The 50-somethingth annual Head of the Trent (HOTT) Regatta is this weekend, which means a number of semi-interesting things to a number of different people.

First off, it means my parents will be coming to town with a mind to see some rowing.

Second, it means Trent University students will trash downtown Peterborough beyond its usual slovenly recognition for a period of 48 hours.

Third and finally, HOTT means plenty of fodder for Arthur.

Many aspects of HOTT/HOCO’s notoriety have, at this point, been thoroughly talked to death (and many of them by me!). Invariably I will write some self-indulgently exhaustive piece on the matter lamenting the spectacle which surrounds the proceedings of HOTT which will once again get me shortlisted for a relatively prestigious award (though perhaps that last bit is wishful thinking).  

That being said, at the very least this year Trent managaged to clear the lowest possible bar for controversy by virtue of not rescheduling National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (NDTR) programming in favour of the drunk-and-disorderly boat-race + beer garden debauchery which Homecoming tends to incite.

A cynic might well point out that they seemingly only managed to do so by the fortuity of the calendar not falling that—not that I’m a cynic, mind.

Indeed Trent’s retroactive defense for holding Head of the Trent weekend over NDTR last year was, in part, that the two dates would not coincide again until 2028, I guess exonerating them of the responsibility for having carried on with the event in spite of that year’s overlap.

Certainly those seem like the words of a school which takes their commitment to Truth and Reconciliation very seriously, no? (ed. sarcasm).

But as I say, this year the university has seemingly dodged that bullet. With the first weekend of October falling as late as it possibly can, a sufficient separation has been drawn between their NDTR events and HOTT to permit Trent to save face.

Instead, the university and its various satellite orbiters seem rather more concerned with the annual London-street anarchy which accompanies the more sanctioned on-campus festivities.

This is an inference, granted—an assumption on my part. 

It is an inference based on the fact that this Sunday, from 10:00 AM to noon, the student union is hosting a "Homecoming cleanup," which aims to “Help keep our community clean after Head of the Trent.”

It is also an inference based on the fact that Trent University and the Peterborough Police Service called a press conference at 10 AM this morning to assure everyone that they’re working very closely together and encouraging students in the most emphatic terms to please party “responsibly” and be “good neighbours.”

This messaging from the university strikes an interesting contrast to the the chalked-on slogans adorning the concrete palisades of Symons campus, proclaiming “Rowing ♥” and “HOTT BEER GARDEN 2–6PM BATA PARKING LOT!”

It all reeks to me a little bit of trying to get out ahead of the story.

While Trent has spent the last week posting a number of very slickly edited rowing videos to their Instagram and website, and every poster and chalk notice maintain a careful 1:1 ratio of the words “Rowing” and “Beer,” there’s the underlying sense that both the school and the city are holding their collective breaths.

The Peterborough Examiner’s Mike Davies writes that “Trent University is shifting the focus to family-friendly and de-emphasizing alcohol sales” in advance of the coming weekend. For the first time, Trent is advertising a dedicated children’s area for the on-campus festivities. Even the dedicated beer pen is being kept all-ages until 2:00 PM.

Trent’s VP External Relations & Development, Julie Davis, was keen to re-emphasize that rhetoric at Friday morning’s Police presser, where she emphasized that Trent “wants everybody to come—that’s students, alumni, families. It’s very family friendly.”

Of course, de-emphasizing alcohol sales is not to say no alcohol sales. If anything, the beer garden chalk signs as testament to that.

Then, of course, there’s a doozy of a quote in Davies’ piece where he juxtaposes VP Davis’ comments about “de-emphasizing” booze with her adding that “There will be a Publican House special edition brew to help support the rowing club.”

If anything, this seeming hypocrisy has made me obsessed with the particular and oxymoronic phrasing of Trent’s beer aversion—“De-emphasized” alcohol sales—as if Trent were Mark Cerny talking about why you can’t jump in his video game.

I think Davies inadvertently hit the nail on its head in his story with this particular turn of phrase. In many ways the preparations for this year’s Head of the Trent feel like an attempt not to fully pre-empt the carnage of previous comings-home, but rather to mitigate their worst excesses.

VP Davis said Friday that Trent’s alcohol-conscious approach is because they “very much see this as a celebration of athletic sports,” adding that “good health and good activities is the predominant theme, and we just want to support celebrating responsibly.”

The operative word therein is, of course, responsibly. Not wanting to come off as killjoys, Trent isn’t saying “don’t party; full stop,” but rather “celebrate responsibly.” 

The great thing about responsibility is that it deflects onus from the university to actually determine what exactly that means. Responsibility is contingent upon individual judgement, which is generally fine, unless the people whose judgement you’re appealing to are drunk.

This sort of rhetoric extends to the way in which the police have been talking about Homecoming weekend.

Despite staff sergeant Mark Reesor’s admission at Friday’s press conference that “In years past we've seen some fairly large unsanctioned community gatherings or or parties,” most of what he talked about were not about the specifics of policing such gatherings, but rather vague allusions to “safety.”

“Our regular officers have been in the areas where we've seen those gatherings in the past as a proactive approach, in order to provide local residents with information on what they can do and how they can best ensure their safety and the safety of other people that live in the area,” said Reesor.

Significantly, the Police aren’t promising the spectacles of the last several HOTT weekends won’t repeat themselves.

“We want people to enjoy themselves, but we want them to do it responsibly,” Reesor told the press. “We're encouraging people to use the on-campus events and facilities. If people choose to celebrate off campus, we're asking them to be responsible.”

It’s all a rather empty, prepared speech—a lot of words to say nothing.

Unlike Ottawa police, who’ve released concrete details of how they plan to deal with the rowdy crowds of Sunday’s uOttawa v. Carleton Panda Game, the vibe of Peterborough Police Service’s overly-optimistic messaging is very much “if we don’t acknowledge it maybe it won’t happen.”

There’s no bar against which to measure “responsible,” really. While Reesor noted that there’s laws against such things as “impaired driving, things like noise complaints, disturbances, open alcohol in public,” and that “all of those activities would certainly open people up to fines, consequences,” I was there last year, watching as police officers signed the backs and chests of inebriated co-eds on London street. 

In light of that, the promises ring slightly hollow. 

While I don’t live on London street, the hub for most of the off-campus “festivities,” I can imagine to some that do, this feels a bit like a kick in the teeth. 

Julie Davis can insist that “people love Trent”—as she did at the press conference—all she wants; people posting on r/Peterborough tell a different story.

The messaging this year is not as it used to be. No longer is the university pretending that the occurrences of the past several HOTTs are some unprecedented events; outliers to not be counting.

No, make no mistake, this is the new normal.

If you want proof of that fact, look no further than the aforementioned Homecoming cleanup.

To plan a cleanup event in anticipation of a downtown not yet trashed must speak to a certain amount of resignation as to its happening.

Mark Fisher calls this “reflexive impotence”—to know things are bad, but to equally know you can’t do anything about it. 

I, for one, call this giving the fuck up.

Rather than tell their membership to have a little tact about the city they’re living in, it's interesting that the TCSA are instead appealing to the good nature of students to help address the worst fallout of HOTT weekend.

At the risk of being callous, I highly doubt the type of person who devotes their Sunday to cleaning up beer cans and cigarette butts is the same type of person to have littered them in the first place.

Even I, fucking loser that I am, have enough self-respect to not spend my Sunday morning cleaning up somebody else’s mess.

Yet to their credit, the TCSA seem to be the only ones with any sort of HOTT strategy, bad as the one they propose happens to be.

For all the police’s talk of being “proactive,” I’ve yet to see concrete examples of what that proactive policing is going to look like beyond last year’s decision to pen in partiers like some sort of interactive museum exhibit.

All the pageantry of the press conferences and the news bulletins leading up to the day proper is just to cement the normalcy of everything going on such that the university can do the same thing year-over-year and keep getting away with it.

This is what homecoming is now; deal with it.

At Friday’s press conference, staff sergeant Reesor said that “part of our job is to examine the underlying cause of anything that we're called to.” I find this ironic given no one at the police or the university seems to possess the faintest idea of what exactly those underlying causes are.

Last year, I put forward that Head of the Trent seems like a referendum on Trent’s place in the Peterborough community—a relitigation of its relevance to the cultural fabric of the city in which it happens to find itself. 

Year over year the event has driven a wedge between the community and the school which calls it home.

Unless Trent figures out how to divert the energy of its young and frustrated student body into places if not more productive, than at least less destructive, then Trent is doomed to spend every October for the next decade putting out fires.

It’s not enough to “de-emphasize” drinking in the context only of events taking place on campus (while promoting a new Publican House brew the whole while). It’s not enough to insist that this year is the most proactive you’ve ever been, and that a few more police officers are going to be all that it takes to stop drunk students from flipping cars and taking shits on people’s front lawns. 

I'm not saying that the solution is discipline and punishment, mind. Even if Trent were to go Robocop about expulsions or the police were to put as much effort into enforcing drunk and disorderlies as they did beating up homeless people for shopping carts, I'm not convinced that the end result would really change.

Neither of those things address the underlying issues to which Reesor spoke. They’re just band-aid solutions which see HOTT as some kind of annual Purge-style event—an outlet by which to absolve Trent of its sins.

Personally, I find myself at a loss for any word but “insane” to describe how it makes me feel to watch the police and the university routinely make excuses for the most entitled demographic of coddled young, mostly white students in a town which so routinely and blatantly criminalizes poverty that it has become banal.

Head of the Trent is a class war in microcosm, revealing year upon year who exactly is entitled to the privilege of being protected and served.

If this weekend is a referendum on the cultural position which the university is allowed to occupy, the conclusion which I’m forced to draw is that all the HOTT people have been anointed untouchables.

So far are they above us in social esteem that our tax dollars go to pay cops to hang out with them while they drink beer in the street, and—chumps that we are—we’ll volunteer to clean up after them on the promise of coffee and doughnuts.

I know now I was wrong last year to ask who loves Trent Rowing. It has never been about rowing. 

Every year we will continue to offer up Peterborough as sacrifice for a weekend. It is Trent student’s right as paying customers of an ossified, self-aggrandizing diploma mill. 

The customer is always right, and they’ll be coddled so long as they cough up tuition.

For all of the sternly-worded emails and solemn JPEGs telling them off, Head of the Trent remains not about athletics, nor reunion, nor Trent University. Instead, it’s but the thinnest of veiled excuses for a weekend of excess and debauchery.

The implorations to behave, the police officers, even the press conferences—it’s all theatre in the end. If anything, the hypocrisy is the point.