunk every weekend to the point that their brains become an etch-a-sketch. I’ve lived in the student ghetto. I’ve seen your students drunk at 3 a.m. in the middle of the road screaming at the top of their lungs because they think they have the right to walk drunk in a busy road. Your posters are full of lies. Stop admitting students who are going to drink themselves to death and you can save a lot of money in the budget on those stupid posters.

Money for deadbeat sports programs that attract drunks; money for posters around campus lying about the drunks. A constant party school front-runner. The destruction of neighborhoods. Riots. Meanwhile, the dismantling of an academic mission.

SUNY Albany is UD‘s first Online Makeover candidate– the first of several American universities she’ll be nominating, in the months ahead, for closure and then reorganization into exclusively online institutions. These universities are essentially unviable as physical campuses – because of overcrowding, violent student bodies, financial insolvency, reduction to sports venues, academic meltdown, whatever. SUNY Albany has reached the tipping point and should sell its physical plant.