I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me, as Lady Bracknell says… Is attendance at games, as this University of Virginia student editorialist argues, really a reflection of any kind, poor or rich, on a university? You could argue that the school in question here, UVa, should be proud of its low football turn-out, suggestive as it is of things like independent mindedness and studiousness. Perhaps some UVa students don’t like thinking of themselves as subjects in a long-running experiment on how to stimulate your rats into finding boring bone-crushing sports events interesting.
[UVa needs to be] building new stadium video boards … enhancing sound systems….
Buy a state of the art Adzillatron to shriek car dealership ads at them! Trap them in a stadium for hours, unable to turn off, or even turn down, incessant messages!
But UD says: Nothing will work without liquor. Only schools willing to soak students in booze are going to get anywhere with the national nightmare of tanking game attendance. Once your students are really shitfaced, they’ll do anything.
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Now with university players, it’s different. If you want to motivate them, try Coach Kermit Blount’s approach: starvation.
October 4th, 2015 at 1:54PM
I don’t think lack of alcohol is UVA’s problem. They’ve frequently been rated a top party school, and came in at #1 as recently as 2012.
October 4th, 2015 at 2:16PM
Anon: Yes, there are many big drinkers at UVa, but they’re all already in the stadium. UVa’s problem, I think, is the persistence of a strong minority of studious non-drinkers. These must be dealt with.
October 5th, 2015 at 5:58PM
UVA is conflicted with its own historical tug-of-war over drinking identity. There’s a strong sentiment towards romanticizing the cavalier-like drinker, tempered only by a desire to be taken seriously on the academic and world stage after it got left behind in many regards by other research universities. UVA idolizes the image of the drunk as storyteller, as in adopted writer-in-residence William Faulkner, who spun his inebriation into rich narratives, brutal truths, and a sort of smirking, Southern gentility. At the same time it wants to cultivate a serious image as a place of consequential ideas, embodied by sober men of grand strategy like Edward Stettinius.
Consider the two poles of UVA’s favorite alumni sons (incidentally both drop outs before degree): Edgar Allan Poe, the poetic lush, and Woodrow Wilson, the infrequent drinker and stern decry-er of frivolity. Drinking runs through the student identity — there’s a reason the Kennedys went to law school here — but there is definite tension between those students who want the “Teddy” path and those who want the less-liquored-up “Bobby” route.
Sometimes the two mesh, but UVA has never entirely balanced the public persona of dual identities of “hard-drinker” and “originator of big ideas” the way, say, Princeton has.
October 5th, 2015 at 7:26PM
Crimson05er: Your subtle account of drinking at UVa made me think of the recent interview Patrick Kennedy gave on 60 Minutes about alcoholism in his family. The details are horrible and sad.