Campus Violence: Self-Promotion at the Scene of the Crime
Table of Contents: Campus Violence
Four people shot on campus after the Spring music festival: live footage of the aftermath and campus brawls distributed on YouTube. What is the fate of higher education in the jobless future? 1. Culture and Anarchy 2.0: Broadcasting the End of Civilization Four people shot in New Brunswick and drunken violence occasions a prehistory of Rutgerfest, including Snooki’s recent visit to campus. 2. Culture and Anarchy 2.0, continued. Students take to the street to protest increased tuition. 3. Culture and Anarchy 2.0: Bitches Poppin’...
read moreCulture and Anarchy 2.0: Broadcasting the End of Civilization (1st of 5)
Is this when it begins, the end of civilization? I had the ringer on my phone turned off, so I didn’t wake at 3:14:53 when the string of text alerts came in announcing a shooting on campus. As it turns out, the three text messages were lagging reality: at least four people had been shot in separate incidents hours earlier. Here the technology provided not so much early alert as eventual alert. What’s a few hours on a Saturday night? On the main campus of a large, public university? On the night of Rutgersfest, when thousands and...
read moreCulture and Anarchy 2.0: No Ideas without Ideals (2nd of 5)
And now we turn to the runaway hit from Rutgersfest 2011, a video that to date (some 48 hours out from the event) has garnered more views than all the other videos of fist fights, drunken walks, revelry, and stupidity from that day combined: “This Is Just 2 Crazy: Fight Outside Rutgers Fest 2011!(Girls Poppin Off On Everybody & Boyfriend Fights 3 Chicks While His Girl Gets Jumped).” This video, captured by a cell phone, has far surpassed interest YOungRic0′s “Rutgers Fest Fight 2011,” which captures the same...
read moreCulture and Anarchy 2.0: Bitches Poppin’ Dudes (3rd of 5)
In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold’s foundational act of public criticism, the author looks on in horror at the society that is being brought into being by the Industrial Revolution. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, although most of Arnold’s observations are about practices, institutions, and factions long gone, Culture and Anarchy remains an object of interest because Arnold had a way of categorizing that would now be called “sticky.” In slicing the Great Britain of his time into Barbarians, Philistines,...
read moreCulture and Anarchy 2.0: Self-Branding and the Jobless Present (4th of 5)
Ready for your test? Describe YaWifeyLovesMe, the videographer/citizen journalist/ringside announcer, who excitedly recorded “This is Just 2 Crazy,” the four-minute video of the brawl in front of the Rutgers Student Center that has racked up over half a million views on WorldStarHipHop.com over the past eight days. (If you’re lagging the action, I’ve been writing around and about this video over the first three posts in this Culture and Anarchy series. But, if you’re just dropping in now, I’ve given you...
read moreCulture and Anarchy 2.0: Never Mind the Bollocks, Gimme Back My Party (5th of 5)
Act One, Scene one: April 27th, late in the afternoon. Returning from a matinee performance of Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Communism and Socialism, with a Guide to the Scriptures,” (the title is a snide reference to an unfinished dissertation, twenty years in production, by the main character’s son). There’s a line stuck in my head that’s been looping the whole train ride home. Gus is trying, once again, to explain to his children why his life as a union organizer was worth...
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