Students are adults, too

By: Kyle Hayes, Mike Spier, Nickie Reitz

Posted: 11/12/08

College is the time in most students' lives when you learn the tricks of the trade, you expand your horizons and you learn things that the real world might not necessarily teach you. Sure, it's an educational experience but it's also the time when students learn what it's like to be a young professional.

Throughout one's time here, a student has a few dozen professors who are mentors and role models. A professor acts as someone that has been in the "real world" and experienced what a student has yet to. However, it seems as of late, those who should be helping students make decisions about their own lives are making those decisions a little more difficult.

Whether it's faculty and staff who are difficult or impossible to get a hold of via e-mail and phone to those that have tried imposing their political views on others, the relationship between professor and student is visually changing.

Although, sometimes change isn't necessarily a good thing.
Students are adults, too, and want to make their own choices, develop their own views and make their own decisions. As students, we live by our own rules and have the right to govern ourselves no matter if we're in class or in the dorms.

Obviously some rules need to be set to ensure that things run smoothly on campus. However, if a student sends one quick text message in class, is it necessary to call that student out in front of their peers for attempting to stay in contact with someone outside the classroom? If you're in class in the computer lab and need to send a quick email, is it necessary to be kicked out of class for sending what could very well be an important message?

Resident students pay approximately $33,430 to live on campus; a commuter pays $23,330 in tuition. For as much as a student pays to go to Fisher, don't they deserve an email back to a question about the class that they're paying so much for?

Students don't have the ability to send campus-wide emails when they lose their thumb drives. Students don't have reserved dining rooms that they can eat in, separated from the rest of diners in the dining hall. Staff members have told students they won't open e-mails if the subject lines aren't descriptive enough, well what about the staff-sent e-mail messages with glaring typos that were sent campus-wide?

We're not asking for a complete overhaul of the current system, but some confidence in students as adults would be beneficial not only to the students themselves but to the institution in general. We're adults, we have lives outside of the classroom and we have the ability to make our own decisions.

True, we make mistakes. But we are here to learn and gain experiences of our own that will prepare us for the "real world." Kicking us out of class for e-mailing, embarrassing us for text messaging and not responding to our e-mails isn't helping us learn any better than sitting in class for three hours.