riot stairs

English

Etymology

Coined for the construction of such stairways on university campuses in response to student unrest during the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to prevent mobs of students from running together.

Noun

riot stairs pl (plural only)

1. A flight of stairs that is constructed to deliberately disrupt the natural strides of people walking or running on them.
   • 1994 December 14, Tim Gray, “The Myth of the Prison Builder”, in alt.folklore.college (Usenet):

     It is slightly believable because the stairs are all riot stairs. In other words the stairs are all diagonal so if you walk straight up them you run into a wall.

   • 2007 Fall, Jonathan Vincent, Danny Mayer, “Teaching radicalism from the university archives”, in Radical Teacher, number 79:

     The construction of riot stairs and observational offices at the University of Kentucky as pre-emptive measures aimed at diffusing future dissent proved more stimulating to dialogue than, say, a topic like "repression" or "authority" in the generic register.

   • 2009, Douglas Reichert Powell, John Paul Tassoni, Composing Other Spaces, →ISBN, page 118:

     Walking the riot stairs and lounging on the wide lawn in front of Patterson Office Tower, our students could feel the continued presence of the state's reactive measures to a moment of student power organizing their own bodily movements 30 years later.