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August 27, 2010

We can cut 'our' students some slack

By Brian Ojanpa The Free Press

MANKATO — The perception: Each August 100 or so students at the local university are ticketed for underage drinking during move-in week.

The reality: Most of those receiving citations aren’t students at the local university.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but there are numbers to back it up, not only at Minnesota State University but at its mirror-image school St. Cloud State.

Locally enrolled students aren’t blameless, of course, but they deserve to be cut some slack in connection with the boozy bacchanal that has become a rite of late summer on many college campuses.

It turns out that a lot of these blatant tipplers are transient weekend drop-ins, pilgrims aiming to get plastered with their local-student friends.

Here’s something that may be even more surprising: Substantial numbers of revelers who come to campuses to party have no connection whatsoever with the schools.

“We have kids coming in from other states” on move-in weekend, said St. Cloud State Assistant Dean of Students Rob Reff. Some are friends of students there, he said, but others come because of the school’s reputation as a party school.

Minnesota State Director of Student Conduct Mary Dowd said as much about that weekend’s drinking dynamic in an area of concentrated off-campus student housing.

Both schools work closely with local law enforcement, which supplies name lists of those receiving citations. The names are then compared with student databases.

In the first two nights of the annual three-night move-in week patrol by Mankato police, more than 70 citations were issued. Of those, 10 were Minnesota State students, Dowd said.

The others, presumably, were visitors out for a good time and perhaps blissfully unaware of — or didn’t care about — the $177 underage drinking fines the city levies.

At St. Cloud State the scenario in recent years has been similar.

In 2007 there were 376 citations issued during move-in weekend. Of those, 46 percent were SCSU students.

In 2008, 41 percent of those ticketed were students.

Last year, that figure dropped to 36 percent.

Reff said the drop in locally enrolled student citation numbers corresponds with a new prevention and enforcement process begun in 2006 that holds students responsible for off-campus behavior.

That process calls for first offenders to be given the option of going before a judge and taking their lumps or taking an alcohol diversion class at a cost of $165.

Reff said school representatives and local police officers also team up at the start of each school year in a 12-hour marathon to knock on students’ doors and let them know, in effect, that Big Brother is watching.

Minnesota State has a similar sanction process in place for off-campus offenses.

The upshot is that although drinking citations continue to abound, the majority of those most drunk and dangerous are non-accidental tourists in town for a single reason.

The locally enrolled students play things closer to the vest, the likely result of ongoing preventive measures and sanction processes that the   schools and their communities continue to tweak — in spite of a drinking culture that has become systemic.

Not to mention ever-profitable.

Reff said a pizza chain during move-in weekend was offering free beer pong kits with each pie ordered.

School officials asked them to stop, and they declined.



Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com.  

    

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