College students are stupid and dangerous
Gee, this sounds familiar:
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Officials at Central Connecticut State University don’t see the humor in this prank: burning bags of popcorn in a microwave in a crowded dorm in the middle of the night and tying some doors shut so residents think they’re trapped in a burning building.
Campus police say they arrested three teenagers who purposely burned the popcorn early Monday, setting off a fire alarm in the dorm shortly after 3 a.m.
Oh, yeah. It’s a less lethal version of this story, when some students — mostly at B.U. and mostly associated with the soccer team — managed to kill a friend and classmate with some fireworks and a locked door.
People that young are stupid. They think they will live forever and that breaking the rules is cool. College is a group of thousands of these stupid, dangerous people, without any real supervision by adults. Then you combine alcohol and a culture that encourages binge drinking as a rite of passage, and when some of them are athletes, who quite often are coddled and have previously avoided discipline …
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
When I was in college we had a “Unastencher” who thought it was funny to nuke parmesan cheese in the dining hall microwave, which smells building-evacuatingly bad. He had a manifesto. Srsly. I forget what he was upset about, but something to do with dining hall food.