There were 29 alcohol-related calls to MUPD on National Marquette Day this year. Out of those 29 calls, 14 students were taken to the hospital. This does not include students who took themselves to the emergency room, were taken to the hospital from Fiserv Forum or other off-campus locations.
Some transports happened without contact between Marquette staff, MUPD or the Office of Residence Life, because they were overwhelmed by calls.
At one point, there was an hour wait for an ambulance, and Marquette staff was triaging students in the lobbies of dorms.
At the residence halls, staff confiscated 47 BORGs (black out rage gallons) — gallon jugs filled with hard alcohol and flavored water — and had to start telling dozens of students to go outside and dump them once it became too overwhelming to confiscate all of them.
Christine Navia, acting vice president for Belonging and Student Affairs, Erin Gannon, dean of Students and Rick Arcuri, executive director for Business Operations, presented all this information through a presentation created by MUPD at the University Academic Senate meeting Feb. 17.
The UAS consists of 38 members, including faculty, graduate and undergraduate students — and acts as an advisory body for the university leadership.
Incidents at the party on 17th Street and MUPD response:
The NMD men’s basketball game tipped off at 7 p.m., giving students all day to drink. Arcuri referenced a party that takes place annually in the alley at 800 block of 17th Street.
“Our understanding this year is that it’s the parents of the students that live in these houses that sponsor the party. There were about 1,000 students that were there,” Arcuri said.
The Wire is actively working to confirm who sponsors the party.
Arcuri pointed to a place in a photo of the party where students were standing on someone’s car. He said they totaled the car and crushed the roof. The owner of the car was a student, who parked behind his apartment building. A WISN 12 news story reported that MUPD officers made arrests after escorting the car out of the party, but the arrested students’ identities have not been made public.
A party this size is difficult for MUPD to manage. Arcuri said MUPD officers were worried about going into that crowd because if the students turned on them, one, they would have to deal with students in a way they do not want to deal with them, or two, the students will run, either running onto Wells or 17th Street where they could get in the way of traffic.
“It’s a different kind of drinking we’re seeing now, and it’s drinking to be drunk to the point of excess. It’s more dangerous than what we’ve seen in the past. I’ve been here for almost 40 years now, and I’ve never seen anything like I’ve seen this year on National Marquette Day,” Arcuri said.
The Marquette Wire has requested records for the number of emergency calls to MUPD for the past five NMDs, and we are currently waiting for a response.
Reports of disrespect and reactions on social media:
Not only were students being taken to the hospital, before staff were able to transport them, 14 students were disrespecting either staff or MUPD in the residence halls.
“It’s notable to also recognize that the behavior towards staff is something we don’t like to see from our students. Our custodial staff, FPNM staff, Sodexo employees, they don’t come to work to be treated the way they were treated by students on that day,” Gannon said.
The events of NMD were being shared on social media by individual students and on Instagram by the “Barstool Marquette” account.
“I was particularly struck by the comments upon comments about ‘entitled spoiled Marquette students,’ in terms of destroying a peer’s car because they were so intoxicated,” Gannon said.
Not only were there incidents of disrespectful behavior, but Arcuri said he was in a situation where a student’s life was in danger. He said he was directed to a bathroom in the Commons where a student was passed out, and his friends were trying to take the student back to his dorm.
“I opened his eye, and it was rolled back into his head. I’ve never seen a student that drunk before,” Arcuri said.
Arcuri said the student’s friends were being aggressive with authorities, not wanting them to take the student to the hospital.
“When the paramedics showed up, the thing that settled the students down was one of the paramedics turned to the other one and said, ‘Go get the defibrillator,’ and that’s when the students turned to us and said, ‘Wait, what are they talking about?’ and that’s when I said, ‘He could die. You have to let them take him,”‘ Arcuri said.
Ambulance response delay and emergency calls to dorms:
Arcuri presented photos of students in stretchers in the lobbies of dorms and students passed out and receiving care in dining halls. At one point, ORL was told to triage, assess and call MUPD who then called for an ambulance to help regulate calls for ambulances.
“One of the things that was different than in the past was we were overrun because of the amount of people that were drunk beyond the point of being able to take care of themselves,” Arcuri said.
When the wait for an ambulance became an hour, MUPD called Bell Ambulances and told them to just park ambulances on campus. Gannon said they would drive students to the hospital and then immediately turn around to come get another student.
Response from university leadership and next steps:
Moving forward, Gannon, Arcuri and Navia presented a list of possible ways to mitigate some of these issues in the future.
They want to create more planning around the selection of the date and time for the NMD basketball game and send messages to students about responsible behavior.
The team said they could create a response plan or crisis team and see if they can have more support staff on campus throughout the day.
To fix issues with emergency response times, they talked about having Bell Ambulance’s on site to assist with triage, and to decrease excessive drinking and possibly increase fines for student conduct violations.
To control parties off campus, they suggested preemptively meeting with off-campus housing to discuss repercussions of hosting parties and potential consequences for doing so.
Navia said they are hoping to spark some discussion about how to keep students safe, which Gannon said will be an ongoing conversation across campus.
“This is exponentially worse than what we saw last year, but it’s just an evolution. My concern is if this continues or goes any further, students are going to continue to get really hurt, and God forbid we would lose a student,” Gannon said.
Other colleges across the country have similar days where drinking is heightened. Gannon brought up the “Mifflin Street Block Party” at UW-Madison as an example, but she said Marquette just has not seen parties reach this level.
At last year’s “Mifflin Street Block Party,” a car was flipped and dozens of students were arrested. 150 officers worked the event, some of which got trained in crowd control beforehand.
An alcohol task force was created at Marquette in 2019 to find solutions to alcohol and drug use on campus, and faculty members at UAS brought this up to see if it could be reinstated to deal with situations like this. It is unclear if the task force is currently active.
“It’s fair to say we’ve been put on notice,” Gannon said. “I think we have an obligation both moral, ethical and probably legal to do something to ensure this behavior stops.”
An earlier version of this article stated that Aurora Sinai’s ER had to close and direct people to St. Mary’s because they’d hit capacity, but according to Aurora Sinai’s communications team, they didn’t have to close or direct patients. MUPD said they received word that the ER had to close and direct patients from EMT’s on site. We’ve corrected this version of the article and apologize for the error.
This story was written by Sophia Tiedge. She can be reached at sophia.tiedge@marquette.edu.
