Question arbitrary rules and punishments
Maribel Morey
senior
At Notre Dame, nobody has sex. Nobody does drugs, either. Nobody has fake IDs.
On campus, it seems that people tend to avoid topics in order to safeguard themselves from ResLife — this judicial system with arbitrary powers.
In philosophy, we learn to discuss the meaning of justice, but somehow once outside the classroom walls, we are faced with promulgated yet unjust campus rules. People avoid saying they have sex because that's against Du Lac. People avoid saying they smoke marijuana because that's also against Du Lac — yet it's fine to say that freshmen, sophomores and juniors drink regularly.
Under-age drinking is just as illegal as smoking marijuana, yet Notre Dame tolerates under-age drinking. So while it's still illegal under state laws, it's tolerated to a certain extent on campus. The administration looked at the state law and judged for itself what applied and did not apply for its students.
In case of conflicts with these state laws, Notre Dame has a team of lawyers. If students decide to pick and chose what campus rules apply to them, they will simply be at the mercy of ResLife, whose decisions, at times, seem arbitrary.
If you start thinking, is having sex really worse than having a drinking problem? Have alcoholics had to write a letter of apology to The Observer? Somehow, at Notre Dame, we should publicly apologize for sex. Hello, scarlet letter.
In a sense, I believe that stringent rules and the arbitrary decision-making power of ResLife leads many of us at Notre Dame to live in "bad faith" — to lead a public image that molds to Du Lac and ResLife's rules and to thus avoid aspects of ourselves that do not conform to Catholic or Notre Dame teachings— without questioning whether or not these punishments are just or unjust.
Should we be afraid to discuss certain issues in the paper just because there exists this certain Big Brother with arbitrary power? If we are to be a community, the laws cannot simply be the will of the administration. If we do live in a democratic community here at Notre Dame, we should have influence over the rules that govern our environment. We should not be at the whimsical mercy of ResLife.
And this campus should ultimately be a place where students discuss "real issues" without having an impending fear of being unfairly judged or expelled. Aquinas argues that we, as rational creatures, have a natural inclination to live together in conversation.
So perhaps together, we should question the existing rules and the punishments that follow defiance. Then we could analyze what kind of political community governs us at Notre Dame — and whether we've got to tame it.
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, November 19, 2002
