The American Quarterly Review, No. 18, June 1831 (Vol 9)Various
History
The American Quarterly Review, No. 18, June 1831 (Vol 9)
Various
Intellectual life -- Periodicals; United States -- Intellectual life -- 19th century -- Periodicals
No youth hesitates to depose in a court of justice touching an offence
against the municipal laws of his country, committed by a brother
student. The youth and the people at large, are, indeed, distinguished
for their ready attention to the calls of justice. Yet it is esteemed
the depth of dishonour to testify when called upon by the college
authorities, against the grossest violator not only of collegiate but
municipal law, as if it could be less honourable to give the same
testimony before one tribunal than another; or the morality of the act
differed in the two cases.
This erroneous principle, which leads to the separation of so many
promising individuals from the universities, threatens their reputation
and prosperity, injures the cause and saps the very foundation of
education, prevails in some countries, and in some portions of this
country more than in others. In some of the most respectable of our own
colleges, it is made a duty to give evidence under pain of the highest
punishments; and in some of those in which the _esprit du corps_ has
prevailed to the greatest extent, it has given occasion to the adoption,
by the faculty, of the monstrous alternative of selecting persons on
bare suspicion, or at random, and punishing them under the expectation
that the real delinquent might exhibit himself. A law of this kind
prevails in the college of William and Mary, in Virginia. "In any case
of disorderly conduct within the college, in which students are
concerned, every student in college at the time, whether he be a
resident therein or not, shall be considered as a principal and treated
accordingly, unless he can show his innocence." It has also been
proposed to get over this difficulty, with regard to testimony, by
establishing a law court at the university, of which the law professor,
for example, might be judge, and the jury be constituted of the
inhabitants of the vicinity. This tribunal to possess the ordinary
jurisdiction of courts of law, and of course, empowered to require
testimony on oath from the student. Such might be a valuable adjunct to
the powers ordinarily possessed by the faculties of our colleges.
The majority of the convention, seem manifestly to have been in favour
of what they term _Parental Discipline_; but we are left to conjecture
how much this embraces. If it be meant, in the language of Meiners, that
"the academical authorities should bear to the students the relation of
fathers as well as of judges; that they should not only punish, but
entreat, admonish, advise, warn, and reprove"--no one will dispute the
propriety of the system. It is, in fact, that which is introduced into
our best institutions.
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