The campus party pandemic

In September, a party in Guelph, Ontario, quickly escalated into a full-blown street riot as more than 5,000 university students celebrated homecoming weekend.

The party took place on Chancellors Way, an off-campus student housing community beside the University of Guelph (UofG). Videos and photos across news platforms and social media show hordes of students partying on litter-strewn streets, throwing beer cans and hanging out of apartment windows as police push through the masses with shields. Fights broke out, music blared, beer cans were thrown skyward, teens climbed buildings and the area’s hospitals were choked with the aftermath.

In the wake of the wreckage, Peter Schuurman posed an important question in his blog Sensus Divinitatis: “What is the university for?”

Sara DeMoor is a campus minister at the University of Guelph. In her 10 years in this position, she said she does not remember a homecoming “where such concerning behaviour was happening.”
University homecoming parties are common in Ontario, she told Christian Courier (CC), and university administrations often work with local law enforcement to manage events. But a party of this scale is nearly impossible to prevent or shut down. “The administration definitely has a role to play, but from their perspective, they actually have no jurisdiction there,” DeMoor explained.

The expected rite

Schuurman said the culture of partying is an expected rite of student life outside the classroom.
DeMoor agreed, although she said this doesn’t apply to all students. “I think there is an assumption that some students come to university with, that it’s the time to push back against boundaries. For some students and in some families and communities, there is this expectation that you’ve got to live a little in college, that this is the time to party because when are you ever going to again?”

Campus parties can quickly shift from group hangouts to dangerous situations when drugs and alcohol are introduced. What might be a fun event for one person can easily be a nightmare for another; only a week before homecoming weekend, 16-year-old Nash Dunlop was killed at a local house party, and two teenagers were charged in his death. The community was still reeling from the death of Dunlop when students took to the streets to party. And in the midst of all of it, social media blew up with the news that seven fraternity brothers from Cornell University were accused of drugging and gang-raping a woman for over seven hours.

The fact that university culture creates the conditions for such horrors displays a deep flaw in the system, Schuurman wrote in his blog.

DeMoor echoed this. “The drinking, the partying and the overdoing it is a symptom of something. It is a problem in and of itself, for sure, and it’s a public health concern,” she said. “And as a campus minister, one of my ongoing deeper questions is why? Why does this seem so appealing? Why are some students wanting to escape from their lives or to get so drunk that they can’t remember? What does it say about the reality that students are experiencing?”

She added, “There’s always too much drinking. There’s always ambulances. It’s never something that the university approves of or wants to happen.”

The social media problem

But there is no easy solution. Although the UofG has worked through various alternatives, Chancellors Way remains the safest place for the party. If the police shut it down before it can start, people will just use social media to organize a relocation. “The kids are just going to end up in neighbourhoods where families live,” DeMoor told CC. “It’s going to diffuse into more places where the police can’t actually keep track of all of it.”

But after this year’s property damage, hospitalizations and widespread social media attention, the university and local law enforcement might need to put their foot forward. “There’s been a SWAT team in the last couple of years, ever since covid,” DeMoor said. “But I’ve never heard of them having to be active. This year, they had to pepper spray people and suppress the crowd.” The policing cost for the night was approximately $91,000.

As populations grow at the UofG, the partying problem becomes increasingly difficult to address. Social media only exacerbates the situation, as students turn to their feeds to find the best party in their area. Crowds, no matter how raucous, only attract more members, even when videos show people throwing glass bottles and starting fires.

With events like this, DeMoor said there’s a mindset of “I’m not gonna get caught; I’ll stay in the periphery, I just want to see it.”

This mob mentality creates conditions that can result in injuries, property damage, sexual assault and fatalities.

“It would not be that hard for someone to be killed,” DeMoor said. “You get 5,000 people angry or panicked [and] you’ve got trampling.”

Christian students

Despite the thousands of people who attended, the homecoming party was not the only opportunity to celebrate the beginning of the academic year. Christian students at the UofG who wanted to put distance between themselves and the party had the option to attend a retreat off campus. DeMoor said, “Sometimes we [plan the retreat] intentionally to provide an alternative, a way to connect with the community.”

Some Christian students attended the festivities as partygoers. Others chose to help a local church distribute thousands of cups of water to dehydrated and intoxicated attendees. And there were even students DeMoor talked to who didn’t know the party was happening.

The Wednesday after the party, DeMoor was scheduled to lead a conversation at a campus ministry program. “We were in the middle of a series on what it means to be a faithful university student,” she said. On the Monday before, she read Schuurman’s blog. “It did really impact how I wanted to approach [the question]: Why are you here at university?”

Changing the narrative

The Guelph homecoming joins the queue of university party stories spreading across social media. Since the news broke of allegations of gang rape by seven Cornell students, thousands of women are coming forward to share their own “Jane Doe” experiences of sexual assault. The sheer number of victims of parties points to a much larger issue.

Although there is no easy solution, Schuurman encourages students to think of themselves as leaders of the next generation. The way university life should be “includes attending and participating in class, asking questions, working with their peers, completing assignments and tests and contributing to [the] communal well-being of their educational institution,” said Schuurman. “What happens in the classrooms, the dorms and the hallways of the campus over time is what truly counts.”