LATEST CAMPUS UNREST FIRED BY ALCOHOL, NOT SOCIAL ACTIVISM

(AP) -- Bonfires in the streets. Bottles whizzing through the air at
police. Chants and tear gas and television footage of students being led
away in handcuffs.

The images may have harkened back to the 1960s, but it wasn't war or
segregation that inspired scores of college students to take to the streets
this year.

It was the right to party.

Students from at least 10 schools rallied and rioted, saying new
restrictions on how they drink and carouse were the latest evidence that
their freedom is at stake. Bans on porch furniture, limits on how many
people can share a house, tickets for riding a bicycle on the wrong side of
the street -- rule upon rule made without student input, they say.

"It's been one thing after another. Each one was not enough to set off a
protest, but we were getting sick of it," said Adam Herringa, 22, who
graduated this spring from Michigan State University in East Lansing,
Michigan.

An e-mail summons answered by 3,000

Through e-mail, Herringa summoned 3,000 fellow students into the streets
May 1 after the school banned drinking at a popular spot where students
party before and after football games. Police fired tear gas as students
lit bonfires and threw rocks and bottles at officers.

But faculty, police and some students say something less meaningful is at
work.

"What I saw seemed to have no rhyme or reason, no ideological passion, just
rebelliousness without a cause," said Richard Little, a spokesman for Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio.

Oxford police clashed with about 200 students on the nights of May 9-10
when they tried to break up parties near campus after months of tension
over drinking. Forty-five people were arrested.

"Some people theorize that there's always going to be that rebelliousness
for people of this age, yet with no war, no civil rights struggle, nothing
to latch on to -- that cork's going to pop," Little said.

Not much to do in peacetime?

"If there's peace, there isn't much to do -- or it appears there isn't,"
said Wallace Reese of the Greater Lansing Area Peace Education Center,
which works on mediating disputes such as the one there between students
and police.

Some student activists are disgusted by the gatherings, the largest at some
schools since the Vietnam War. There are still traditional social issues to
work on, like racism, education equity and labor conditions, they said.

"People riot after a football game, but what's the point? Yet when we want
to have a nonviolent sit-in, not even a third of those people show up,"
said Michael Norman, 21, a public relations and political science student
at Ohio State.

Norman was among a few dozen students who occupied an administrative
building for a week this month to protest a reorganization of the school's
minority affairs office. The sit-in ended when the school agreed to hold
off until fall.

Aldo Valmon, 31, a psychology student, has rallied for lower tuition and
more minority professors at New York's Brooklyn College.

"To pick alcohol, drugs as a thing to mark your career in college, to say
`I fought for the right to drink,' I find it weak," he said.

Restrictions on parties, alcohol stir clashes

About 175 people were cited this spring in clashes involving partying
students and police at Miami, Ohio State University, Ohio University and
the University of Akron. Some students said they were frustrated by police
harshness on partying students.

Other recent clashes include one on May 3 at Washington State University in
Pullman, where 23 police officers were injured during a riot by 2,000
students. Some students said they were angered by a year-old ban on alcohol
at fraternity parties and restrictions on off-campus parties.

And police in Plymouth, New Hampshire, were pelted with bottles and rocks
when they tried to disperse more than 500 partying students in early May.
Students were angered by recent restrictions on large gatherings and
underage drinking.

"If they were after something that was more humanity-centered than taking
away the right to drink, perhaps I would be sympathetic to them," said
Henry Dittum, who retired this month after 33 years as an English professor
at Plymouth State College.

Checked-by: Richard Lake