Kerre Woodham: Uni needs to weed out the morons

Students in Dunedin during the recent 'festivities'. Photo / Otago Daily Times

I've already written about the rioting Otago University students this year. That was in February after a parade of students, wearing togas as part of their orientation week, rioted and caused damage to shops in Dunedin's town centre. I fulminated then about spoiled brats and lack of consequences, and how this was a modern day version of The Lord of the Flies with the children taking over the city with predictable results.

So really. I wondered if there was anything more to be said. But what seems to have changed this time is the attitude of the authorities.

In the wake of last weekend's riots the police said they wouldn't be considering diversion as an option for these idiots, and it was pleasing to see that convictions are starting to be handed out to the worst of the offenders.

The students didn't look anything like the arrogant, attention-seeking knobs they looked rioting on the telly as they scuttled into court, hiding their faces.

Hopefully the University Chancellors will follow up the judicial uppercut with a university right cross and kick the rioting students out of their schools for bringing the uni into disrepute. Fewer discharges without convictions and a lot more criminal records and we might start to see the students self-correct.

Can you imagine what would happen if a couple of hundred kids from South Auckland took over the streets and fought a pitched battle with police? Would people be putting that behaviour down to youthful high spirits. I don't think so.

When the anti-Maori Party brigade talk about one rule for all New Zealanders, it would be nice to see that applied to badly behaving Otago Uni students.

The other thing that gets right up my goat, as Kath Day-Knight would say, is that they're not even protesting to make the world a better place. They're not taking to the streets to protest against the Vietnam War or nuclear weapons or apartheid in South Africa. At least the students of yesteryear dressed up their anti-establishment carry-on under a banner of youthful idealism. These spoiled brats are just trying it on. Morons.

Unless you're going to Otago for one of the natural science degrees or its law or med schools, going to Otago University is becoming the educational equivalent of owning a pitbull. You're making a statement: straight-C students who are just wanting to fill in a few years before they reluctantly join the real world are telling the world they're pissheads.

The university needs to get rid of this unsavoury element within its student population.

Why should a couple of hundred wasters spoil things for the 20,000 good students and blight the reputation of one of the best universities in the world? It's up to the university to fix this problem.

* www.kerrewoodham.com