Thursday night, N.C. State is privileged to be kicking off the 2008 NCAA Collegiate football season with a nationally televised game. It also signals the annual chorus of radical students like myself who are still desperately clawing for the nearly fundamental right of a major public university student to an unrestricted tailgate.
It signals the beginning of another season of annoying, time consuming, humiliating, draconian and unnecessary pat-downs – and it signals the season long quest to figure out how it’s humanly possible to thoroughly cook a decent sized pig in the five hour time limit allotted by NC State’s administration.
Four years after the tragic shootings that sparked these reforms, any measure available has shown that students are not particularly thrilled with the atmosphere leading up to the football games. In past years’ experimental fee referendums sponsored by Student Government, 74% of the students surveyed said they did not support any kind of increase for the intercollegiate athletics fee and I’d be willing to bet that it had nothing to do with the actual football team on the field.
Of course, athletics director Lee Fowler and other administrators dismissed the students’ vote as uninformed and insignificant since just over 1,000 common students participated in the referendum online. Fowler went on to point out in a Fee Review Committee meeting that he believed in spite of the referendum results there were 10,000 students on game day who would support the Intercollegiate Athletics Fee increase. I guess Mr. Fowler doesn’t get to the games until midway through the second quarter because typically half of that 10,000 number he threw out there is being corralled and searched in one of the two under-staffed entrances to Carter-Finley Stadium.
Unfortunately, one of our ACC brethren may have given the Athletics Department a new idea – with University of Virginia’s recent blanket ban on all signs in the stadium, which some sources claim stems from a sign critical of UVA head football coach Al Groh. Hopefully we won’t see this measure at NCSU, and Student Body President Jay Dawkins has assured me that there are currently no plans in the works for any regulation similar to the one at the University of Virginia.
Griping without a solution doesn’t do much, and whenever student leaders raise the question to administrators they always get the same response: we’ve already addressed the issue with a task force. So, again, I’ll offer an answer to this problem. Give us back the tailgating time we used to have and beef up security patrols to make sure situations don’t get out of hand. The student body has made great strides over the past few years and the University has made a commitment to sustain this progress with programs such as WITH and the “Red Pig Award.” It’s time that the University recognizes this with more than just a one-hour increase and instead revives a faltering tradition at a tradition-starved University.
E-mail Benton your gripes about the limitations on tailgating to [email protected].