There is now 
more accurate reporting regarding
what happened at the Hobart Hoedown two days ago. (There were also articles in the Gazette and the Collegian.) Having lived in Amherst for 7 years now, I've become inured to this kind of behavior. When
we first arrived, faculty warned not to think of living in an apartment. We had lived in a student apartment complex the entire time I was in graduate
school and believed that people must be exaggerating the extent of the unruly behavior. We took their advice anyway and found a house to rent
in Pelham. Once we arrived, we quickly found that they were right. Even when the Hobart Hoedown isn't going on, there is extensive unruly
behavior associated with the apartment complexes: fights, threats, robberies, and vandalism. One year, dumpsters were set on fire repeatedly. Only
too frequently, the culture spills over onto campus: snowball fights descend into riots.
A related phenomenon is the culture that says students need to take over a building or act unruly for anyone to listen to them. What I don't see is evidence of students trying to work within the system. Amherst has a town-meeting form of governance such that students could have a seat at the table to draft town policy. But not only do the students not run for town meeting, hardly any students even vote. On campus, there is a system of student governance, but seemingly few students participate. I have seen instances where the campus has stood together and shown solidarity: after 9/11, for example. Short of that, I'm not sure how to bring the community together and unite them toward finding common ground.
I saw a reference on caveatlector to an Invisible Adjunct blog entry about a local professor. The blog entry references this chronicle article about teaching in large classrooms. It
instantly reminded me of a discussion a group of us had about a year ago (Phil wrote about it) about uncompensated student activity, that was all kicked off by a great quote I found in an LA Times article
.
" It just seemed retarded to work and not get paid when I was in school, but now I'd kill for two years' experience."
Patrick Hefler, recent graduate
It was a revelation to me that I could do unpaid work as a student. I didn't understand it until I was half-way through graduate school. I didn't get any "compensation" for setting up and managing the computers in the intro lab when I was a grad student at Western -- there was no budget for it. I spent hundreds of hours of my own time in the labs, installing software, learning to sysadmin the AU/X machine, configuring machines by hand, becuase I saw it as an opportunity to learn how to do this stuff and I wanted to use capabilities for teaching that would otherwise not be available (because if I didn't set it up, no-one would). All I had to do in that position was come into lab, teach my 8 hours of class per week, and correct student work.
The key thing here, is that I had goals, purposes, and ideas and found an opportunity (unpaid) where I could explore those things. Coincidentally, this also became the experience I had when I went looking for a faculty position. I could say, "I single-handedly set-up and managed a laboratory of networked Macintosh computers with a Unix file server for teaching biology." That was a big part of what got me my interview.
It's nice when a faculty member or department can pay students, but the most important opportunities are the ones that students discover for themselves. A university is chock-full of opportunities where students can do useful work and gain experience for getting a job. But a lot of students don't. My point is just to help students understand that they can find interesting productive things to do with their time.
The question you have to ask yourself, is what would you be doing if you didn't have to work? For a lot of students, it seems to involve going out drinking and sitting around getting stoned. How many biology students choose to do "Biology" with their free time? Why don't they? Why do they want to be a biologist if it's not what they want to do? What do they want to do enough that it's worth investing their own time in? A University is diverse enough that, if you look around, you can almost certainly do it here. And, like this guy found out, it's too late to go looking after you're done.
It's worth adding that I've known people who've been successful at this as undergraduates and when I'm doing advising I tell students about one fellow in particular. He first came in to talk to me about Capt. Horatio Hornboa -- the snake that used to live in the BCRC. He had observed that I was busy and didn't always have enough time to devote to the Cap'n. He liked snakes and was wondering if he could take care of him for me: feed him, water him, and get him out from time to time. I said, "Sure!" Another time, he came to me and asked if I could help him figure out how to post some pictures on the web -- I was only too pleased to help. (Of course, I'm only too pleased to help anyone.) He had been in a class where a professor was talking about different species of plants. After class, he went up to the faculty member and asked if he'd like to have digital pictures of the plants -- he knew they were all available in the greenhouse and he knew where he could borrow a digital camera and he wanted an excuse to learn how to use it. Another semester, he came to me and said he wanted to learn to design webpages and was planning to do an independent study with a faculty member to design a course website in order to have the excuse to learn how. Again, I was only too happy to help out. And these are just the projects I was a part of. I talked to him about it once and he said his brain just worked that way. I use the story with advisees to make the point that that there are lots of great opportunities to learn stuff that also can help you get your foot in the door. You won't find the opportunities advertised anywhere -- you just have to have the vision to see the opportunities for yourself. But they're everywhere on campus.