If you throw up on the college shuttle bus, should you be forced to pay the (several hundred dollar) cost of cleanup?

That's the urgent question being debated at George Washington University.

There it was in the GW Hatchet: "Fines Imposed for Vomiting on Vern Express." Students who drink until they are sick could be charged $200 to $300 or more to clean up the bus, which runs round-the-clock between the Foggy Bottom and Mount Vernon campuses, and to pay for cab vouchers for all of the student riders who are trying to get home.

And "mystery riders" could be on board at any time, the administration warned.

Like air marshalls! Saving us from the vomiterrorists!

Meanwhile, at Harvard, students may boycott Drew Faust's inauguration because of a decision by Harvard College dean David Pilbeam to stop underwriting undergraduate parties.

Colleges and universities in recent years have been under pressure to reform their alcohol polices following increased awareness of binge drinking on campus, and a series of student deaths on campuses. This year, New York University for the first time is requiring all students to undergo alcohol-screening questioning. Every student-run event at Columbia University must provide a "social, educational, or cultural theme, and may not have the availability of alcohol as its focus."

Bleh.

You have two more days of leverage, Harvard students! Use them. This is serious stuff.

(I speak as one who once engaged in a powerful silent protest, a procession of candle-carrying mourners, outside a New Haven bar to fight the cancellation of a two-for-one happy hour.)

Here's why this apparent triviality matters: Our country and our colleges seem determined to churn out perfectly behaved, brain-dead automatons who never do anything wrong...which likely means that they will never do anything really right. Perfect McKinsey fodder. But who wants to live in that society?

So fight for your right to party, friends. (Maybe not to puke, though. You're on your own there.)

Once they take that away, they come for more....