The Madison Police Department has recommended that the Mifflin Street Block Party not continue. The city has had a rocky relationship with the event in the past, and students haven’t always fulfilled their duty to keep each other safe. But putting an end to Mifflin ignores the unique role the party plays in fostering community and continuing a centuries-old tradition of getting together to, well, get drunk.

From a journalistic standpoint, the first mistake the Madison Police Department made in its report on the 2011 Mifflin Street Block Party was referencing Wikipedia in the opening paragraph. “It is telling,” the MPD writes, “that Wikipedia and other sources readily cite alcohol consumption as a defining feature of this event.”

OK, so Mifflin may no longer be the forum for political activism as it had been in the past, but citing the one uncitable Internet source seems like a stretch. Labeling the event as an unsustainable knife-crime chugfest is all part of the city’s plan to overwhelm students’ will to keep kegs flowing by providing evidence that the crime is uncontrollable and the costs unsustainable.

In any case, the report, which details the nature and extent of the arrests at Mifflin 2011, as well as the supposedly devastating financial impact on the city due to officer overtime pay and benefits, repeatedly shames students for turning Mifflin into an event “with a singular and unabashed focus on alcohol.”

Efforts have been made, the report argues, to shift the event’s focus away from drinking by introducing official event sponsorship and street use permits. The MPD sees these endeavors as “admirable” but incapable of erasing Mifflin’s identity as an “opportunity to indulge in the overconsumption of alcohol.” It’s worth noting that increased city intervention in the early 90s made it financially impossible for the Mifflin Street Co-op to continue its sponsorship – thus began Mifflin’s transformation into an all-day drinking bash.

Nothing can ever be done to fundamentally change Mifflin’s purpose. City and university officials need to accept that devoting one day a year to the communal, convivial and somewhat controlled consumption of alcohol – as long as students observe each others’ personal space and safety – may actually yield some social utility.

Let’s consider, for a second, the Greek Symposium. In early Greece, aristocratic males would gather at the house of one of their peers for what was essentially a drinking party (“symposium” comes from the Greek “symposion,” which means “to drink together.”) Wine was served in decorated kraters to the top political and military leaders, who delighted in conversation, poetry and each others’ company.

The host would determine what level of intoxication his guests would reach, for instance, according to a lost play from Euboulos, “the first cup was to health … the sixth to drunken revel … [and] the ninth to bile.”  The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the symposium as an “event that provided liberation from everyday restraints within a carefully regulated environment.”

So, while I doubt that the same level of educated conversation goes on at Mifflin – arguing with your friend about multiverse theory over a noon bong rip doesn’t count – there’s something essentially human about celebration for the sake of celebration, about ignoring, for a day, societal rules and responsibilities for a bit of drunken comradery. Writing for Scientific American, Steve Mirsky argues that the “communal and equitable inebriation” at a Greek Symposium “led to a common loss of inhibitions and the building of, well, a fraternity.”

Although untold amounts of group drinking take place throughout the year in Madison, Mifflin presents the only opportunity where the entire student body can assemble together to share libations under the supervision of uniformed police. Of course there are other outlets for fraternization and the forging of new friendships, such as joining a club, starting a rec sports team and hanging out at the Rathskeller. Yet Mifflin is unlike any other social opportunity on campus. There’s something refreshingly and maybe even necessarily primal about a day’s worth of public beer consumption.

Some people have tried to make the point that even without a political dimension, Mifflin has retained it’s essence as an outlet for freedom of expression. But what really hasn’t been lost is the willingness of students to rejoice in one anothers’ company. It’s tough to write a column advocating the necessity of Mifflin after receiving Dean Lori Berquam’s email, “A Message About Alcohol.” She makes the excellent point that too frequently, students abuse alcohol at unsafe levels, creating dangerous situations for themselves and those around them.

Her point is proven by the absolutely unacceptable stabbings and sexual assaults that went down at last year’s Mifflin (although not at the hands of UW students). In this sense, students need to bear the responsibility for recognizing their drinking limits and do everything in their power to protect one another.

But instead of ignoring Mifflin or devising new methods for changing the event, the university and the city of Madison should embrace it. Their focus needs to shift from making the event something it’s not to making it as safe as possible.

Eric Carlson ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in
journalism and political science.