A townsperson’s comment on this year’s local Pumpkin Fest – a traditional event in the small town of Keene New Hampshire, where residents display carved pumpkins and celebrate the beautiful New England autumn together – could also stand as the motto of Keene State University, a very dangerous American location whose rioting students turn everything – including the Keene New Hampshire Pumpkin Fest – into insanity.

Keene State enjoyed a spot of fame when a man who barely survived teaching journalism there for a few years wrote, post-traumatically, The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. Last weekend’s riot – pretty much unsurpassed, in the annals of college riots, for violence, injury, and destruction – can have surprised no one who, like UD, read Craig Brandon’s account of the gruesome brew that is Keene State. His book of course reviews the long history of student riots there. A sample:

[T]here were dangerous riots when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007 [Note that Keene State shares with our most riot-torn campuses the practice of rioting when happy and rioting when sad]. Nearly a thousand students, about one out of five students at the college, started fires, broke windows, turned over cars, threw rocks and bricks at police, and threatened to go on a rampage through the middle of town until they were turned back by dozens of city and state police [Dozens, hah. Lots more than that – SWAT, tear gas, the works – at the Keene State Pumpkin Riot.] who had been put on active duty to prevent the riot.

Brandon’s main point about Keene and other tuition-starved universities is that the school will do anything to keep bodies in rooms (“[I]t was common practice to stack freshmen into [dorm] rooms like cordwood, with as many as four students assigned to a room designed for two. Why? So many freshmen leave the school during their first year – usually at least 25 percent – that colleges overstuff them in the fall to avoid having empty rooms in the spring.”). This means giving in to students on all matters – academic, recreational – and never making them actually study or anything (“I left my teaching position in 2007, right after the dean threatened to put me on probation unless I made my classes more student-friendly by removing grammar from my lesson plans and showing more movies.”). When you add social media’s ability to draw rioters from all over the state to an already large concentration of drunken louts, you turn everything into insanity.

And oh how “disheartened” Keene’s president is by this shocking unprecedented student riot. Disheartened, re-disheartened, re-re-disheartened, re-re-re-disheartened… The sorrowful lot of the university president.

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Oh yeah, UD? And what’s Keene State supposed to do?

There’s nothing it can do. The state will never close the place. As fewer and fewer students attend, the administration will make its lout-friendly atmosphere even more lout-friendly.

But God knows there’s something its local terrified populace can do. Move.

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Let’s end this year’s account of life at Keene State with a comment from another townsperson:

Lillian Savage brought her kids to the Pumpkin Festival on Saturday.

“All you could see was smoke, lots of screaming, lots of drunken rage really,” she said. “I have been coming here since I was a kid and I loved it and now this. I will never come back – ever.”

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UPDATE: You can’t buy this kind of publicity.