Categories: Arizona StateArticleColumns

Taking an uneducated pot shot at my school, that I’m not okay with

“Congrats to the Arizona State Sun Devils on defeating Penn State for their first ever win over a D-I program, proving that along with being a bro-tastic party school where academics take a back seat to butt-chugging, ASU also has a hockey team.”

ASU hockey got the Puck Daddy blog’s “Gold Star Award” this past week on Yahoo Sports’ website. The quotation above is the write up ASU got for winning this award.

How about that? ASU hockey getting national coverage! That’s awesome! And boy do they deserve it! An ACHA team beating a NCAA D1 hockey program on the road is unheard of. For ASU to march into Penn State’s barn and take game two of their series really goes to show how good ASU really is.

I do, however, have a problem with how this writer portrays my university.

A “bro-tastic party school” where scholarly work isn’t as important as “butt-chugging”? First of all what in the world is butt chugging?! I digress; I don’t really want to know the answer to my last question.

I’ll start with some statistics. ASU was named Playboy’s top party school in 2002, and since 2006 ASU has seen that number drop dramatically. In this year’s Playboy ranking, ASU isn’t even in the top 10! Virginia nabbed the top spot this year. Newsweek ranked ASU as the 24th best party school in the nation. ASU didn’t crack the top 20 of the Princeton Reviews list either

Michael Crow became the president of ASU in 2002. In the last ten years, ASU’s reputation as a party school has decreased significantly. According to ASU’s Annual Report, ASU has had four Pulitzer Prize winners, three Nobel laureates and five Sloan Research Fellows on its faculty during this ten year span. In the fall of 2011, ASU had more national merit scholars enrolled than Duke, MIT and Stanford. Doesn’t sound like a big time party school does it?

Boom, knowledge dropped.

Throughout high school, kids always talked about ASU as a party school. When I decided to take my talents to the Cronkite School at ASU, I was proud to become a Sun Devil. I was proud because I didn’t see myself going to the biggest and best party school in the country. I was proud because I saw a school that was shedding its old image in favor of a new one. A new image focused on the future and being a model that maybe even other institutions would follow.

So to the writer of the Puck Daddy blog who thought it would be funny to take a pot shot at my school, please do your research beforehand. I appreciate you acknowledging ASU’s hockey team for their success, but don’t poison the minds of your reader by perpetuating stereotypes about ASU that are long gone and dead. Find me a school other than maybe BYU that doesn’t have alcohol or drugs on its campus and I’ll give you my “Gold Star Award”. Until then, leave your stereotypical thoughts about my university to yourself.