But if you think they’re going to go down without a fight, you don’t know LSU.
The prodigiously pissed Louisiana State University.
Sometimes a simple little sentence says it all.
As the corrupt people who brought you the situation this sentence describes go on their summer retreat and do some really intense reposeful thinking about how they can unfuck their entirely fucked system — a system that directly benefits every one of the retreatants — they might give a thought to this sentence.
It appears in an article about one of the more notorious forms of money whoring sports universities do – selling beer to students at games.
Doesn’t always seem to work very well. One of the commenters reports from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:
UNLV sells beer at basketball and football games. It’s generally not a problem at the basketball games from what I can tell (I go to nearly every home game), but the football games are completely different. There are numerous incidents at each game because of the alcohol being sold inside the stadium. Students/young-adults are binge drinking in the parking lot at tail-gate parties and then coming in and getting more drunk. It requires a very strong police/security presence in the stands just to keep order in Sam Boyd Stadium.
And this is a UNLV game, so we’re talking only 10,000 people at most at a game (unless it’s Wisconsin and the Badger fans sell it out). Usually it’s less than that, maybe 6,000 to 8,000 people. Imagine a stadium packed with 80,000, it would be nuts. Actually just last season the university made the paid tail-gate lot go dry because of the incidents that occurred during the UNLV/UNR game. I think the universities considering selling beer just to make a few extra bucks are greatly underestimating the problems that accompany it.
Great synergy. Your team sucks, so no one comes to the games. You figure plying students with drink might bring them in, but it doesn’t because your team sucks. Meanwhile your school (and it’s not a very good school to start with – UNLV I mean) has no budget because the state (Nevada I mean) doesn’t care about education, and because you’re in hock for all the big-time athletics stuff you thought was such a great idea.
So sucky team plus you don’t even make the money on booze you thought you’d make because … what did the commenter say? Six thousand a game? Six thousand pissed losers? Watched over by a “very strong police/security presence”? (That costs money too.)
I’m not sure even Samuel Beckett could sketch so arid a scenario.
Yeah. And?
… UD lived in an off-campus Evanston apartment with three – or was it four? – other women.
Turns out there was always a law – the beautifully named Brothel Law – prohibiting more than three unrelated people from sharing apartments and houses in Evanston.
So pissed off are Evanstonians about loud drunken students that the town has now decided to enforce the law. NU students – some of whom will be evicted – are furious. Five hundred of them packed a campus meeting about the situation.
During the forum, Weinberg junior Taylor Barrett read aloud responses from Evanston officials she received after e-mailing them Tuesday to “respectfully express her unease” about the ordinance. Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl apparently responded by suggesting students ask the administration to change NU’s alcohol policy.
“Perhaps you might consider talking with the NU administration about allowing drinking on campus,” she wrote. “Then all partying would not have to take place in the neighborhoods.”
Ain’t gonna happen. NU doesn’t want its students falling into the lake.
No – here’s one of the better scenarios: The town of Evanston now has NU’s attention. Big time. Evanston knows which houses and apartments are the major offenders, and it should, with increased campus and town police presence on weekends, aggressively target them. NU sends letter to the students and their parents threatening suspension, whatever. Evanston leans on landlords, who also send letters. This high-profile activity scares other students into better behavior.
… just how seriously it takes dangerous drinking.
Lovely way to start the semester at JMU, with a big story in the campus newspaper featuring a psych professor’s latest mug shot, as she’s put away for two years for her second DWI within two years. Great message to send the students: If you’re a professor at JMU, you can just keep doing it.
Currently, Serdikoff is still employed by JMU, according to university spokesman Don Egle.
“The university has a process in place to deal with situations,” Egle said. “If there is conduct that needs to be dealt with, there are policy procedures to deal with that. We are aware of some elements of this ongoing situation.”
Great statement, Don!
“[A]dvisees have been informed she is unavailable this semester, but were not told why.” That’s it! Deal with it nice and directly. Express disapproval; put punishments into place…
Oh, whoops. No. That’s what you do when a student goes to jail for two years because she’s a threat to the community. When it’s a professor, you don’t do anything. You just let the campus reporters check the local court records, scare up her mug shot, and go to town. Well played.
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JMU shows the same aplomb with the local media.
Compassion is always good. The professor in question is adored.
But when an alcoholic on the faculty — multiple DUIs, operating without a license, public intoxication, felonious assault on a police officer, violation of pre-trial release, failure to appear in court —melts down in front of her students, in class …
… “She wasn’t finishing her sentences,” [one] student said. “It was like she couldn’t find the right words. We asked what was wrong but she just said she wasn’t feeling very well.”
For a few minutes after watching Evans, another student said they believed she was having a stroke.
“Someone went to call 911, and everyone else just sat there really upset,” the student said. “She’s easily everyone’s favorite teacher.”
… While the class waited for the ambulance to arrive, students tried to talk to Evans.
According to the student, when asked what was wrong, Evans told students that the university had taken away her job because she had been charged with a DUI. When police came into the class, they told students to leave.
This woman – driving drunk on a suspended license, assaulting police officers – is dangerous. She should not have been in a James Madison University classroom.
Not all the details are in yet, but it looks as though a good and dedicated teacher there may have allowed students traveling with him on a field trip to drink on the chartered bus taking them back to Lubbock. One of the students got outrageously drunk, and, once back in her own car, plowed into another vehicle and killed one of its passengers.
[The student] was arrested October 22nd and charged with intoxicated manslaughter, intoxicated assault, and aggravated assault. According to the police report, [she] states that a professor allowed the students to drink on the field trip. She says in the report that she had five beers and a shot of alcohol.
… UD‘s George Washington University begins to ask whether 4 Loko makes you 2 Fucko’d.
Drinking… fits comfortably with what some see as a just-regular-folks, anti-elitist strain in Wisconsin’s character. You know, the kind of people who would take an insult from Illinoisans – “cheesehead” – and turn it into a symbol of pride.
… Part of the anti-elitist attitude, [one observer says,] is a sense that we exemplify a true folk culture, and that “real people do these real things like getting drunk.”
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Last night, to toast her friend Courtney’s next stage in life (naval officer), UD sat at the bar at Sushi Damo in Rockville and hoisted an Asian Pear Martini. (Courtney had a Margarita.)
As an elitist, UD felt comfortable limiting herself to one low horsepower drink for the evening.
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Here is a long article (part of a series!) about why the state of Wisconsin leads the nation in drinking. (What does this have to do with universities? Hold on a minute!) It features a tidy paragraph of Reasons:
Climate. Ethnicity. The historical importance of the brewing industry. The interpersonal dynamics that govern how people learn to live comfortably in a group. The social nature of most drinking. A relative lack of newcomers who might foster change. The premium many here place on being just a regular person. The need for identity.
A shivery clannish German-derived person in search of identity… How can you stop being this and start being a temperate cosmopolitan solitude-seeking Jewish-derived person who puts a premium on being irregular?
Well, you can’t. You can’t make yourself over like that. Nor would you want to. You like being what you are just as much as UD likes being what she is.
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But when one of your state’s universities loses seven students in two years to alcohol, you have a problem. Administrators at the University of Wisconsin Stout are cracking down this way and that in an effort to save lives, keep students out of jail, and generally reduce mayhem and injury. They’re doing all the things universities do when they try to get out of the alcohol mess: Upping penalties for underage students in possession, and for riotous partying; begging some of the hundreds of bars just off campus to shut down or at least stop offering insanely cheap drinks; mandating alcohol education courses; increasing Friday classes…
But when even that high a body count has many Stout students taking to Facebook rebellion…
University Diaries has already looked at Four Loko, which everyone calls blackout in a can, so I guess we have to as well. It’s the bière de choix at increasing numbers of campuses, and so there are increasing blackouts.
One school – Ramapo College – has now banned Four Loko, and a bunch of states, plus the FDA, are investigating the marketing (usually targeted at young people) of all cheap “caffeinated alcoholic beverages.”
Wisconsin is one of our most proudly pissed states; and within Wisconsin the campus of UW-Stout is a veritable piss park.
In response to the carnage, the university has put serious new restrictions on students and their drink, which has the students (most of them; not the student I quote in my headline) in an uproar…
Last weekend’s incident might quiet them down, though.
Two students got into a shouting match with a third student at a bar. As the third rode away on his bike, the others
assaulted [Bradley] Simon causing him to crash his bicycle into a concrete wall. Simon flew over the handlebars of his bike and struck his head on the wall causing serious head trauma, according to the report.
[The students] then left the scene…
One will go to trial for felony murder, the other for being party to the same.
… stand for all the alcohol deaths among university students we will see this academic year.
Let her sad, addled end – drunk on a New York City window ledge – stand for all the early deaths we’ll read about on our campuses.
John was about to start her freshman year at the Parsons School of Design; her father, the US Ambassador to Thailand, had just brought her to New York to settle her in.
Because of Eric John’s high profile, his daughter’s story has received enormous attention. Maybe it will reverberate a little among returning students…
UD has, for seven years, read and blogged about the awful alcohol story on American university campuses, and she still has no idea what one might do about it. Universities try lots of things – mandatory online alcohol education courses; arrests; rapid notification of parents; restriction of alcohol, or types of alcohol, on campus; restriction of the number of bars that can operate within a certain radius of campus, etc.
We certainly know how to maximize alcohol death and injury on a campus: Have a wild, inescapable sports scene, have tons of fraternities, line the streets surrounding campus with bars. But no one seems to know how to reduce the havoc.
And, you know, so many people drink — so many of the administrators and professors and parents drink, and drink a lot… In Mankato, Minnesota, where there’s a big state university with a big drinking problem, the mayor was just arrested for drunk driving, and it wasn’t his first arrest.