Re: skinheads - as long as we're getting pedantic here (and actually Laurie, this is not The New Yorker, but FOT: An Irregularly Published Journal of Tom and Tom Culture), there's an excellent book that I sometimes teach by Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style*, in which he expounds at great length of the origins of proto-skin culture in 1960s Britain. I won't bore you all with the details, but basically he characterizes it as a form of co-optation of working-class culture by youth too underprivileged to become hippies. American skinhead culture is, by comparison, totally decontextualized, as the American working class never really dressed like that. The look is associated with violence, et al in the popular imagination, but honestly it could be anything; style is given context by the wearer.
I guess there's sort of an analog to the jock look of the FSU - like, repurposing the costume of the American teenager.
The whole FSU thing seems sort of sad to me. I'm Jewish and was sort of peripherally into the NJ hardcore scene in the mid-80s (I went to the all-ages shows at Shitty Gardens pretty regularly for a couple of years), so I feel a sort of peripheral relief at their anti-racist views. I used to like kids like that. And on some level I have a sort of vaguely-defined Leninist fantasy of organizing the FSUs into a small army. But I'm old enough to know that thuggishness is usually just thuggishness, and tends to follow its own imperatives.
Re: Rutgers - yeah, fat sandwiches, ew brother.
*I'm sure most of you already know about it, but just to throw it into the mix