You Have to Fight For Your Right

When talking about individual freedoms, certain people, documents and ideologies pop into mind: Martin Luther, the Bill of Rights and libertarianism to name a few. Broad, marketable ideas that are easily explained can more easily be disseminated amongst the population. This is all well and good in terms of generally being righteous, but your rights are not limited to amendments found in the Constitution.

The division of powers in American government often provides for multiple claims of rights to be made. Googling “in loco parentis” can easily lead to more insight on individual freedoms. “In loco parentis” is Latin for “in place of parents,” which is a right that educational facilities in the United States have claimed since our nation’s inception.

While the Bill of Rights might be vague on the issue, court cases offer an evolving and interpretive body of opinion. Students have been fighting for individual freedoms on college campuses for as long as colleges have existed, and many have even been punished for their roles. Of particular note is Mario Savio, a key mover in the Free Speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, who was suspended from Berkeley for his political activism. In the realm of student rights, he plays as key a role as Luther did in the Protestant Reformation.

But the work of Mario Savio and the Berkeleyites is not done. The role of the George Mason University’s “in loco parentis” is still active today. Mason is just as active and nosy about student life as Berkeley was in the 1960s.

Individual privacy is a joke if you live on campus and no forum exists for this issue to be addressed. Staff from the Office of Housing and Residence Life, namely resident advisers, can enter individual housing without warrant or reason. Sufficient cause allows for health and safety inspections, which is an excuse to look for illegal objects amongst student possessions.

It is safe to say that while universities could exist in some form without lawbreakers, it would have a sad effect indeed for graduation rates. Therefore, I conclude that it would actually be in a university’s best interest to cease random checks that are vaguely familiar only from TV dramas about prison life and concentrate instead on the task of educating students.

­But this particular case is only an example of the point. Overall, the fight for our individual rights and righteousness amongst educators is far from over. While I admire Amy Jenne for trying to raise awareness of student rights in her letter to the editor (Vol. 84 Issue 11), she fell short on continuing the fight for student rights and knowledge. One is only as free as one allows oneself to be. By failing to recognize our rights as students, we make illegitimate any claims we have to personal freedoms.

Your rights don’t end at the Constitution, your rights end when you stop fighting for them, whether in the courts or otherwise.