Holbrook talks about tailgating

The Lantern: You’ve been criticized by both students and alumni about an increased police presence, but it seems it has paid off and there’s been less and less problems during the last four years. How do you weigh complaints that there is too much security?

Karen Holbrook: You know I don’t think it’s been the security people have been as upset about as it is living with the law. And maybe the two go hand in hand, but for those of you who might have been here for the Michigan riots in 2002, that was a pretty serious time on this campus…

We put together a task force and at that point we said we’re simply going to live with the law, which we hadn’t been doing. Because I said there are two laws we weren’t obeying: one was the underage drinking and the other was the open container law. And what I said is, you can’t have a double standard. You can’t tell the students we’re going to come down hard on underage drinking and then look the other way at the open container law. … And that’s what made people very unhappy, because what it did was cut down on the big bars and the back ends of tailgating.

TL: During autumn quarter there were a lot of complaints by students who said they were treated unfairly by a program called STOP. What’s the university’s affiliation with this program?

H: It isn’t a university program. It’s a county program. They were living within the law. I know they were pretty hard on a number of students but they were living within the laws that they were set up to do.

For us, on game day weekends, we need so much security and it isn’t to patrol behavior, that isn’t the main reason. It’s really to protect everybody, it’s homeland security, it’s the driving, it’s absolutely everything. We bring in all the help we can get.

TL: You were saying just before you didn’t want to crack down, but live within the law, for underage drinking and open containers. How did you enforce the underage drinking living within the law, as you said? Is that just on campus or do you extend that hand to off campus as well?

H: On campus is what University Police take charge of, off campus is what Columbus (Division of) Police take charge of.

All the police were simply living with the law. At the time we made these decisions, it was a pretty tough change for a lot of people and as you said, it was very unpopular among a number of people.

What I think is really exciting is that we have not given up, we’ve stayed firm in what we’ve said, but the students have taken over. It’s no longer us, it’s the students. It’s the wonderful Best Fans in the Land campaign, which now has a number of students (who) are engaged on working that campaign. To me, it’s very gratifying to see that this is something students want because it’s your campus, your future and the visibility of your university and I think they’ve done a fabulous job of really changing a lot of things.

TL: As you were saying about the terrible fan behavior after the 2002 Michigan game, it seems like now after every major sporting event there always is new media just waiting on campus to report on what’s going on. Even after the basketball game, they reported that there was one couch fire. Do you think it just takes time to curb that image that they’re reporting on something good as opposed to just scanning through the police reports for that one couch fire?

H: The news is news and we hope that people don’t run the old film from four or five years ago. I think we’re doing pretty darn well and I think the last Michigan came off extremely well and I don’t think we saw much of that. We did meet with the mayor beforehand to talk about what we were going to do Michigan weekend, as we always do. To have him come out strongly and say this is our city, this our university and we want it to be a really successful, happy and safe. (The) weekend was very positive.