The CU Room Checks: Naive and Disrespectful

If you live on campus then there is a good chance that this has happened to you. In an alleged effort to crack down on rule breaking, the powers that be have been getting stricter. Rumors abound over some of the bizarre rules being enforced. I won't comment since I can't confirm them, even though they do come from some very credible sources.

The basic idea seems to be that some students are keeping members of the opposite sex in their rooms past midnight. Thus basically the head RA is waking everyone up in the middle of the night based on a vague notion that someone, somewhere, might be breaking a rule. This is pretty much akin to burning down an entire house to get rid of the rats. Nevermind that the vast majority of the students here were breaking no rules. Or that it is the tuition money of the students that pays the salaries of those very people who disturb us. Apparently those responsible do not feel that we deserve to be able to sleep at night.

Just in case you happen to get caught breaking a rule, you get sent to Cumberland Court. Here you will find out what your punishment will be for breaking a rule. I think a more fitting name would be Kangaroo Court. Apparently they are trying to put over that they are judicious, yet at the same time they are waking people up in the middle of the night and inspecting their rooms WITHOUT probable cause. That does not seem very judicial to me.

I am not suggesting that there is never a reason to inspect someone's room. If there is reason to believe they are breaking a law, then by all means inspect away. However, waking up an entire campus in the middle of the night is ludicrous at best and a total abuse of power at worse. Yes, I know that there is probably a clause somewhere that allows this type of thing, but use common sense people. The right to bear arms does not give someone the right to carry a machine gun around the town square. The right to search rooms should not give anyone the right to deny students a good night's sleep.

I am not blind. I know rules get broken every day. However, I don't like getting up in the middle of the night and neither does anyone else. If the idea is to stop people from staying over at their boy/girlfriends' place then they need a reality check here. I am not advocating anything, but the fact is simple: If something is going to happen between two consenting adults, then it will. Room checks aren't going to stop it. I resent the fact that we are considered adults, yet get treated like children. We are paying a fortune to go to this school. We deserve to be treated as adults and our rights to sleep need to be respected.

I will end this by stating that the powers that be need to respect the students of this university and treat them like the adults they are. There are some things you don't do to people. You don't call someone's child ugly. You don't track mud on someone else's floor. And you don't wake people up in the middle of the night. If this continues, it will make CU look very unattractive to both current and prospective students.

- John Brown is a senior in political science and history at the University of Tennessee @ Knoxville. Contact him at johnnyb325@aol.com, or visit www.johnnorrisbrown.com. This column originally ran in the December 2001 edition of The Phoenix Review, the student newspaper at Cumberland University.