Editor's note - The following article is part of a series covering violence on campus.
By midnight, the party at Amherst College begins to look familiar. Students are drunk out of their minds - or getting there with dedicated efficiency - and there is someone passed out on the couch. A week later, a party at Mount Holyoke offers the same experience. It doesn't take long to match these scenes with something familiar: a party at the University of Massachusetts.
But while partying cultures at all three colleges are almost identical, UMass receives more media attention for the drinking habits of its students. A simple in-ternet search of 'UMass' and 'drinking' yields nearly 200,000 results. The same search for any of the other Five College schools or other schools in the UMass sys-tem offers no relevant sites.
To add to the double standard, only UMass deals with the stereotype of be-ing a university with a large, violent student body that can lose control under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
One of the first hits on Google is an Urbandictionary.com definition of the University. UMass has "insane amounts of partying," according to the post, mostly because "there is nothing better to do." A Wikipedia article agrees, as do countless other student blogs and informal college ranking Web sites.
This image of UMass inspired the nickname ZooMass and won the Univer-sity the No. 8 spot on Princeton Review's ranking of the biggest party schools of 2005. UMass avoided the list for the past two years, but the stereotype lingers. A recent string of violent events has only heightened the media attention on UMass.
Edward F. Blaguszewski, a spokesman for UMass, said that this problem stems partly from the University's size. With 19,299 undergraduate students, the Amherst campus is one of the largest institutions in Massachusetts.
"For lack of a better term, we're the 900-pound gorilla in the higher educa-tion world in Massachusetts," said Blaguszewski.
In comparison, Hampshire College has 1,434 students, and UMass-Lowell has 7,419 students. UMass is nearly eight times the size of Smith College, the sec-ond largest school in the Five College consortium.
Consequently, the size translates to more parties, larger crowds at riots and more attention from the media. The riot in 2006 - precipitated by the school's par-ticipation in the Football Championship Subdivision's final - involved nearly 2,000 students, a crowd about as large as Amherst College's entire undergraduate population.
"People pay more attention to you," said Blaguszewski. "In Massachusetts, everyone knows somebody who went to UMass."
Nearly 80 percent of UMass students are from Massachusetts. A majority of these students decide to remain in the Commonwealth, which means that UMass has many more connections to Massachusetts residents than other institutions.
Events on the campus in the past few weeks have given the media a lot of material to work with. The Boston Globe ran several articles with headlines such as "Violence rattles UMass-Amherst," and "UMass-Amherst urges calm after vio-lent events."
Senior Andy Stone sees this as only natural.
"This is a tax-payer funded school," he said. "We're under more scrutiny because more people pay for it, even if they don't go here."
Captain Mike Kent of the Amherst Police Department said that regardless of the amount of media coverage a campus receives, alcohol has always been a prob-lem for universities across the nation.
"Every college has its issues," he said, pointing out that Michigan State Uni-versity had to deal with an incident of its own earlier this month.
Like UMass, MSU is a large university with a history of student violence. On April 6, a large crowd of nearly 4,000 students - many of them intoxicated - had an encounter with the campus police. The incident received a lot of local atten-tion and revived discussions about the stigma associated with state schools.
"We need to shift away from looking at each individual incident, and toward looking at this as a cultural problem," Marianne Winters, director of the campus women's center, told Boston Globe.
As a higher education behemoth in Massachusetts, UMass commands a lot of media attention and must deal with the 'state school' image as a violent party school. In 2005, an ABC "Primetime" report included UMass as a campus with one of the highest rates for violent crime.
This stereotype feeds back into the campus culture. Senior Steve Jeter be-lieves that students feel the need to live up to the myth of ZooMass.
"Kids are just rioting and partying because the school has a reputation, and they want to live up to the standards," he said.
The administration does not agree with this portrayal, and said the media ig-nores progress that UMass has made like the recent decrease in campus binge drinking, according to Sally Linowski, co-chairwoman of the Campus and Com-munity Coalition to Reduce High-Risk Drinking.
The media bases its analysis on empirical data provided by UMass under the Clery Act, which requires institutions to release annual reports disclosing crime statistics. According to these statistics, UMass is classified as a very violent cam-pus. This coverage, however, is not an accurate interpretation, according to John Kohl, Director of Residence Life at UMass-Lowell.
"Alcohol use in a college-going population is a problem that every institu-tion struggles with in varying degrees," said Kohl. "But it's hard to compare apples and oranges. A Smith is different from a UMass-Lowell and a UMass-Amherst."
Jeter acknowledged that the public ignores these differences and notices only the volume of incidents.
"It doesn't matter the population or the school. If there're six incidents a year in UMass, and only one incident in Amherst, people will pay more attention to UMass," he said.
The attention that UMass receives is not entirely bad, according to Blaguszewski. It brings attention to the University's achievements.
"We are the flagship university and the original UMass," he said, "It is a po-sition of great influence and great scrutiny."
Sruthi Valluri can be reached at valluri@student.umass.edu.
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