Dr. Aaron Lazare, the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, thinks UMass-Amherst needs to work harder to get rid of our ‘party-school’ image.

He said we’re “rude, rowdy and often destructive to [our] environment.” He added that, “[we] don’t know how much [we’re] paying for that perception.”

Kiss it Lazare.

It isn’t bad enough that we have the eastern end of the state constantly suggesting that we’re nothing more than boozehounds. Now we’ve got our own administrators seconding it. Lazare apparently spoke with 100 individuals from the UMass community – students, faculty, administrators and community members – in coming to his conclusions. I’ve had a hell of a time figuring out who was on Lazare’s committee. Nobody seems to know what students and what community members were on this advisory board.

So I don’t know for sure, but I can certainly guess.

The students who’d legitimately come forward and suggest that UMass has a drinking problem would themselves have to be non-drinkers. They’d have to be concerned about UMass enough to volunteer. They’d have to be the type of people who simplistically blame their peers for the bigger problems of the world. In other words, the only group that could have possibly volunteered such an idiotic explanation of our problems as a University would be the Orchard Hill Commonwealth College students.

Is anybody more disgusted by a casual student with a casual attitude towards classes than people whose idea of an exciting Friday night involves a floor-wide Snood tournament? Oh sure, they do kegstands…of Diet Mountain Dew. I heard one kid once funneled a Dr. Pepper off the sixth floor. These are not a group of individuals who go out on the weekends and enjoy themselves.

What of those community members? They’d have to be locals who’ve lived here long enough to make ill-informed and ignorant decisions about the UMass community. They’d have to be bitter, mean, pathetic and spiteful. In other words, it could have been anyone from the local community.

The Town of Amherst hates UMass. It has constantly ignored the fact that UMass underpins the town’s entire economy. Without students and professors, Amherst doesn’t have the same quaint number of quaint establishments. They’d be out of business because they’d be out of our money. But has that realization ever stopped locals from pointing towards UMass and blaming us for their problems? Of course not.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Amherst wants Amherst College and doesn’t want UMass. It’s that simple. We’re lower class and we bring less notoriety to the town than AC does. Hadley got Mount Holyoke. Northampton got Smith. The nearby hinterlands got Hampshire College. Amherst got Amherst College and us. They don’t think it’s fair and as such they make the same ridiculous complaint against us: we party too much. Of course, depending on the climate, we also park too much, we drive too much and we break the law too much.

The biggest problem with Lazare and the cronies who oozed their way onto his committee is that they have simplistically looked for the easiest complaint to make and then made it.

Saying that “well, we party too much” and then slapping our foreheads for not thinking of such an obvious problem earlier isn’t a solution to the problems facing UMass. Lazare might want to believe UMass is paying a heavy price for the occasional boozing done by the student body, but our University has serious problems because we don’t have any money.

If our own town, and our administrators don’t like our existence, the state legislature apparently doesn’t really know that we exist. While many state schools took advantage of the recent economic boom with new buildings, new fund drives, new attempts to bring in money, UMass simply sat. While students at some schools have “nice” student unions and great facilities for the time they don’t spend in class, the UMass administration has done nothing to make our school better.

No new buildings.

No improvements.

No capital spending that is obvious to anybody.

No recreational facilities, unless somebody wants to count the swimming facilities available at the campus pond, and I don’t.

How could the administration provide anything for the student body? We don’t have any money. The last new building we got is a horrid-looking glass and steel building on the corner of our campus that nobody has any access too. UMass is probably the first school in the history of education to think that cutting majors was the best possible solution to our chronic lack of funding. Nobody can get a class because UMass doesn’t offer “classes” anymore, only spots to hopeful contestants in the education lottery.

The real problem facing UMass is our total lack of money, of ends, of bling-bling, of ice, of cash, of bills. If our school had the appropriate funding it needed to educate nearly 25,000 students, individuals like Lazare wouldn’t be able to make a career out of declaring that our student body drinks a few too many beers every Friday.

It’s fairly easy to be dismissive of somebody like Lazare. While he could have come out and made a strong statement about the abominable treatment our campus gets at the hands of the legislature, he turned around and fingered the one group who can’t do anything about the condition that our campus is in: us.

That the community and certain students joined the cry isn’t surprising; it’s that such a large group of individuals could put such a small amount of thought into their final statement.