Yeah that was largely non-KSC students. There were still KSC students participating, but they weren’t the majority. I knew a few people who were either expelled or “suspended” (for lack of a better term) for the rest of the semester or year without reimbursement for the tuition they’d already paid. The administration took the whole situation very seriously, and any KSC students who were proven to have participated in the mayhem and destruction were punished harshly.

Also to be fair to the current students, that was seven years ago. Nearly two classes of graduates have passed since then, so it’s not like the current student body had anything to do with the whole thing. Most seniors now were probably around the age of 15 when the riots happened.

It’s relatively small as far as colleges go. It feels sort of like a large HS campus. Additionally, since it’s a small state school it doesn’t attract the most serious students. Many of them call it either “keg stand college” or “kinda sorta college” with pride as they do the bare minimum amount of work to pass their classes so they can party as much as possible. There was also the great pumpkin fest riot of 2015 which certainly tarnished the school’s reputation.

It’s not a bad school though, and a lot of graduates have gone on to do some cool stuff. Their biology and chemistry programs were really good before Covid (they’ve had some faculty layoffs since which has stretched everyone thin and led to fewer available classes each semester), and they’ve also got a pretty good occupational safety program.

Source: I was one of the “keg stand college huhuh” students my freshman year and nearly failed out. I took a year off, worked a shitty job, did some traveling, and then went back to KSC to retake a class I had failed and boost my GPA so I could go to a more serious university. Met a cool girl, decided to stay and ended up declaring biology as my major, broke up with cool girl, still decided to stay because my professors were incredible. I buckled down, became a straight A student, and was presented with some really good opportunities many students at “better” institutions don’t get. I was an author on multiple papers due to my undergrad research, made connections with labs at larger institutions and got to collaborate with them independently, and I presented my research at multiple conferences. I also secured employment within my field a few weeks before graduating, as did many of my peers. The school’s biology program has an extensive network of students working in biotech now, and it’s made it very easy for graduates to get their foot in the door.

So yeah, KSC gets a bad rep, but so do most small state schools. In KSC’s case I think it gets a particularly bad rep because of the pumpkin fest riots from 2015 which made national headlines and embarrassed the entire town of Keene. It’s hard to be taken seriously as an academic institution when that’s what everyone knows you for. There are certainly worse choices than KSC to attend though, and the college is actually ranked fairly high in terms of value among liberal arts colleges nationwide. It’s a decent school all and all.

Very well written and informative comment. As an interesting aside I’d like to add that the spirochetes themselves may not actually cause damage to the tissues, but rather the immune system responding to their presence causes damage. Wildlife reservoir populations of B. Burgdorferi have actually evolved not to respond to the presence of the bacteria as it doesn’t produce any toxic waste products and in a lab environment they don’t develop any symptoms of tertiary Lyme despite lifelong infection.

> As B. burgdorferi does not produce toxins or extracellular matrix-degrading proteases, most of the manifestations of human Lyme borreliosis at each of the three stages of disease result from inflammation generated by these immune responses.

Additionally, tertiary Lyme may also be due to disregulation of the immune system and not necessarily permanent damage to the tissues. I believe studies have shown modest success with immune modulating drugs. In addition to seeing a neurologist it would also be wise to talk to a rheumatologist. I don’t have a source handy for this claim but do have a paper somewhere that talks about it (I believe they mention it in the Nature paper linked above as well but don’t go into detail). I’ll dig it up and link it some time tomorrow.