“Students here just don’t feel welcome and they don’t feel accepted here.”

You think?

In all fairness to the university, I found this previously omitted detail rather, um, how shall I say ... essential to the discussion:

As part of its recognition as a student organization, the Goat Pack signed a contract acknowledging that any of its events, even fundraising ones, have to be planned and implemented in a way that there would be no harm to participants or damage to other people’s property, Roter said.

If something were to happen, the university could take disciplinary action, Roter said, which could vary on the severity of the infraction. Such actions could include probation, suspension and restitution.

Kuhn said the Goat Pack became a provisional student organization to recruit new members and have a location on campus to do planning for the event, which was the only thing regarding the pub crawl that took place on campus. After receiving the letter Monday, Kuhn pulled the Goat Pack’s paperwork because he thought the pub crawl could be considered a university event.

(emphasis added)

That's little more descriptive than "social organization" and changes the liability ramifications of the equation rather drastically. This would have been nice to know going into the discussion. A "social organization" can be four guys hanging out in an apartment on Amherst Street waxing philosophical between bong hits and rounds of Halo 3; it does not have to be something with the quasi-imprimatur of the school. This would suggest that UW-O had more discretion to assert their influence in this matter than previously thought.

Nevertheless, this incident was blown way out of proportion. If the Goat Pack was a "provisional student organization" I would assume they would have to get someone from the university to have signed-off on the pub crawl/fund-raiser. If they did not know any better, I would have hoped someone from the university would have said "Yeah, there are some legal issues here ..." once they started hearing about the event from students.

So maybe the UW-O administration, the OPD and other civic gate-keepers were a little more hands-on than I originally thought. Maybe they did try to help work with these kids and push them in the right direction. I'm perfectly willing to give them credit for trying. But the ideal end would have been an event that the entire town could have enjoyed and been proud of and not merely the cancellation of one with which many people were afraid.

Independent of what the "Running of the Goats" was going to be all about, the most telling line in the whole article has to be this:

“We just didn’t want to do it anymore because we felt unappreciated as students and that is the major problem.”

(emphasis added)

Now that this business is all over I would recommend that city leaders read this comment not as the pouting lament of a young person who has not gotten his way, but as a perceptive statement on student-civic relations that we should all be working to mend.