Henrietta Hay's Column

Ah college days -- spring in the air, romance, freedom from parents -- riots in the streets, booze in the kids, bricks through store windows.

Whoa, we must be talking about different things.

In the sometimes-peaceful town of Boulder, Colorado University students with a lot of help from townies had a wild drunken weekend recently. In three nights of rioting and random violence on the Hill, 12 police officers and several students were injured, 37 arrests were made, and untold thousands of dollars in property damage occurred.

Students are always protesting something or other. That goes with the territory. In the sixties the parents of these kids were rioting on campuses all over America. They were protesting racial prejudice and the Vietnam War and Victorian morals and anything else they could think of. But they usually had social causes. We deplored the violence, but often approved of the causes. These kids in Boulder were lighting fires and tossing rocks and slugging cops because they were drunk and mad because the city and the University were clamping down too hard on underage drinking. The right to get drunk does not qualify as a "cause" in my book. Like it or not, kids, drinking before the age of 21 is against the law. So is throwing a rock through a store window at any age.

Colorado University holds nothing but good memories for me. I got a good education and had a lot of fun. Today I look at the huge, prestigious institution it has become and read about the tremendous achievements of its faculty and students, and I feel great pride. So I was especially disappointed to read about the senseless, random damage caused by a bunch of spoiled brats.

Let's stipulate that (a) of the 37 people arrested on charges of drunken violence, only 19 were students, and (b) those students involved in the riots were a very small percentage of the entire student body. The fact still remains that in the eyes of the public it was a student activity.

Responses from some of the students involved show an interesting attitude. It was all the cops' fault for being there. Some students said that if the police had not been out in force the kids would have gone home. One senior said, "College is the time for experimenting...I don't think it's the police's responsibility to be our absentee parents." Rule of parenting #2: If they are going to behave like children they need to be treated like children.

Some of the kids should do their homework in Political Science. They complain that they make up 25% of the population of Boulder but have no say in the laws that are being passed. I wonder whether they are registered to vote in their home cities - and whether they voted in the last election.

When I tell people that I attended the University during prohibition days, they usually burst out laughing. Hard though it may be to believe, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution said in part that the "manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within ... the United States...for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited." It was in effect from 1920 until 1933.

That does not mean, of course, that alcohol was unknown to the populace at large or to the student body at C. U. during those years. It does mean that the campus was generally dry, and that large scale drunken rioting was unheard of.

So maybe I am not in a position to empathize with today's college students. In the thirties Drinking I (Falling Down Drunk) and Drinking II (Belligerent Rioting Drunk) were not course requirements for graduation. And we managed to survive four years anyway.

The University acted promptly and firmly. President John Buechner said, "What happened the last two nights was not an action of protest. It was completely, plain and simple, destructive violence." He says that students convicted of violent acts will be expelled.

According to my C. U. student contact, the great majority of the student body is embarrassed by the whole affair.

It takes a lot more than a bunch of immature kids to damage a university, but a small, drunken group tried hard.