As far as the switch, regardless of it's state, it is property of FITES and as such should never be handled by attendees. As Broken previously stated, we will have a zero tolerance rule in effect for those messing with network equipment at future events.
AFAIK they only switched their cable to another port.
Your questions regarding DCHP would indicate that you nor non staff members have zero know how of how our network is configured and or ran. With that being said, any network related issues should be handled by a staff member and preferably one who is assigned to our network team.
I heard rumors that the cable modem had to be swapped out because it wasn't able to handle all the systems, but I would have guessed pfsense or similar with a DNS table entry for your fites.lan domain. I noticed the two cables connected to the uplink ports on the switches and was curious if you daisy chained or used link aggregation with star topology?