Double Jeopardy?
The following is not – repeat not – from a Monty Python skit satirizing a priggish university don:
“When individual behavior conflicts with the values of the University, the individual must choose whether to adapt his or her behavior to meet the needs of the community or to leave the University. This decision, among others, assists each person to determine who he or she is with respect to the rest of society.”
On the contrary, it is the statement of an actual university official, or, considering that it reads as if written by committee, a cluster of actual university officials (we don’t call them ‘dons’ on this side of the pond) of the actual University of Vermont.
There is no indication that satire was his, her, or their intent.
Now let’s be fair to the staff of the Center for Student Ethics and Standards, author of the italicized paragraph above. What it is doing here is entirely justified. The paragraph is part of a disciplinary proceeding – a punishment, if you will – and it is directed at students who violated University rules.
Punishment, therefore, would seem to be in order.
Nor is this punishment all that severe. The plan, at least, is neither to suspend nor expel. All the miscreant students have to do is….well, eat crow.
Last April, the students in question, to protest university plans to raise tuition and cut faculty positions, walked into the campus building that houses the president’s office, and refused to leave after business hours and despite being ordered to disperse.
They occupied the corridor.
This exercise in civil disobedience didn’t do much good. The 32 protesters were a tiny fraction of the roughly 9,500 members of the student body, most of whom went about their business. The budget cuts at issue were imposed, slightly reduced thanks to federal money, not student complaints
But neither did the protesters do any harm. They hurt no person and damaged no property, unless one counts spilling a few crumbs of the pizzas smuggled in by sympathetic professors.
Still, they were punished. The students having violated not merely university rules, but the laws of the state of Vermont, said state charged them with trespassing, to which they (sort of) pled guilty and were sentenced to community service. Said service having been completed (this being a piece about academia, the ablative absolute is appropriate), their records are now clean.
In other words, as the state’s attorney clearly thought, it was no big deal. Better yet, for months, this not-so-big deal has been O-V-E-R over, which is, one would think, just what UVM’s bigwigs would want.
Not the folks at the Center for Student Ethics and Standards. They decided that community service was insufficient. The students may have been punished, but they would have to be re-punished.
Why? Well, a message to the University’s Communications Office seeking an answer to that question having gone unanswered, we will have to resort to conjecture based on a careful reading of the Center for (Yakkety-Yak)’s statement on the matter.
Which reads, in part, “you will note that your acceptance of the charges will result in a simple sanction that asks you to create a reflective response that attempts to prompt your thoughts specific to the incident. Once that response is submitted by the deadline noted, the matter will be considered resolved…”
This “reflective response” is to be a 1,000-word essay in which the student must “engage…in purposeful thought about what it means to be a member of the University of Vermont community. While it is intended to be a reflective assignment, and your completed work will not be evaluated on its content…be advised that your paper may not serve to merely justify your own actions or evaluate the actions of others”
(Memo to Center for Yakkety-Yak: You should really hire someone who can write a simple, declarative, English sentence).
Failure to complete the assignment , “will result in a $100.00 non-compliance fee, the cancellation of all pre-registered classes, a hold on… registration until these sanctions are completed, and/or further disciplinary action from the University.”
Now remember, we are still in the realm of conjecture, but here is what appears to have happened: Some folks at the Center for (whatever) sat around one day and said, “let’s devise a punishment which will humiliate these students to the utmost of our ability, and make it clear that we are grinding their noses in the dirt because we have the power to do so and they have no recourse whatsoever.
“Better yet, let’s express ourselves in the most pompous, priggish, pedantic language we can muster, just to prove that we are university bureaucrats.”
All of which might have been a touch less obnoxious if the boys at Ethics and Standards were known around campus as consistent executors of disciplinary action. They are not. Students who are part of the enforcement apparatus tell tales of nonfeasance even after they write up violations for drug and alcohol offenses. Present and former athletes report that –as in the old days well-connected Chicagoans took their traffic tickets not to city court but to the precinct committeeman who would “take care of it – so do members of certain teams take their write-ups to their coaches, who “take care of it.”
But some good may yet come of this. If, that is, these students possess both grit and wit. Grit they must have, or they would not have occupied the corridor. Wit is more doubtful. Student protesters are oft afflicted with earnestness, wit’s rival.
But (the rest of this is addressed to those 32 students), a few of you ought to be able to create an essay which, while meeting the terms of your penalty, also exposes those who set those terms as the priggish, pompous, self-righteous twits they are.
If so, send a copy to this web site. The best (assuming any are good enough) will be reprinted here (yeah, yeah; “printed” isn’t exactly the right word). It could be the beginning of a writing career.
Tags: UVM
October 21st, 2009 at 2:21 pm
So I’m glad you have been covering this as I was one of the folks very involved in the planning and execution of the sit-in. Now the assertion that the student body was not sympathetic to the action is false. The reason only 32 people were arrested is because Pres. Fogel ordered the building closed for the night. After he did this we had a few hundred people show up ready to go. But hey, presidents orders…for “safety” reasons.
Anyway, I know a lot of the people who are now faced with the decision of how to respond to this letter and I appreciate the fact that faculty (yourself included) have been so helpful in exposing the twisted priorities of this administration. I can assure you that these are some of the brightest students at UVM whose unique understanding of the world drove them to break the law. The idea that those involved in civil disobedience should, for fear of retribution, be forced to repudiate their actions is insane. It takes the teeth out of their action and aims to break them down to the point where they might start to question their own activism.
Damage control is something that the Administration’s PR dept. needs to work on. The more they act, the more they compound and broaden the vitriol that feeds a healthy opposition to an out of touch administration.