The University of Iowa isn’t going to forget the Vodka Samm incident any time soon, especially not after her sloppy drunk mugshot made it’s way around the web last week. The University of Iowa’s President, Sally Mason, is none-too-happy about the incident either, telling the Des Moines Register, “It’s not who we are.”
“The vast majority of our students have expressed concerns to me about the reputational damage that one student can do to all of them,” she said. “We work with those students to help them understand it’s important that they get the message back to their peers, who may think it’s amusing, or may think that it’s OK to engage in these kinds of risky behaviors and attract national attention to the University of Iowa.
“That’s simply not what we’re about.”
So there you go, Hawkeyes. Your President is not amused. When you’re 21-years-old, full-of-yourself, drunk on school spirt, and have a naive world-view, it’s easy to scoff at a University president’s words about your partying habits. Classic “Don’t lecture me, Mom” behavior. But you should take what Sally Mason says somewhat seriously, because her influence will eventually trickle down to affect you.
When Penn State earned the #1 Party School spot the year after I graduated, This American Life did a massively influential profile of the school’s bad habits. Gears were set in motion very quickly by the administration and town to calm things down in State College.
Now that Iowa is in the national spotlight, for all the wrong reasons, your administration is going to start taking your school’s drinking culture a lot more seriously. They will work tirelessly with the off-campus community in Iowa City to do this, too. Business owners, town council, etc. There are a few ways they can achieve this: For starters, they’ll ramp up enforcement and arrest everyone with a beer in their hands a la what’s happening at Arizona State University. After that, they’ll start canceling your massive campus-wide parties: I.E.: Mifflin Street Block Party at UW-Madison, Floatopia at UCSB, State Patty’s Day at Penn State, St. Patrick’s Day at West Virginia, and the 4/20 Smoke Out at Boulder. This is all done under the politically-sound auspices of curbing drinking in order to promote public health and safety. Needless to say, this will also have an impact on your college experience.
In otherwords: University of Iowa, you’ve had too much of a good thing. Time to kiss it goodbye. Sorry it had to come to this: