Certain types of people in certain types of administrative positions will come to the realization that it is amazing what people will put up with if you simply excuse an action as common practice. Asked about the recent arrest of a student for possession of less than two grams of marijuana, Director of Public Safety David Meyer replied, “These incidents occur throughout the year.” We are now paying a group of people to make sure the police know that we are doing things that are illegal. This would be unthinkable in any other sort of community where individuals pay a central administrative system to provide them with food, housing, and social environment. Can you imagine a senior citizen paying to live in a retirement community that would feel no compunction as they searched their and property and impulsively reported their aberrations from the law? There seems to be an underlying belief that young adults need to be policed in some form if they are going to live in a stable community. Or perhaps the belief is that young adults are one of the many groups of citizens that will put up with it.
I, like much of the Wesleyan population, and most of the national population that will graduate in 2008, will end my undergraduate life more than $20,000 in debt. I greatly regret that even a fraction of this debt has been incurred to pay the sort of Public Safety officer that finds it acceptable to report our actions to the Middletown Police Department. The Wesleyan administration allows these individuals to make a living out of invading our privacy but refuses to raise professors’ salaries at the rate of inflation, even as it increases yearly tuition at an average of double the rate of inflation.
I believe the impression of the average Wesleyan student is that the code of non-academic conduct exists to give reasonable punishment to those who have agreed to follow it—it enforces a standard that is adjusted to the nature of our community. And yet it is frequently the case that the code of non-academic conduct is used alongside the Connecticut legal system. The same action is punishable twice by two separate bodies of law. Double jeopardy is accepted as the norm—it is, in fact, written into the introduction of the code of non-academic conduct.
Yet more disturbingly, the Student Judicial Board is often ignorant of the very body of law that it is enforcing. In my own Student Judicial Board hearing, I was met with blank stares when I asked the three students responsible for sentencing me if they were aware that “a student charged with an off-campus criminal violation is not automatically subject to University disciplinary procedures.” This court did not feel obligated to establish jurisdiction before it tried the case—it assumed it. It is the obligation of any serious court to prove its jurisdiction before it tries the case. This court feels entitled to try Wesleyan students with impunity because we have raised no significant challenge to its authority.
Most unsettlingly, it is comprised entirely of our fellow students. Even as part of the administration giddily deprives the students of the atmosphere they thought they were purchasing, it trains certain of them in their art—the art of feeling comfortable as you denounce your peer for something that you know is socially and morally acceptable within your community. Is it not disturbing that Wesleyan is interested in offering this sort of person its “opportunities?” These are the people that grow up to be our ACs [Area Coordinators]. How many of us have been asked, “Will you do this again?” “Will you drink underage again?” “Will you smoke pot again?” It isn’t even totally clear that these individuals believe in the standard that they are enforcing. But it is astounding to me that they ask us to make a disgusting show of feigned penance.
A Middletown Police officer once told me a story about a Public Safety officer who chased a trespasser all the way to Main Street. When I asked him what he thought was remarkable about the incident, he responded (to the best of memory) as follows: “What if the guy had a gun? What was he going to do? Throw his nightstick at him?” The incident I refer to occurred a number of years ago. To my knowledge, no similar incidents have occurred during my stay at Wesleyan. The Office of Public Safety has recognized that it is incapable of protecting us from danger but is widely capable of interfering in our community and making sure that the preposterous student judicial system is allowed to make examples out of our “offenders.” And that is exactly the role it has presumed to take within the Wesleyan community.
In the end, the Office of Public Safety is limited in its actions by the extent to which the student body tolerates their enforcement. They are acutely aware of the fact that the individuals whose lives are affected by their policies will usually remain a member of this community for only four years. When any elected official is bound by a four-year term, it means that will behave in a way that will allow either themselves or their party to be re-elected after their term is over. When those who hold a position of authority do so over a group of people that is almost completely replaced over the course of four years, they can only be held accountable to the extent that the governed body is actually capable of realizing how the community is being changed. What would have been unacceptable to a Wesleyan student twenty, ten, or even five years ago is now acceptable to us.
Wesleyan is made up of brilliant, idiosyncratic individuals. It is nearly impossible to leave the University without having encountered a professor that permanently changed your life. And much of the administration acts with genuine kindness towards the student body. It is unconscionable for us to allow the Office of Public Safety and the student-run judicial organs to inflate their importance and power in a way that obliterates our privacy and tramples the security of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Now that there has been a changing of the guard at the head of Wesleyan’s administrative body, it is more important than ever to make sure that we make our expectations abundantly clear. President Bennet approved the current code of non-academic conduct in July of 1999. The approval of this document, and the decisions made in the implementation thereof, have shown us how fragile our community really is, and how easy it is for someone to push it in a direction that is totally opposed to the desires of the student body. We need a new code of non-academic conduct signed by our new president.
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