Quote:
|
Quote by: Improvident So i ask.. what the hell are students paying for? To better tell time by the dongs of the clock tower? How to cope with crappy living conditions? Or for a quality education given by quality educators so that your hard work and hard earned money put forth into the university will someday pay off? |
And that's not even getting into all the rights you give up as a dorm resident.
I just got appointed to our judicial board so I have an interesting perspective on this.
Lost Rights in the Dorm:
1.) The right to unreasonable search and seizure
RA's and other Dorm officials can enter your room without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion of wrong doing. The only thing they're not allowed to do is open boxes or other types of containers / mini-fridges but I've never seen that stop them.
2.) Right to Due process
The judicial process, at least at my school, is extremely skewed. If you get in trouble, you are sent a letter by a judicial assistant scheduling you for a meeting regarding your infraction. Typically, the first letter will tell you that you did not respond to an earlier letter that they never sent out to you, putting you at an immediate disadvantage and making you look either irresponsible or a smartass.
Then you go into the meeting with the Judicial Assistant. Their job is essentially to punish you or recommend that you have a hearing. Supposedly, this part of the process is supposed to get your side of the story to argue in favor of yourself or explain the actions brought about by an incident report submitted by a dorm / university official. However, I've never seen someone not get in trouble who didn't take the hearing.
So if you pick the hearing you start a waiting game sitting around wondering when they're going to decide to do it. The actual hearing process is downright laughable.
You sit behind a board of 3-9 students labeled "justices" whose only real qualifications are passing an interview and a sitting through a short one day seminar with such mentally and legally stimulating topics as "How to build a paper airplane" (no joke).
So the judicial assistant who supposedly had been there to hear your side, is now essentially the prosecutor for the school. They present an opening statement which typically is nothing more than re-reading or best case re-phrasing the incident report and then leaving it at that.
The accused student is then allowed to make their opening statement. This is where things get fun.
3.) The right to confront your accuser(s)
The judicial assistant is then allowed to ask you a series of questions (through the chief justice) and then every justice is allowed to question you directly.
Then the judicial assistant is allowed to call witnesses. Not once is the accused student allowed to directly question the witnesses, he has to phrase them in the third person to the board, and then the chief justice either repeats what you just asked, or simply looks at the witness expecting their response. If you even start to phrase a question in the first person they will stop you and require you to rephrase it.
"What did you see on that night?"
will be forced to become
"What did he see on that night?"
This slows everything down and prevents you from following any coherent progression of questions
Then the accused student is allowed to call their witnesses, which the process of even getting them admitted is overly difficult in and of itself.
While all of this is going on, they have a university official recording the entire incident. It is not uncommon for the recording to glitch up if the accused student makes a good point or gets one of the prosecution's witnesses to say something they didn't like.
Finally they kick out every one in the room but the justices who supposedly deliberate on the testimony. The atmosphere of the group is highly pompous and they immediately assume guilt.
I once heard a justice ask the judicial assistant prior to a hearing who "our witnesses" were, completely negating any objectivity needed in the role of a judge.
Then these justices are given access to the student's past judicial record before making their final decision. They actually have the authority to expel students.
The only recourse is the Dean of Students who is typically stubbornly defensive of the Judicial process since it reflects badly on her if she overturns a ruling.
The only recourse above her is the President of the University and good luck getting an audience with him.