November 18, 2008

Top Canadian University Drops Homecoming to Forestall Drunken Mayhem

Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, has decided to cancel its fall homecoming for the next two years because unauthorized street parties have gotten so out of hand that both students’ safety and the university’s reputation were put at risk during the annual event.

Instead, the university says it will hold a reunion during its MiniU lifelong-learning weekend, in late May.

The student drinking and other revelry associated with homecoming have mushroomed in recent years, according to The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, which quoted an emergency-room doctor as saying that “loss of life” was “inevitable” unless the party scene was shut down. Last year’s event featured 138 arrests, 600 liquor-related and other fines, and an influx of local residents unconnected to the university.

In an open letter to alumni, the university’s chief executive, Tom Williams, pointed out that the street parties attracted up to 10,000 students and were a matter of public safety. The university has been canvassing opinions for an alternative event and will try the spring reunion for at least two years. —Karen Birchard

Comments

1. Boo Hiss!!!!!!!!!!!!

   — Derek    Nov 18, 04:13 PM    #

2. Hmmm. . . I believe that Ontario has a drinking age of 18. Maybe lowering the drinking age won’t make college students imbibe more responsibly.

   — J. Ward    Nov 18, 09:40 PM    #

3. 19!!! But since I have a kid at Queen’s who is 20, who’s counting?

   — Patrick    Nov 18, 11:24 PM    #

4. As correctly pointed out, the Ontario legal drinking age is 19. However, it is more than a stretch to associate the “drinking age” with the mass scale of drunken revelry these types of “traditional” events degenerate into. There are many examples of such events in the USA, one of which — Oktoberfest in La Crosse, WI — requires an absolute lock down of campus during its annual run. Why? To protect the college students — of all ages — from the tens of thousands of out of control drunks, the vast and overwhelming majority of whom are way past the legal age in that (or any) state.

   — dude dodging drunks    Nov 19, 08:15 AM    #

5. Another fine Ontario university, Trent, went through a related problem back in 1991 when their Spring celebration, Bachus, became a challenge due to outsiders crashing the event. The university had to review how the event was operated and new procedures were adopted that reduced the impact of drunken participants etc. The changes brought the event into compliance with Ontario’s liquor laws. Not all the stakeholders were happy but that was a price to be paid for safety and security.

   — former staff member    Nov 19, 12:46 PM    #

6. With respect to comment 4, I don’t think it is much of a “stretch” to link this type of behavior with the drinking age. My point is this: one of the key arguments for lowering the drinking age is that it allegedly teaches students how to drink responsibly by bringing them out into the open where their consumption can supposedly be monitored. The experience at Queen’s U — and other Canadian colleges — seems to prove otherwise. I am actually in favor of lowering the drinking age, but I don’t buy into this notion that it will make students behave more responsibly.

   — J. Ward    Nov 19, 12:50 PM    #

7. With respect to comment #6, it in fact becomes a stretch to identify the degeneration of a traditional college celebration into a drunken brawl as the result of youngsters drinking — when in fact that is not the causative factor. My point was — and remains — that large numbers of outsiders, well above the legal drinking age, create the critical mass of drunken yahoos. It is both a lazy assumption and inaccurate to associate young drinkers with the critical mass of drunken idiots who ruin these events — regardless of one’s stance on potentially changing the legal drinking age.

   — dude dodging drunks    Nov 19, 04:30 PM    #

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