After earning the dubious distinction of being ranked the 11th best party school by Playboy, the University of Maryland at College Park is mounting an effort to crack down on excessive partying this year, according to the Washington Post.  But with only 34 officers in its Department of Public Safety charged with controlling over 26,000 undergraduates, it’s a bit of a daunting task.

The force of 34 officers put up a good fight, busting dozens of parties in a matter of a few hours. The consequences of a bust can range from confiscation of alcohol to, in  rare cases, arrest, and the University often comes down hard with harsh administrative charges.

The easiest way to crack down on parties? Taking advantage of clueless freshmen:

On this Thursday night, Ecker drives through campus and the surrounding neighborhoods, easily picking out the freshmen, who travel in packs composed of nearly every person from their dorm floor.

In one such clump, everyone has a student ID around his or her neck, and a few students wear high school T-shirts. But the most obvious clue that they are freshmen? No red cups in hand, Ecker said. They haven’t learned to bring their own cups to keggers.

Additionally, the police are declaring war on a much more frightening enemy this fall: the “undesirables.” These would be the young men who gather at a popular location and harass the women walking by, especially those who are dressed up for the evening.

The harassment that normally begins as verbal assaults and gradually increases to grabbing, pinching, touching, and fondling later on in the night when traffic on the sidewalk becomes more congested. This also makes it more difficult to identify the perpetrators, some of whom are students themselves.

Meanwhile, at the Washingtonian

In its February issue, the Washingtonian has an article that chronicles the party scenes of five area colleges. It can be trite (the writers have either long since graduated or are trying hard to indicate that they’re so over college) but I can’t say I knew much about the George Mason party scene before I read it.

However, the article incorrectly states that a fifth of all calls to GERMS are alcohol related. In reality, it’s only 7 percent. Give us a little credit!

Charms and out-of-touch touches in the article:

• Necessary explanations of the curious drinking games we play: “He uses a beer bong for ['pregaming,' or warming up with drinks at home]; the funnel attached to a tube is great for drinking fast.”

• The weird decision to view Howard University scene through the lens of a student who is identified outright as not your typical Howard student in a feature that implies it’s looking at the typical party scene at each college: the hyper-alcoholic Tiffany, who’s had a fake since she was 12, and friends, one of whom can chug a pitcher of margharitas in two minutes.

• Delightfully transparent references to Towne: “You could walk in with a piece of cardboard that says ‘I am 21 years old,’ and they will give you alcohol”  and probably Rhino: “So she heads to a bar that’s popular with freshmen because it’s so easy to get into.”

• Those crazy kids at UMD: “I blacked out a little bit, but I remember playing around with a fire extinguisher in the hallway.”

The GWU section also awkwardly transitions into a three-paragraph detour to discuss our old friend Juicy Campus:

Kids worry more about a new Web site called Juicy Campus. It has pages for schools across the country where students can post gossip. “C’mon. Give us the juice,” it says. “Posts are totally, 100% anonymous.” Topics are often things like who the biggest slut on campus is or which guys are secretly gay. Or they’ll target one person, using first and last names and asking others to weigh in.

On the GW page, someone wrote that a certain guy “is a loser. He hit on his straight friend. Twice. What a FAGGOT.” On the Georgetown page, one girl is labeled “the dirtiest slut around.” Someone else wrote about her: “definitely a huge whore. probably has STD’s, so stay away!”

Some student governments are considering blocking Juicy Campus, and students have started flooding the site with poems, off-topic questions, and messages about how Juicy Campus is cruel.

Hey, it’s all college culture, right?

Photo taken from Flickr user ThisIsIt2 under a Creative Commons license.

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One criminal has perpetrated six similar, creepy crimes in the past year

Last night’s PSA was a definite sound-alike to the slew of “Cuddler” crimes. And while the culprit in this latest sexual offense, which took place on the 1200 block of 35th Street, may not be the same behind similar crimes, it does call to mind a question: How many times has the criminal who Georgetown students call the “Georgetown Cuddler” struck near our campus?

Six, since January 2008. (We’ve been tracking him for a while, but even we’re surprised.) Yes, the Metropolitan Police Department verified in September that they suspect five different incidences which took place near Georgetown University in the last year to have had the same culprit. And that was before a similar crime with a similarly-described suspect occurred on September 25th, in which an officer said the MPD suspected the same suspect, making six.

If the MPD suspects him last Friday’s incident, too, that would make seven. In chronological order, they occurred on:

• January 13, 2008. “The first incident occurred on January 13, 2008 in the 3700 block of R Street, NW,” MPD 2D officer Helen Andrews wrote in an email to a community listserv.

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Metro map with proposed silver and purple lines

University of Maryland-College Park students have formed a new campus organization in hopes of drumming up support for the Purple Line, a proposed Metro line that would connect the Red, Green, and Orange Lines and keep suburbanites from ever having to enter the dirty District:

Student government president Jonathan S. Sachs, said the “Terps for the Purple Line” coalition is “one of the broadest we’ve seen.” It includes the campus NAACP chapter, Black Student Union, Latino Student Union, Hispanic Heritage Coalition, Graduate Student Government and the campus chapter of the Maryland Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

It’s not surprising that such a diverse array of student groups has signed on (who wouldn’t want to cut down on travel time?), but it’s a strange cause for short-sighted college students in general, since the Maryland Transit Administration fact sheet (PDF) says that the construction would begin at the absolute earliest in 2012 (between friends: 2020.)

Metro map by Eric Fidler