Let it be known: Getting caught smoking pot on the campus can seriously affect a student’s ability to influence policy on the campus. So says the University Senate’s membership policy, which was invoked last week in barring one of the senate’s most outspoken and active student members, Stacia Cosner.
Apparently, no one really bothered to pay attention to the senate’s membership rules until Cosner started making waves. Only then was her disciplinary record examined, turning up a previous marijuana violation that bars her from serving. Strange coincidence? Probably. We’d like to give whoever discovered the oversight the benefit of the doubt. What we won’t stand for, however, is the fact that a horrendous double standard exists in the senate’s membership rules.
According to our reading of the rules, undergraduate and graduate students may not serve if they aren’t in good academic or disciplinary standing with the university. Fine. Makes sense. But oddly enough, there’s no similar rule applied to faculty or staff senate members. We recognize the same academic and behavioral rules that apply to students don’t necessarily apply to faculty and staff. But is that to say faculty and staff aren’t subject to disciplinary action at all? If that’s true, one wonders what effect grievance policies and academic ethical standards have on the faculty and staff of this university.
Make no mistake: We take no issue with the rule as it stands now. And we don’t always agree with Cosner’s outspoken agenda. However, she deserves credit for stepping into a thankless position where she could buck the status quo and force influential policy-makers to tell her just why her ideas wouldn’t work. Simply put, Cosner is an activist’s activist, and it’s fairly uncommon to see any undergraduate students take the risks Cosner has to pursue change. But sadly, her risk-taking has made her the rare student who has been unceremoniously ousted from her position after doing so.
Cosner’s predicament isn’t troubling so much only because she’s been outspoken and the senate will lose an active member. The red flags should be going up when one considers that student records and personnel records are offered similar protection under the law. Yet when it comes to serving on the senate, personnel records are closed and student records are apparently ripe for the picking through.
For a university that so often cites the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act as a convenient reason for shutting down transparency of the university’s student judicial processes and keeping bad news about student behavior under wraps and out of the media spotlight, it’s interesting that Cosner’s FERPA rights don’t seem so important when it comes to her senate service. The double standard is further insulting because the senate bylaws theoretically allow faculty and staff to run for the senate regardless of whether they’ve ever been disciplined for anything from sexual harassment to plagiarism.
Fear not, folks: While there’s no oversight of faculty and staff senators’ past indiscretions on the campus, at least we’re keeping students who have made mistakes out of the decision-making process within the university’s most powerful policy-making body.
Considering the obvious double standard, we call on all students in leadership positions – be they university senators or Student Government Association members – to demand the senate to address this double standard immediately. Senate elections are upon us, so the matter couldn’t be more urgent.
In our view, the senate has two options: It could repeal the rule that creates the double standard immediately, effectively allowing graduate students and undergraduate students with judicial problems to run, or it should apply a rule of equal weight to faculty and staff senators, which would prompt close analysis of members’ personnel files. And if it chooses the first option, the repeal must retroactively apply to Cosner, whose past service and idealism should be commended, not condemned.
