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.