We recently reported that there was an ugly brawl at the conclusion of a basketball game between Utah Valley and New Mexico State.

A piece in the New York Post takes a look at the increasingly wild behavior on college campuses that has become so bad that some schools call in riot police to curtail the destruction (hat-tip, The College Fix).  The author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, suggests this trend may be the fruits of grade inflation.

If you’re a college administrator with a team headed toward the Sweet Sixteen, you may want to start rooting against your school.

Just ask the folks in Kentucky. When the University of Louisville beat Michigan in the NCAA men’s basketball finals last year, the school needed riot police in armored vehicles to quell the chaos that erupted on campus. What began as your usual incident — 10 kids arrested for drunken behavior, a few injuries — ended with bottles being thrown at police officers.

The reaction to losing wasn’t much better. Fans in Ann Arbor reacted to Michigan’s defeat by lighting things on fire — desks, couches, mattresses. But the authorities there seem to be used to it: “It’s actually been pretty normal for a night where you have U-M activity going on,” Sgt. Craig Flocken of the Ann Arbor police told the local media. “There hasn’t really been anything major.”

….Old news? Your typical “Animal House” behavior? Really, what else can you say about the ­SUNY-Brockport kids arrested for forcing a dog to do a keg stand? Those students posted a photo of the stunt, but maybe the cops should start bringing the ­ASPCA with them on patrol.In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan recently chronicled the destruction wrought by college fraternities, from the humorous to the horrific. Her list of people who’ve accidentally plunged from roofs or out of windows is a journalistic sight to behold. She reports: “Falls from fraternity houses, . . . far from being freakish and unpredictable events, are in fact fairly regular occurrences across the country.”

It’s the parents paying for tuition who should be rioting. If we don’t tolerate our 3-year-olds throwing rocks at each other, why take out a second mortgage so our 19-year-olds can get drunk and do the same?

…[A]dministrators need to stop enabling. The chancellor at UMass Amherst said that the protestors had “brought shame on our fine university,” but the president of the UMass system told The New York Times that a review of the incident would include an investigation of the police response. “We can’t ignore the fact that this needs to be looked at to see if they behaved as they should,” he said. Oh, come on.

And schools need to do a lot more to keep kids busy. Students who only spend 25 hours a week in class and studying (the average, according to the 2011 report “Academically Adrift”) and then get inflated grades have way too much free time.

There are 18-year-olds all over this country working their behinds off to make a living — some of them putting their lives on the line to defend American interests in foreign countries. The yahoos on campus should go see how the other half lives.