The Massachusetts Daily Collegian school newspaper today featured a ground-breaking advertisement. It was a photo of Judge Nancy R. Dusek-Gomez scowling into the camera with the following headline: "Welcome back students ... I hope we never meet."
According to the Boston Globe, Dusek-Gomez was sick of seeing college students in her Hadley courtroom, where she has jurisdiction over 30,000 undergraduates at five schools near Amherst. She was sick of underage drinking, sick of students altering the number on their driver’s licenses in an attempt to slip into bars, sick drunken assaults and drunk driving.
And there's a whole lotta criminal activity going on in Amherst; police arrested 56 people on Friday and Saturday night, the bulk of which for alcohol-related offenses.
(Tangent Warning: Fifty-six arrests?! The only way criminal mischief of that magnitude is acceptable is if your school won the NCAA March Madness tournament. Either that, or your student government hired Dick Cheney to speak at your commencement ceremony.)
U-Mass officials happily picked up the $2,211 tab to place the ad, but that's money well spent when you consider the hard-line publicity they garnered from regional newspapers and talk radio pundits. So kudos to U-Mass.
Now, would this ad have stopped me from forging my driver's license to get into The Bomb Shelter for "Dimie Night" when I was a freshman at Ithaca College?
Probably not.
But it's a nice "Told You So" card school officials can pull out when their next student is arrested.
And judging by last weekend's events, that should be sometime this evening.
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