Obviously the problem of student party houses is not unique to Amherst -- although the main contributor is of course UMass/Amherst ,who can't seem to house all of its students, or keep the ones they do shelter on campus with interesting activities.
A former one-family house on North Maple Road (that actually once had a family living in it) in Hadley directly across from the UMass horse farm, about a mile from campus, attracted many hundreds of students last night. Around midnight four cruisers from Hadley PD converged on the scene, and a few minutes later APD sent two cruisers across town lines to assist.
Dispersed party goers either walked back to campus or crammed into cabs ... in search of another party.
Larry, would you prefer they be driving?
ReplyDeleteAnd I say again, if they had someplace more enjoyable to go, they would.
If the UM Division of Student Affairs was actually interested in students and not just trying to run a Marxist Re-Education Gulag in its dormitories, if Student Activities was truly providing the activities students wanted to attend, wouldn't they?
Q.E.D....
Why are they standing in the road?
ReplyDelete"a Marxist Re-Education Gulag in its dormitories"
ReplyDeleteEd, you say the darndest things.
I'm a townie who went to UMass and lived on campus in the 80s -- before they banned drinking in the dorms. And believe you me, we DRANK. But.... we watched out for each other, no one was driving anywhere, and if you did something stupid, violent or dangerous it was a problem *on the UMass campus* and was followed up on as such, at the residence hall level. So a UMass problem stayed a UMass problem -- it didn't create a Town of Amherst problem. In my four years of dorm living and hard partying, we never, ever had an ambulance ETOH call.
ReplyDeleteI live in South Amherst now -- and can tell you that even at this end of town, away from most bars, weekends are starting to be a nightmare. Yelling/screaming, bad driving, noise... and no cops to be found, probably because they're all uptown or at whatever large party's going on, trying to control the bedlam that seems to happen every weekend. *Off campus.*
UMass pushed the problem off campus. And all the duck posters in the world aren't going to fix it....
"Posters using cartoon characters - a duck depicting a police officer who approaches a duck student who has a beer can sticking out of his backpack - will blanket the UMass campus next month. It's a new twist on the annual effort to try to get students to control their alcohol consumption."
four comments, one verifiable... impressive, Larry.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but you just went and skewed the results.
ReplyDelete