Last year, I was with the visiting family of a friend of mine when we received the seemingly unavoidable Providence parking ticket.
"Brown University Parking, $30 fine," I read aloud.
"Brown University!" my friend's father said. "Who is Brown to issue parking tickets? Does Brown think it's part of the government?" And he ripped the ticket up right then and there. Apparently, he was right: They never heard from Brown about the parking ticket again.
I was completely taken by surprise. I would have just paid without questioning.
It made me realize the extent to which I take Brown's authority for granted. Brown has its own police, its own parking policies, its own justice system and its own transportation system. The University, in many ways, is a government in microcosm.
But how far does the University's jurisdiction reach, and how far should it reach? Brown has come under a lot of scrutiny lately for allegedly overstepping the bounds of its authority. The University is facing not one, but two lawsuits from students who claim that the University unfairly tried them outside the judicial system and removed them from campus. Smaller conflicts between the University's authority and students' rights play out all the time, however, in the form of torn-up parking tickets and petitions to move off-campus.
The farther afield the University goes from academics, the less clear the University's authority becomes — and the more the University overlaps with the actual government. The line between the domain of the Department of Public Safety, the University's fully-accredited department of police officers, and that of the Providence Police is hazy, especially when students themselves are under scrutiny. It's public knowledge that being caught with alcohol or having a party be broken up can have vastly different consequences depending on which department answers the call. Regardless of whether this is fair to the rest of the population, this double standard is fairly common practice among private universities.
Brown has gained unwanted attention recently, however, for its forays into the criminal justice system. The lawsuit by William McCormick III against the University has brought to light just how far the power of the University goes. According to the suit, allegations of rape were brought against McCormick — but they were brought to the University, rather than the state police. McCormick alleges that the University, without ever filing official charges or bringing in law enforcement in any capacity, forced him to leave the school. This revelation has stirred up feelings of anger on all sides. If McCormick was actually guilty, then the University allowed a known rapist to go freely back to his hometown. If McCormick is innocent, the University kicked him off campus while denying him the right to defend himself. Does the University have the right to hold its own courts and decide its own punishments in lieu of our criminal justice system, especially when it lacks our traditional constitutional protections for the innocent?
The clash between the University and local authority goes beyond these unusual circumstances. Most students clash against the University's limitations when they try to move off-campus. At Brown, the quality and price difference between on and off-campus is huge: A private bedroom in an apartment off-campus can cost less than a dorm room on campus.
The University manages to maintain its high price by requiring students to remain on-campus so long as the University has space to put them in. Last year, a record numbers of juniors were denied off-campus permission, forcing many to break leases and change living arrangements to compete for doubles and public bathrooms on-campus at much higher prices. To make matters worse, Residential Life then "discovered" that it was actually over capacity, and was forced to renovate more lounges and kitchens into triples and even placed students into off-campus housing specially bought for that purpose — but at University prices.
Every government operates on some sort of social contract between the people and itself: people expect something specific in exchange for some of their freedoms. Brown offers the traditional mainstays of government — safety and protection — but most of all it offers an education and a degree. Brown can pretty much do as it pleases because it is a private institution and, unlike the real government, no one is forced to attend: You can always opt out by giving up your right to graduate with a Brown degree. We exchange our freedoms for participation in academia, and from that perspective, it's amazing what we're willing to give up. You can insist on living off-campus and refuse to pay ResLife, but you will be unable to register for classes, request a transcript or graduate until the University has been fully paid. You can refuse the University's request to attend a disciplinary hearing, but you can then be kicked out of the University without trial. Would we accept a government that told us where we could live, allocated housing by lottery and meted out jury-less punishment? If Brown is a government, is it becoming an authoritarian one?
Michelle Uhrick '11 may disagree with its practices, but she is pretty sure the University isn't Hitler.
