THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'. Look back at forty years of campus rioting. University Diaries links to Northampton Republican (yeah, right) coverage of a riot that broke out at the University of Massachusetts (now ZooMass; my dad left the engineering faculty there at the end of the 1955-1956 academic year for heavy industry.) The cause of the riot: ZooMass lost their bowl game to Appalachian State. "NCAA Division I title game" is kind of underwhelming: why not call it the "Amateur Bowl" or the "Not Ready for the Mid-American Bowl"?

What's instructive is that campus officials are describing this riot as bad.

Eleven people, including 10 UMass-Amherst students, were arrested. Their arraignments were scheduled for yesterday and today in Eastern Hampshire District Court in Hadley, with charges including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, failure to disperse in a riot, minor in possession of alcohol, possession of marijuana, breaking and entering, mistreatment of a police horse or dog and destruction of property.

About 60 campus, town and state police officers in riot gear were needed to squelch the riot that drew more than 1,800 students to the plaza of the Southwest residential area. Students threw bottles, cans, bricks, pieces of concrete and other items at the officers and yelled obscenities.

So much for generational morphology. This riot reminds me of a brawl that erupted at Massachusetts when the New York Mets defeated the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. That brawl probably strengthened the hands of diversity hustlers at Zoo Mass as Mets and Sox fans differed along racial as well as geographic lines. Millennial crudity, just more of the same Thirteenth Generation crudity. But back up another 20 years: possession of marijuana was a political act, breaking and entering was expropriation of the capitalists, and mistreatment of police animals a display of courage. Maybe in another 40 years the football yobs will have a Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture celebrating their efforts and there will be a special reference collection in the library.