Mardi Gras would suck at Northwestern, and it’s not due to lack of resources. We’ve got plenty of alcohol, balconies and handheld video cameras. And with the 10 pounds of beads I just brought back from New Orleans, we could light up Library Plaza like a reinforced-concrete disco ball.

No, the problem is authority. After one pre-Lenten night in the Big Easy, everyone on this campus would trade their Residential Assistant or Area Coordinator for a New Orleans cop in a heartbeat.

Down there, the rule of the blue is to keep things safe and the crowd from losing control. And that means turning a pair of blind Ray-Bans to a few things that conflict with the city’s penal code. At a midnight press conference in the French Quarter on Tuesday, Duane D. Johnson, New Orleans’ superintendent of police, estimated his troops tallied about 800 arrests during the Carnival season. If they were nitpicking, the boys in blue could have hauled in most of the 2 million visitors and thousands more locals for public indecency or underage consumption.

But in Evanston, rules are rules and liability is liability. During my four years at NU, the trend has been to push the parties off campus and regulate to death the ones that can’t move. From Gone Greek night to Dillo Day, enforcers are out and the comfort level is down. It all culminated with this year’s Frances Willard Party, where extra RAs roamed the halls, busting up mini-parties behind closed doors and keeping residents and guests out in the cold by guarding the doors like rats on cheese. That wasn’t how it was my freshman year, when the authorities were out to ensure safety. But even then, that party was an exception to the NU rule.

The attitude up here is that we’ll kill ourselves and everyone around us if we’re left in drunken ecstasy, and that our rebellious spirit can be crushed with a few write-ups and a visit to Residential Life.

But at Mardi Gras, revelers don’t tend to fall out of windows or set their homes on fire. They tend to have fun. In New Orleans, they set limits early and let everyone know the rules: Drinking, vomiting and trading your dignity for a 50-cent string of baubles will be tolerated. Punching the guy next to you will not. For a cop, the stench of pot on St. Peter Street takes a back seat to confrontations between sign-wielding Christian protestors and drunken passers-by. Why? Because pot doesn’t hurt people and crazy Bible-thumpers with 10-foot posters reading “Prepare to meet thy God” do.

So why can’t those guidelines transfer to beer and brawlers at an Allison throwdown? Maybe it’s tradition. Maybe it’s the fact that NU students have a terrible time taking responsibility for themselves. Or maybe years of treating both experienced drunks and fun-seeking neophytes like rule-breaking toddlers has bred a culture where whining and lawsuits rule and where authority figures are the bearers of trouble instead of the providers of safety.

At midnight on Mardi Gras, garbage trucks, police cruisers and cops on horseback perform a ceremonial sweep down Bourbon Street, announcing that Ash Wednesday has arrived and that the party is over. After weeks of fair deals, good decisions and a tolerance for fun, the drunks cheer the cavalry like centurions returning to Rome, and then vacate the Quarter – smiling, drunk and thanking the city for letting them have a good time.

I’d bet they’d even give to Campaign New Orleans, if fair-minded, fun-loving cities had such a thing.