I’m not going to suggest this is in any way indicative of the kind of petty tyrannies that animate the nannystatist impulses of many university administrations. But I will say it’s indicative of a troubling progressivist trend in universities to suspend basic freedoms by claiming to be acting for the greater good. From the December Reason, “Balance Sheet”:
Officials at Albany’s Siena University outlaw drinking beverages outside dorms. Any beverage, not just alcoholic ones. Water, Kool-Aid—anything. “Safety first, that’s what it’s all about,” a spokeswoman explains.
That sound you’re hearing is America struggling to pull a knife out of its back.
Safety? Hell, why let them go outside at all? Surely if we want our youth to be sheltered in a hovel of safety we should take further steps.
I mean they are going to let those bastards eat but not drink? What kind of safety precaution is that? Hell, I bet they let those kids run. Is no one, I mean no one thinking of the children?
RACISTS!!!
Water??!?!?
Hmmm.
Sorry Jeff but I’ve got to agree with the University on this one. I mean really. Kool-Aid. I was with you until I read that.
Where would it end? First Kool-Aid and then what?
Sunny-D. That’s where. And we have to fight now to prevent that atrocity. We have to struggle now to avoid having entire generations immersed into a sub-culture of drinking Kool-Aid and Sunny-D.
And then where will it go? Where is the endpoint where disaster meets grief?
Tang! TANG!
Don’t think that I don’t agree that the policy is crazy, but doesn’t it have to be the result of students walking around with screwdrivers or gin’n’juice in Tropicana containers?
If this is a proactive rule then I am on board with you without reservation.
We should send all the little bastards to trade school anyway.
Lotsa luck enforcing that shit.
Next they’ll declare that Guinness is not good for you! Oh the horror.
At face value, this is retarded. But when you start looking at implications, obvious (and then not so obvious) scenarios – it becomes frustratingly, painfully even, stupid. What about sports teams in training? Who is really going to run around enforcing this? Is the University aware that by making this rule, they are offering themselves up to our notoriously litigious society?
Joke. Laugh it up.
But don’t let me here you crying “law suit!!” when you’ve suffered severe cornea damage in a freak V8 Splash incident.
T-shirt: Juice Drinkers do it Outside
I don’t know, Jeff. I was drinking a YooHoo on campus this one time, and this guy told a really funny joke (about liberals being dumb or something), and the YooHoo came straight out of my nose.
I could have drowned. And it made my nose feel weird for, like, at least an hour.
That can’t be safe.
That man is drinking orange juice – TERRORIST!
He wishes to threaten the safety of our entire community with his calcium and vitamin-c laden cocktail of subversity! Stop the violence!
So I guess the water fountains have to go now too?
Overheard inside a Siena University detention center:
Criminal 1: “So, what you in for?”
Criminal 2: “Pouring dish soap in the fountain on the mall. You?”
Criminal 1: “Finishing up a cup of black coffee on my way out the dorm.”
Criminal 2: “Damn. You are one crazy bastard!”
We weren’t allowed to take glass bottles a lot of places when I was in college, but this is a horse of a different color altogether. Wow.
Juice safety is just a big joke to you isn’t it?!~?!?
I guess you’ve never stayed up all night with an innocent squirrel as he shat himself to death after lapping up a puddle of Juicy Juice and chasing it with a few under ripe acorns………..
Thought not.
It’s even a horse of a different cooler.
Isn’t Siena a Catholic school? Maybe they could hold an outdoor mass to protest. Communion has never been so riotous.
is there at least a Sippy Cup exemption?
“Maybe they could hold an outdoor mass to protest.”
Well, yeah. Except the priest would get thrown in the pokey during the Eucharist.
If our universities don’t stand up to the neocon cabal of JUUUUUUICE, who will?
“outside the dorms”
That’s what the blurb said. Not just outside. Now the students can’t drink any beverage anywhere except inside the dorms. Not in the campus lunch halls. Not in restaurants. Not at home. Not at sporting events, even the indoor ones.
“Im’ sorry, stewardess – er, I mean miss flight attendant. I can’t have a beverage. It’s against my school’s rules.”
</sarcasm>
I think the administration is just being proactive based on recent events. The French Government allowed those Muslim youths to drink stuff outside (emphasis on outside), then they went on to burn cars (which are also outside). People who are inside drinking their beverage of choice are in no position to burn cars, because cars are outside.
I hope Jeff is happy when his little crusade gets this policy overturned and Albany goes up in flames!
Ironically, they do permit late-term abortions on the lawn facing the administration building. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.
The belligerent prick inside me would stage a protest with the following items:
vodka jello shots, rum chocolate pudding, beer-icicles, and cheese grits (’cause they’re good)
“Sorry mam, no rules being violated here. The laws of physics clearly state that ‘DRINK’ implies a liquid state. Solid states implie ‘FOOD’. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tough shit. Move along, nothing to see here.”
Well, at least they are consistent. They ban drinking outside the dormitories, and they ban sexual intimacy within the dormitories (See “Visitation Policy”, Part A(e): ”Sexual intimacy is not permitted in any College residence facility. Siena College believes that the proper context for sexual union is an all- encompassing union of life and love within the covenant of marriage.”
Of course, some would say that such a policy simply invites drinking . . .
Well, you could never get by with that in the West: too many students would collapse from heat exhaustion and dehydration.
Does that “Visitation Policy” also include intimacy with myself?
My first year of college was at Siena in 1981. At the time the drinking age was 18 in NY.
They didn’t have “Orientation” so much as “Disorientation”. There were kegs everywhere. The fricking ROTC had a keg at their gathering.
I lived in a dorm with mostly seniors, the rugby team on one wing, basketball on another and lacrosse on the third. The RA on the rugby wing dealt herb, the RA on the lacrosse wing told you to towel your door and we never saw the B-ball guys.
My favorite memory was going to the john one morning and seeing a passed-out Franciscan monk, in Friar Tuck robes, sitting up in the hallway.
Now I’m all depressed.
Drink inside; fuck outside. What’s the problem?
I might be able to shed some light on the kool-aid thing.
One wing in the boy’s, freshman dorm had a traditional Halloween party. They would fill a garbage can up with Hi-C or Kool-Aid and Everclear (grain alcohol) then they would add dry ice so it smoked like Addams Family tea.
Funny, I remember the beginning of that party but not the end.
Since the drinking age is 21 they might have stopped that practice, but maybe not until now.
FREE THE V-8!!!!!!
It’s absurd, but it’s also serious. Little by little, small gestures like this–seemingly too innocuous to resist vigorously–are leaching the freedom out of our lives.
Orwell was wrong only with respect to the villains in the piece: Instead of obvious totalitarians, we’re gradually being subjugated by people who claim to love us.
By God, I think he’s got it!
My sister, who managed to graduate from there, pointed me to this story
Siena reverses ban on drinks
…Beverages are back on tap at Siena College.
One day after the Times Union wrote about a new policy designed to restrict consumption of all drinks, alcoholic or not, in public places on campus, the school went back to its original policy: No open containers of alcohol.
…snip…
And they’ll dispense open-container violations only when students are actually carrying containers marked as holding alcoholic beverages
So stock up on plastic cups if you intend to go to Siesta College.
And the proper pronunciation of this newspaper’s name is “Albany-Times-Useless”. They make the NY Times look like a bunch of neo-cons.
TW-Right, as in, “Right to Party”.
Err wonders,
Gordon says,
There you go Err, no need.
Back in the day, attending a small Southern Baptist university in SC, we were told by our RA not to take our (NOT ALLOWED) alcoholic drinks outside our rooms into the dorm hallways. Seeing us drinking outside would probably have caused an RA’s head to explode.
So don’t tell me about growing up living in a box in an alley, we’d have killed for a box to live in!
And the next thing to go will be dancing, because we all know that dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
Safety first…Safety first…you’re feeling very sleepy now…safety first.”
We’ll just call them Generation Numb.
(Too funny, shank!)
Wow. Definitely an organization is dire need of a moronectomy.
I guess the intellectual inbreeding in the Academy has finally reached the point where Academics are now officially more whacked-out than European Royalty.
Wow. Imagine what just one person who’s not afraid to say “shut up, you idiot” could accomplish at Albany Siena.
Criminal 2: “I mean, you’re supposed to be over on the Group W bench!!”