This is an excellent

Jacob Freeze — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:16:05 -0600

This is an excellent overview! It's too much for me to absorb at one sitting, but there's a lot here that I didn't know. The comparison between a signing statement and a line-item veto is right on the money!

Executive Privileges High

Betsy L. Angert — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:09:27 -0600

Executive Privileges
High Crimes and Misdemeanors . . .

Thanks for your input on this matter.

epppie — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:58:00 -0600

I too am concerned that the VT situation will lead to further erosions of privacy laws. In my opinion (and I don't know all the legal specifics where I live, much less in Va), no fellow students have a right to information about someone else's mental illness. Period. Or, if we are to allow them to have access to that info, then their medical information should be freely available too. You want to know about my depression. Ok. I want to know about your sexual dysfunction. Yeah, it comes down pretty quickly to the lesson Jesus taught us, valid whether or not you are a Christian. If you want to check out your neighbors dirty underwear, are you ready to put your own on display? I didn't think so.

Most administrators would not justifiably have access to such information either. But where I have a problem with what the NYT article said and with what VT did is that my experience with university tells me that Universities have tremendous leeway in their handling of their students. Now when you have a student who is taking pictures of other students surrepticiously and without permission and who frightens a class so badly that the professor asks him to leave the class, one of two things is happening. Either that student is a serious problem, or the class is acting out of some kind of prejudice, it seems to me. The school has a responsibility to get to the bottom of that.

THROWING A STUDENT OUT OF A CLASS is not an everyday occurrence. I've never seen it done, when not for academic reasons. Such an extreme step almost certainly calls for some kind of University disciplinary response, I think. When someone gets thrown out of a class, for nonacademic reasons, it's a serious matter. Either the teacher has seriously misbehaved or the student has.

The fact that a student can be thrown out of a class also points to the wide discretion a university has. While it cannot deny services to a student based on mere prejudice, it has a basic right to decide who can study at the school and to set conditions (as I understand it, anyway). Once they threw Cho out of class, they had a RESPONSIBLITY to get to the bottom of the matter, somehow. Instead, they seem to have closed their eyes, hopeing the problem would simply go away.

When I was in University, I suffered from a severe depression. NOT ONCE did a faculty person in our small, tightly knit program, inquire with me as to how I was doing, in two years. Not once. In fact, the only time anyone inquired into my mental health, ironically, and criminally, was when I got into a scrape with one of the faculty (different department). This individual and I had to face each other in a disciplinary hearing and included in his (bogus) charges against me was information about my sessions with a mental health counselor on campus. He had no right to that information. But that goes to show how ass-backwards the University can be when it comes to students' mental health. The only time a faculty person inquired, they DIDN'T come to me. They instead accessed records, via the informal networks that seem to exist on every campus, that they had no legal right to access.

And that, to me, points to the basic problem. The University does not need to have any extra legal rights over its students to show compassionate care. Compassionate care is actually part of its responsiblity for students, under it's commitment to educate the whole person. Compassionate care is also part of its responsiblity to foster a safe learning environment. Compassionate care is also a pragmatic investment in the life of its campus. My campus too was once shot up by a (former) student who had become a white supremacist.

Listen, there's no way that a University can, with certainty, prevent violence on campus. But when someone gets kicked out of a class for frightening the other students, there needs to be a discplinary process, which should also be a healing process. Either the student has misbehaved badly in some way, or the class has misbehaved badly in some way, or both. You can't just let a situation like that slide. Once Cho was expelled from that class, a line had been crossed. Again, being expelled from a class for non-academic reasons is major step. Isn't this obvious? It is an infringement on the student's right to learn. There HAS to be a reason for it and that reason REQUIRES some kind of amelioration.

Public finance

iconoclast — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:58:35 -0600

We should have public financing of all elections. We may have the most corrupt government in the world right now. It is absurd how easy it is to "pile on the pork" when bills come before the Congress. Our Government stopped working for us and started working for special interests decades ago. We need to create an environment where average Americans, teachers, farmers, firemen, can afford to run for Congress and win and that will only happen with public funding and getting the special interests out of the process.

Diatribune - power - Comments

This is an excellent

Executive Privileges High

Thanks for your input on this matter.

Public finance