UMass, “ZooMass” and the Post-Super Bowl Incident

By James Bucklin

AMHERST – Super Bowl XLVI, February 5, 2012. Tom Brady’s New England Patriots had just lost to Eli Manning’s New York Giants in the final battle for NFL season supremacy for the second time in the past five seasons. A debilitating safety in the game’s opening minutes and a hefty dose of catch-able dropped balls left New England in utter shock.

Television newscorrespondents stood with microphones in hand and broadcasted fan reactions from all of the hot spots. The streets of Boston were curiously silent. Foxboro, Mass., the home of the Patriot’s Gillette Stadium, was surprisingly tame. But about 95 miles away from Gillette, in the southwest living areas of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, there were thousands of chanting students, combusting smoke bombs, fist fights and police officers on horses.

A wild scene in Amherst indeed, but the most interesting part of it all may have been that the incident at UMass was not exactly unexpected.

Fairly recently, a similar incident in the same location had followed the assassination of Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011. Southwest residents and others flooded outside of their dorms to chant different slogans at the tops of their lungs, namely the chant of “U – S – A,” a chant that was revived on February 5^th among many others not suitable for all audiences.   

Also, students were sent warning e-mails from Student Government Association (SGA) President Yevin Roh and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life, Jean Kim encouraging students to “keep it classy for our UMass community” and “continue representing the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the same positive manner that you have demonstrated throughout this academic year.”

Even New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz got in on the action releasing a PSA to students on the UMassNation blog telling them to “watch the game, be safe, enjoy the parties and don’t hurt anyone or anything.”

The consequences that came with a failure to comply to these instructions were also included in the e-mails. Vice Chancellor Kim informed students that if crowds did congregate after the game, the police would monitor the situation and act accordingly.

“Please remember that if the police deem it necessary to issue a dispersal order, once that dispersal order is read, it is no longer acceptable to be just hanging around,” Kim added. “All students must return to their residence halls. Any students who continue to congregate after the dispersal order has been read will be considered contributing to the safety issue and may be subject to arrest and administrative sanctions.”

Well, the police did deem in necessary to issue a dispersal order. And once that dispersal order was read students continued to hang around, which the police clearly saw as no longer acceptable.

Some students continued to congregate, with hundreds of lights from smart phone cameras lit above their heads, which provided the footage that has sparked hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits since that night. Smoke bomb explosions drew gasps from the crowd, and seemed to ignite the ire from some of the rowdier students, 13 of which were arrested.

This sent Kim back to her e-mail account to address the students the following Wednesday, expressing her disappointment in the “illegal and disruptive actions that a small minority of our students committed,” and that “They have contributed to the perpetuation of a reputation for UMass that belongs
to the past and with which the vast majority of students do not identify.”

Thus is the story of the UMass Amherst Super Bowl riot, but questions still remain. Why has this activity become expected after widely emotional moments? And if it is expected, does that reputation for UMass truly belong to the past?

“ZooMass” still relevant?

For decades UMass students have been referring to the campus as “ZooMass” or simply “The Zoo.” The moniker likens the university to a campus full of animals, known for their incessant partying and reckless behavior. While some students are still fond of using this term to describe their temporary home, Vice Chancellor Kim thinks it is a nickname that should be dropped and forgotten.

“I think the ZooMass moniker is outdated and it is not helpful,” Kim said. “It does not fairly and accurately reflect UMass Amherst. I think it’s a disservice to the students here that that moniker stays on and I don’t know why it does.”

And there is certainly some truth to that. UMass Amherst, a former high-ranked staple of the Princeton Review top party school survey, which has long been the go-to spot for that information, did not list UMass anywhere in their top-20 of 2012.

But the moniker is still very much alive. In October of 2011, UMass Amherst student and rapper Paul Markham released his song “Welcometo the Zoo” which features lyrics such as “Welcome to the Zoo where we drink beer, getting messed up but we still think clear.” The video has almost 70,000 hits on YouTube and can be heard blaring in the speakers of several parties on and off campus every weekend.

And the party atmosphere has caused the Puffton Village apartments, located a half mile from campus, to implement new rules to preventsuch disturbances. (Link provides comedic extremist view. NSFW.)  On Friday nights and all day on Saturdays, Puffton Village does not allow any car without a resident sticker to enter the apartment complex, nor do they allow any furniture, such as tables or lawn chairs, out doors. Puffton Village officials have also shut down bus service during those times and implemented extra security guards to monitor the complex on those nights.

The “ZooMass” moniker also surfaced on national television for the potential ears of 113 million people on the night of February 5^th, as Patriots safetyJames Ihedigbo announced “ZooMass” as his college during NBC’s Super Bowl starter introductions. Vice Chancellor Kim thought that NBC airing Ihedigbo using the nickname “was really unfortunate. He’s one of those alumni that is not living in the current reality.”

While Kim does not deny the existence of the term among the student body and alumni, she does say that the conversations she has with students don’t reflect the name, and that if one were to poll every current student on campus that 90 percent would say that they did not identify with “ZooMass.”

“I think we have, by and large, great students here who are bright, who are committed, do the right things, who have the right values, who are great leaders,” Kim said. “The notion of Zoo… Mass. I don’t see what would ever be a positive connotation about that.”

At the same time, Kim does not want student’s college experience to be bland or void of fun.

“It’s not a monastery right? People should have fun.”

The psychology of riots

“So… how are things at UMass?”

This was a question that was proposed to Linda R. Tropp, Ph.D., UMass Amherst psychology professor and Director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at UMass, by many of her friends and colleagues from different parts of the country days after the events following the Super Bowl.

Tropp believes that the idea of being part of a group has a great deal to do with how people act in certain situations, and says that there is a lot of social psychological research that proves that people tend to act differently in groups than they would as an individual. “There’s something about being in a large group that tends to be associated with less inhibited behavior,” Tropp said. “People feel freer when they see the people around them acting in more free ways and that’s where things like riots can happen.”

If you take that state of freedom associated with being a member of a group, and couple it with the high level of emotions following a sporting event of such magnitude, it would make sense that an event like the Super Bowl would ignite such a response. Tropp says that riots of any nature are usually popping up in “emotion-filled moments,” and that emotion can come from a sense of identity when it’s in a sports fan environment.

“If it’s just an interest or a hobby usually you don’t have that investment that an identity has,” Tropp said. “You don’t just like the Red Sox. You are part of Red Sox Nation. There’s this thing associated with it. It becomes who you are and becomes your identity and you become more motivated on behalf of the group to promote your group’s interests and goals.”

And promoting can come in the form of loud chanting and unruly behavior, which is what we saw on the night of February 5^th, but why did it only happen at UMass? And why only in the Southwest residential area? “That’s a darn good question,” Tropp said. “I don’t know if I have the answer to that. I’ve spent a lot more time in academic buildings than I have at Southwest.”

But Tropp did mention that she has spoken to undergraduates who feel that there ate local cultures to the different dormitory areas on the campus, and that Southwest has a tendency towards partying and rowdiness, which could stem from it’s heavy freshman population. Tropp also expressed the old adage that one bad apple can always spoil a bunch.

“It’s not even necessarily the crowd became violent,” Tropp said. “It could be one person resorted to violence and that provoked a violent response or led other people to think that violence would be okay in that context. That’s when violence erupts. It’s not like 1,000 people in Southwest all decided, ‘yeah! Let’s scream!’ People just felt a need to congregate, to share this experience because it was an impactful event for their identity group and it kind of takes on a life of it’s own from there.”

“I think we’re just human and we get caught up in the moment,” she added.

Police involvement

Because of the mild expectation that something may occur that needed to be controlled, UMass campus police, Town of Amherst police and Massachusetts state police were all in the general area of the events when they transpired. Some students have stated that the presence of the police may have sent some of the instigators of the riot into a further frenzy, but Kim thinks that the police responded in the correct manner.

“I thought they did a very good job in preparing and also dispersing the crowd,” Kim said. “We would have allowed students to just yell and scream and celebrate if there were no violent behavior and unfortunately there was and fairly early on in the gathering.”

According to Kim, several fights broke out amongst the students and that is when the decision was made that the environment had become unsafe and law enforcement should become involved. That involvement was in the form of mounted officers and crowd dispersing smoke grenades that popped and echoed through the Southwest area.

Campus police could not be reached for comment on the matter.

Win or lose

Tropp mulled over the idea of the possibility of a riot even if the Patriots had beaten the Giants in the Super Bowl. “I think the potential is definitely there,” she said. “I think we engage in collective behavior as both sources or pride and sources of disappointment. “

That would explain the outbreaks in Southwest over both the loss of the state’s beloved professional football team, and the murder of an abhorred symbol of terrorism towards America.

Despite the two-way street of possibilities, Kim does not expect another incident such as the night of February 5^th anytime soon, as Kim’s image of UMass continues to take form towards a more tame, studious environment, and away from the zoo-like party school of the past.

“I really think that each year our students are better prepared and more mature,” Kim said. “I don’t think that it would happen again. The aftermath is that I think lots of students will (look back and) say ‘well, that was really stupid’.”

It’s probably safe to say that the thirteen students who were arrested will be among them.