College administrators around the country say they are stumped on how to prevent the apres-game student sports riots that cause significant property damage, injure students and result in police overtime charges in excess of $50,000 each.
If you take the problem back to its source, you can see that once again the duplicity of college administrators is to blame. On one hand, they accept millions of dollars from big alcohol firms for advertisements in gyms, stadiums, programs and the like and on the other hand they tell students that they should not drink if they are under 21. It's a pretty clear double standard.
Colleges encourage students to get a little wild at sports events, often with the aid of massive doses of alcohol, as long as they root for the home team and stir up interest in the teams. But as soon as the final whistle goes off, administrators expect students to pack up their enthusiasm and go home. Instead, they head for the streets for a few hours of assault on themselves and on police, setting fires in the middle of the street and general mayhem.
Squads of police need to be deployed to keep things from getting out of hand, but as the numbers of rioters increase and the riots are planned weeks ahead on Facebook, it gets harder to bring things back under control.
The University of Maryland at College Park, for example, is facing a federal investigation into complaints, caught on video, of police abusing students and students abusing police. Since the city of College Park has no police force of its own, it had to bring in county police. The cost for this at the most recent party was $60,o00, according to this story in the Maryland Gazette.
A debate is raging there over who should pick up the tab. The university? The city? The county? After some preliminary discussion, officials reached the correct decision. The answer is to prevent the riots in the first place. So why would university officials hesitate about that? Once again it comes down to the "student-friendly" policies of party school campuses like the University of Maryland. Students LIKE these riots and college administrators don't want to deny them their fun.
Or, as University Police spokesman Paul Dillon told the Gazette, "They want to come out into the streets, they want to start fires, they want to confront police. That's what they want to do." And, he might have added, these students are our customers and they get what they want. Or they might go somewhere else where their right to assault police and set fires is better understood by the college administration.
So, once again, immature and dangerous student conduct is protected by the college because these immature and misguided students pay the tuition that keeps party schools operating.
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