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Oh, I need a place to RAGE about this.
Sat in as a witness to an academic disciplinary hearing today for a student I know, who missed a great deal of work last term while sitting with her ex-boyfriend as he was coming off heroin. She's since caught up with the work she missed, but ran into financial trouble (as, I gather, a consequence of her family relationships) this term resulting in various things (library fines, some residential payments I think) not being paid for some time. She's one of a fairly small percentage of state school students at a largely private-school institution, and from talking to her and teaching part of her course, she's fairly cynical about power structures and institutions. She's also one of the brightest and most gifted people I've met in ages.
The hearing, in front of a panel, consisted of about half an hour of a list of accusations about which rules had been broken, those rules read in full, lengthy quotations from email warnings and the like - essentially a somewhat one-sided account that avoided explicitly mentioning the reasons for absence etc. And then said prosecutor accused her of contempt for the institution. The defence fortunately made a competent case, explaining the facts and pointing to her academic record. Then a rather relentless barrage of invasive questions from the panel for some considerable length of time, by the end of which she was barely coherent and clearly on the verge of tears.
My RAGE in this circumstance comes from wondering: is this really the sort of business we're supposed to be in? I mean, bean-counting, pen-pushing rules gimping with barely a consideration for the sheer trauma of that situation? Is it really justifiable to make a scared 19 year old sit through an hour and a half of invasive examination of a deeply troubled personal history and then expect her to be able to respond coherently to a panel of strangers?
I mean, fuck, I'm sorry, I thought we were in the business of making sure bright people got the access to the resources and inspiration they deserve. God knows what sort of twisted, fucked-up progeny of ethics would allow you to stand in a room for half an hour and argue for the expulsion of probably the brightest person to walk through your doors in the last ten years... and for an offence so trivial, and at root so fundamentally *good* and *human* a thing to do, that it makes a mockery of the whole process anyway.
Today has left a somewhat unpleasant taste in my mouth, because I usually adore my job. I am currently drafting a letter of complain to the appropriate authorities, but mostly wanted to get the sheer seething anger out in order to write something reasonably rational.
(I suppose I also have to have faith that the panel is made up of reasonable human beings, despite my urge to grab them by the lapels and shake some sense into them.) |
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