I agree with most of what you have said here, but here's your fatal error:

The presumption among the emails that are sent out regarding this is to keep the Universities reputation, and if that becomes more important than the people's reputation (and lives of the people) that are in it, then something is going wrong.

This is exactly wrong; your ignorance of the history of this event betrays you.

In the beginnimg years of Unofficial, the university refused to even acknowledge its existence except to promote safety, in an effort to avoid giving it undue publicity. Then people started showing up to class wasted and damaging property, so it began taking action. Then, nine years ago, in 2006, a woman who was drunk and wearing an Unofficial shirt got on a morotcycle being driven by someone equally as drunk, without a helmet, then fell off and died when he crashed. In 2011, the Daily Illini's sports editor, who was a Centennial High alum, tried to cross University Avenue alone, at night, in the rain, with a BAC three times the legal limit, and was run over, eventually dying from his injuries. That is to say nothing of the thousands in property damage done to apartment complexes and vehicles, along with the damage and injuries caused by people hurling things, including furniture, over balconies into the street. If you don't believe me, they were also stupid enough to film it and upload it to YouTube. There's also the hundreds who have to be hospitalized or at least cared for in ERs every year because of overconsumption.

This was not done to protect the UI's reputation; if you need an example of that, try the state police's Operation Campus/TAP, conducted by using grant money to pay state trooper overtime to sweep Campustown bars at least once a semester and hand out MIP tickets to the 19- and 20-year-olds found drinking inside. This was done because people caused wanton destruction and got themselves hospitalized and killed.

So I'll say it again: If you're stupid enough, and a bad enough citizen and member of this society and community, to ignore all these warnings and not heed rules put in place only as a reaction to, and not an effort to prevent, tragic events, then you deserve some public humiliation to go along with a misdemeanor ticket that can be a settled with a fine.