Northwestern has Dillo Day. Illinois has Unofficial Saint Patrick’s Day. Indiana has the Little 500. In an especially obnoxious display of aristocracy, Virginia students drive to a horse track wearing seersucker and fancy hats to spend a day drinking at the Foxfield Races.
The University of Wisconsin, in the truest display of Wisconsin exceptionalism, has the Mifflin Street Block Party. It’s the original springtime college party – a model for high-octane alcohol intake events that has tarnished Madison’s reputation for parents, strengthened it for many aspiring undergraduates and inspired envy among friends of Madison students who attend other Big Ten universities or UW System schools.
But is Mifflin a seminal model for how a college party should operate? Absolutely not.
In fact, the course Mifflin has taken for the last 15 years provides a case study in exactly what an event with large crowds of intoxicated young people outdoors in beautiful weather should not be. And on a periodic basis, UW students return to negotiations with the city about the future of the party. 2012 is one of those years, and the negotiations appear to be failing again because they only continue to work along the divide between students and the city’s older residents.
Traditionalists, or students who want to drink, want the event to stay as tumultuous as possible. They want to keep Mifflin within its “roots” of chaos that never existed in its original hippie incarnation. Grouches older than 30 want the event to completely cease to exist. The city and UW hate the party to the extent that Mayor Paul Soglin has threatened to end the event and the university refuses to come close to putting its smallest finger on any sort of musical sponsorship.
The stories of Mifflin-related stabbings, riots and sexual assaults are common knowledge for every University of Wisconsin student by now. But in another display of Wisconsin exceptionalism, we’ve turned a blind eye to everything that makes Mifflin a nightmare so we can continue to enjoy day drinking. Students were outraged after Soglin’s angry response to the event – which represented the overall views of the city – and some even seemed to think a near-death experience at Mifflin was not enough reason to shut down the party.
Student leaders have the thankless job of trying to bridge the gap between the friendly majority of partiers who just want to have a good time and the government officials who want to see Mifflin die because of the small minority of out-of-towners who have ruined everyone else’s fun.
Believing in tent-revival temperance isn’t a precursor to realizing Mifflin’s current status is a blight on Madison as a whole. In any other city, or among any other student body, the noticeable outrage of the student body and the college town community in question after violence like last year’s stabbings would be impossible to ignore and lead to a complete re-evaluation of the event’s security strategy.
But instead, students appear to be afraid to even admit Mifflin’s drunkenness could be dialed down. This could be fatal for the party’s future. At the University of Connecticut in Storrs, a student died of his injuries from a beating at their Spring Weekend in 2010. Last year, the university announced it was prohibiting any off-campus visitors from coming to the university. The state troopers even came to ensure roads into campus were blocked. The reason?
“Many outside the University have asked why UConn doesn’t simply ‘cancel’ the event,” UConn’s vice president for student affairs said in The Daily Campus, UConn’s student newspaper. “The truth is that if it were possible for UConn to do this, we would have done so many, many years ago.”
That sounds awfully familiar to Mifflin’s current situation. It’s a miracle UW and campus-area apartment complexes haven’t already prohibited visitors from Mifflin like they do for Halloween. But if Soglin says the word, Madison could find itself in a position remarkably similar to our friends in the much smaller Storrs.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, Mifflin is the most impossible public policy issue with which the city deals on a regular basis. Budgets and union contracts look like rice and beans next to a political mole that has the potential to anger both the not-in-my-backyard old folks and the crucial “woo!” student vote. In the event of another disastrous party, Soglin is not going to listen to the whining of students who want to black out because that’s just what you do on Mifflin Street.
In reality, what will ruin Mifflin is the perception of an attitude that plagues the student body’s insatiable need to be drunk at any cost. Yes, the party is fun, especially on a bright spring day. But claiming that it can’t exist in its pure form without a few changes is both ridiculous and untrue, and it could lead to a breaking point where we lose the event entirely.
Ryan Rainey ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in Latin American studies and journalism.
