Breaking News: College students not doing something stupid

The school year started out with several stories of students doing something so unbelievably stupid that you wonder how they managed to get into college in the first place. At my own university, two freshman were arrested before classes even started for possession with the intent to distribute. How do we know they intended to distribute? They shouted out their apartment window to a person on the sidewalk that they had drugs to sell. Unfortunately for them, there were two plains clothes police officers on the sidewalk as well. This story was not only widely discussed locally, it was included in NPR's news quiz show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. These two students didn't even make it to the first day of classes; they were promptly expelled.

And just today, a 19 year old MIT student was arrested for bringing a hoax device into the airport. This young woman walked into Boston Logan airport wearing a sweater with a circuit board connected to 9-volt battery glued onto it. She was also holding what looked like putty and was apparently acting a little bit suspicious. Her excuse for wearing this to the airport: she was on her way to career day and wanted to get noticed.

There's a small part of me that feels a little smug. You could characterize the Northeastern students actions as entrepreneurial. You might sympathetically conjecture that they were trying to raise money to buy their books. It might be a stretch, but not unreasonable. The MIT student, on the other hand, was clearly not thinking.

But, the point I want to make is that the vast majority of students are, in fact, well behaved citizens. The majority of the 200,000-250,000 students who live here at least 9 months out of the year are not selling drugs, are not vomiting on our streets from overconsumption of alcohol, and are not testing our homeland security methods. A significant number of them are taking our orders at local restaurants, hanging up the overpriced merchandise at our favorite retail stores, volunteering in our local schools, participating in the Charles River Cleanup, and a whole host of other good things. They are also spending their money here, a much needed source of revenue that us residents often forget that we rely on to keep our streets paved.

The universities do need to do a better job managing their student's off campus behavior. But, more importantly, the universities should be promoting the good things that their students are doing. And our local media should be covering it. Hundreds of thousands of students graduate with a variety of degrees and certificates from these schools. The vast majority of them spent their time in Boston doing their schoolwork, working crappy, low-wage jobs, and living fairly uneventful lives. A good number of them do some pretty wonderful things. It's too bad that a few boneheads make the rest of them, and the universities they attend, look bad.