Misbehaving students have Kingston talking

Kingston resident whose latest book is 1945: The Year That Made Modern Canada. He is a graduate of Queen’s University and spent 28 years as editor of the Queen’s alumni magazine.

My late father, a no-nonsense, blue-collar Kingstonian and a Second World War veteran, used to rant about the behaviour of Queen’s students. “Educated idiots,” he sometimes would fume, and not totally without good reason.

After Golden Gaels’ football wins on sunlit Saturday fall afternoons in the 1960s, thousands of gleeful students often would march from the campus into the downtown. Once there, they’d form a conga line that snaked for blocks down the middle of Princess Street, the city’s shopping thoroughfare. This invariably would snarl traffic, set car horns honking and move the locals to mutter words that aren’t fit for a family newspaper. In retrospect, a conga line on the main drag was small potatoes, certainly nothing to get excited about – let alone to prompt civic officials to read the riot act and call in the army to “break heads,” as my father demanded. As they say on the playing field, “No harm, no foul.”

Times have changed. So, too, has the level and coarseness of student misbehaviour. In recent years, it has become much rowdier and mean-spirited, more destructive and infinitely more troubling – particularly during the annual homecoming weekend at Queen’s University. Take last weekend, for example.

Despite repeated warnings and impassioned pleas by university administrators, public-health officials and city police, a rowdy crowd estimated to be as large as 8,000 students and hangers-on gathered last Saturday evening for an unsanctioned street party on Aberdeen Street. Nearly 150 fines were given out and three criminal charges were laid, and one police officer went to hospital after being injured in an arrest scuffle.

While the Saturday night unrest in Kingston has set the whole town talking, the sobering reality (pun intended) is that unsanctioned street parties and student rowdiness aren’t unique to Queen’s. This fall, there have been ugly reminders of that at universities far and wide – at Western, Ottawa and Acadia, to name just three.

The reasons this is happening are as varied as they are complex. That said, there are specific steps that could be taken by academic administrators and civic officials in Kingston – and perhaps elsewhere – that could help curb some of the more problematic behaviour.

Here in Kingston, Queen’s University and its alumni association could remove the focal point of the trouble by ending the debacle that homecoming has become. Or they could move the event to spring, after the students have gone home at the end of the academic year. In addition, Queen’s could – and should – stop insisting it has, at best, a limited role to play in regulating off-campus student behaviour, or that homecoming weekend problems are caused by “outside troublemakers.” What nonsense. Both excuses are weak-kneed cop-outs that simply aren’t credible. They make the senior administration and its communications people seem tone deaf and out of touch.

Curiously, while Queen’s has long touted extracurricular activities and the virtues of life in this medium-sized city as important aspects of the “Queen’s experience,” the powers-that-be at the university have been reluctant to hold students accountable for offcampus misbehaviour. When they enroll at Queen’s, all undergraduate students agree to adhere to a Code of Conduct, a 27-page document that was updated and approved earlier this year. It’s high time Queen’s stopped dithering and got serious about enforcing that Code of Conduct pledge. Failing to do so sends the wrong message. Not only does it tarnish the university’s reputation, it decreases the value of a Queen’s degree for all alumni and current students alike.

Officials in the Limestone City also have a role to play in discouraging the kind of misbehaviour by a minority of students that frustrates and angers residents while wasting taxpayer dollars. For one thing, city planners could back-pedal or at least rethink the notion that intensification of downtown neighbourhoods invariably is smart civic planning. Allowing deep-pocketed absentee landlords to buy housing and pack students into each and every room or to build monster extensions in the backyards of these houses is destroying the fabric of long-established residential neighbourhoods. This, in turn, is giving rise to myriad problems. Living in the “University District” as I do, I see ample evidence of this any time I step outside my front door.

When the pandemic raged, neighbourhood streets were relatively clean, and the nights were blissfully quiet. All that changed this fall, when the students returned. Cue the noise, litter and vandalism. Oh yes, and the screeching tires, blaring party music and sirens 24/7. That incessant cacophony again became the soundtrack of daily life. Were the students responsible for this sea change? You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to answer that question.

Such behaviour is widespread nowadays, and its causes are deep-seated. I’d argued that at least in some measure they’re the product of a lack – or is it a loss? – of student awareness that attending university is a privilege. Sure, tuition fees are ever-rising. But those cover just a small portion of the total annual cost of educating a postsecondary student. All taxpayers foot the bill, yet all too many young people seem to be oblivious to that aspect of funding.

At root, where student misconduct is concerned, I fear the nub of the problem is the erosion of the notion of the social contract. While that may sound like a concept for ivory-tower philosophers, it’s not. What I’m talking about is the simple acknowledgment that we’re all in this life together and that by doing what we can to ensure the collective good, everyone is much better off.

Will that feckless contingent of today’s students, those who – as they did in Kingston last weekend – got drunk or high en masse, ignored physical-distancing guidelines, pelted police with beer bottles, urinated and puked on people’s lawns, hung misogynistic signs on the front of student houses, trashed a city park, stole stop signs, and unabashedly flaunted their sense of privilege – one day come to behave that benevolently?

I hope so. But I do wonder.

Officials in the Limestone City also have a role to play in discouraging the kind of misbehaviour by a minority of students that frustrates and angers residents while wasting taxpayer dollars.