MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College alumnus Jerry M. Lewis, an international authority on sports fan violence in the United States and Europe, will lecture on the “Cleveland Browns Riot: Implications for the National Football League” at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, March 7, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell. Admission is free.
At a December game between the host Browns and the Jacksonville Jaguars, Cleveland fans, angered over a referee’s call toward the end of the game, littered the field with plastic beer and soda bottles and other debris. The game was stopped and players left the field for several minutes before the contest resumed. Afterward, Browns officials downplayed the incident.
Lewis will discuss the place of sport in American society and the effect of fan violence on sport, the causes and consequences of the bottle riot and the implications of the riot for fan behavior and crowd control in the National Football League.
Lewis, a 1959 Cornell graduate, is an emeritus professor of sociology at Kent State University and a visiting professor of sociology at Cornell. A specialist in collective behavior, he is teaching a course in March at Cornell on “Gatherings, Crowds and Sports Riots.” He was a witness to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, when four students were killed and nine injured after Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire at a student demonstration against the Vietnam War and the National Guard.