Flash back to high school

The other day, my sister Kath sent me a link to an article she'd seen on a group of student snitches (I'm pretty sure that's the right word, but I think they're trying to hip it up by referring to them as tipsters) at Rice University who are reporting on fellow students (sometimes even friends) for COVID violations. Those reported have to appear before Rice's COVID Community Court (CCC), a student-run entity "the school launched this semester to adjudicate public health violations on campus."

Offenders get the plead their case before the student judges, which then mete out punishments.

Typical penalties include writing letters of apology, performing community service projects, meeting with advisers, and completing educational research papers about public health—not to mention the shame most feel after having been shown to have placed their fellow students at risk. A final punishment, a $75 fine, is available to the CCC, but the group has yet to levy that sanction because of concerns about its potential disproportionate impact on low-income versus high-income students. (Source: Texas Monthly)

Wow.

I'm all for campuses trying to make sure their students are behaving sensibly with respect to COVID. From what I'm hearing about college kids, I understand that this is an all-but-impossible task, given that these kids are away from parental supervision, think they're immortal, want what they want when they want it, are self- and peer-absorbed, and don't believe that Granny or the nice nurse in the student health center could possibly die from COVID. Until they do.

So, good luck, colleges and universities that want to maximize revenues by giving the students the on-campus experience without turning their campus into super-spreader locations. And I don't blame the students who want to be on campus. Let's face it, most of what you get out of colleges happens in person. Distance learning and Zoom meet-ups are great and all, but there's really nothing like hanging around someone's room for an all night bull session. I do blame the students for being selfish little shits, however. And I'm not in the least enthused about the student Stasi and all their little informers.

Frankly, it's giving me a PTSD attack dating back to my high school and college era.

I went to a Catholic girls high school, and the student council was, for the first couple of years I was there, the enforcement wing for the nuns, making sure that infractions were reported and punished. 

Among the petty and ridiculous rules: no speaking between classes. So, while kids in normal high schools were chatting it up at their lockers, we were marching in single fine to our next class. If you were caught talking or even whispering, a student councilor could issue you demerits. You acquired enough demerits, you had to do something punitive, like stay after school and rake leaves near the tennis court. 

By my sophomore year, I was on the student council. Maybe we were no longer giving out demerits, as I don't remember doing so. But I may be repressing a memory of myself as the type of asshole who would have. (We wouldn't have said asshole. We would have said fink or rat fink. By my senior year, we'd have upped the name game to include bitch, but I really don't think that by that point the demerit system was still in play.)

A really terrible infraction was smoking in uniform. Even if you weren't on the school grounds. Because, of course, if a non-Catholic saw someone from a Catholic school smoking - a girl from a Catholic school - why, that would be giving scandal. Tsk. Tsk. 

Even in grammar school, I thought that this 'giving scandal' stuff was nonsense. Worcester's population was about two-thirds Catholic back then. To whom was a misbehaving parochial schooler giving scandal? 

Anyway, smoking in uniform was a colossally big deal, and at some point, a couple of my classmates were ratted out for being seen smoking at Leno's, a downtown coffee shop. 

I didn't smoke. I didn't drink coffee. Although I knew where it was, I don't think I was ever in Leno's, which had something of a racy reputation. On the rare occasion when we hung around "down city" rather than just transfer buses and go home, my friends and I went to Toupin's Bakery, a more wholesome spot. Where we ordered hot chocolate. 

I have no idea who snitched on the girls smoking at Leno's. Was it some prissy, purse-lipped parent? A Protestant stranger who was actually given actual scandal? Was it a fellow student?

I'm thinking this last one. Who else would know the names of the girls smoking?

I was a goody two-shoes, but, yikes, it wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years to report someone for smoking in uniform. But it occurred to someone.

And so, at one of my first student council meetings, there was a serious discussion of what the punishment should be. Suspension? Expulsion? Or this lulu: a ceremony at which the offenders were marched on stage and, in front of the assembled student body, have the school badge ripped off of their uniform jumper. That didn't happen. I don't remember what did. Maybe the girls had to rake more leaves than usual.

(My mother had a friend who'd gone to a high school run by the same order of nuns that I had. Terry told my mother that girls who had violated some rule or another - it may have been smoking - were stood on the auditorium stage while all their classmates marched past them and slapped them in the face. Nuns monitored the strength of the slaps, and if a slap was deemed to weak, called for a reslap. So I guess in comparison that even having your badge stripped off your jumper meant things had lightened up.)

I'm even more embarrassed to admit that I went to a college - my high school was a feeder for the college in Boston run by that same order of nuns - that, my freshman year, had a student honor council that ran a kangaroo court.

This is what happened to some of my fellow students (one of whom became a lifelong friend):

Someone brought a bottle of beer back to the dorm. Strictly verboten. Not a bad rule: who wants a bunch of kids sitting around a dorm getting drunk. It's just a rule that should be supremely judiciously and rarely enforced. Especially for trivial infractions. Anyway, a half-dozen girls shared the bottle. My friend MB, who didn't drink beer, took a pass.

A few weeks later, one of the students who'd been in the room was nabbed for breaking curfew. As she was being browbeaten about that, she was caught up in a plea bargain and ended up reporting her friends for the shared beer bottle.

Well after midnight, the girls were summoned from their beds and, still in their nightgowns with a coat thrown over them, and put in front of the senior run honor court. (Two of the judges were, in fact, prissy, sugar-spun girls who'd been seniors in my high school when I was a freshman.) 

Next thing they knew, the girl who'd brought the bottle in was suspended for the year and anyone who'd taken a swallow of beer was kicked off campus and sent off to a nearby town where they lived in a rooming house run by some Irish-immigrant relative of the nun who was the college president. 

I remember seeing the parents of one of the girls showing up on campus that morning - they'd driven pell-mell up from New Jersey - looking completely shell-shocked. Their daughter - I became somewhat friendly with her later, as she had been my friend MB's roommate - was the first in her family to go to college. I can still remember the look on her father's map-of-Ireland face. He was a Jersey City firefighter with a brilliant daughter. I remember her mother crying.

All this ended by the next year, when that last class where the majority of students were of the prissy-arsed sugar-spun variety had graduated. This was the late 1960's, and nonsense like this became NFW. 

Over the next year or so, the bullshit rules toppled. We could wear pants to class and off campus without permission. (Seriously, you had to get permission to wear pants off campus. I remember being stopped by a nun once because I was wearing a very cute pair of tweed culottes. She made an insta-judgment that they were not pants.) 

Curfews were extended. (They may have been eliminated, but by then I'd moved off campus.) Parietals - boys in the room - were allowed. 

Seriously, when half the student body was getting on buses to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, it was kind of hard for the nuns to keep it up with the thumbscrews. And there's no way they could find enough student judges to do their absurd dirty work and man their kangaroo honor courts. 

So, back to Rice University.

It's hard to believe that, in this day and age, they could find students willing to snitch, and students willing to judge. Pandemics, it seems, do strange things, and one of the strange things has resulted in the university encouraging students to:

...report coronavirus-related misconduct that makes them feel unsafe. Friends have turned in friends, usually without advance warning, for failing to wear masks and maintain social distancing. Most tips are submitted anonymously online, and they often include photographic evidence or screenshots from Instagram stories. In many cases, the rule-breaking is accidental. When confronted with evidence of an infraction, the majority of students are cooperative and apologetic, court members say.

Hmmm. If many of the incidents are accidental, wouldn't it have made more sense for the snitches to have just, say, used their words rather than their smartphones, and just told their fellow students - especially the ones they were friends with - to knock it off. 

Seems that, while there's quite a bit of support for the snitch-fest:

[Some] students worry that the court has begun to turn the idyllic, oak-shaded campus into one swept by paranoia and punishment. As French philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued, plagues create the ideal conditions for excessive surveillance. To keep tensions from flaring, the university has embarked on a campaign to destigmatize the reporting of violations and has promised that initial offenses won’t be recorded in anyone’s permanent records. [One of the student judges] added that the court has placed messages around campus arguing that reporting others is “adding to the greater good.”

Permanent records? Hmmm. Where have I heard that before? Oh, it was in high school - or was it grammar school - when the nuns were always rage spouting about things going on our permanent records. 

And I love those efforts to "destigmatize" snitching. How about not. 

Yes, we all need to be vigilant about COVID. I wear a mask. I socially distance. I don't eat out. I have a small bubble. 

I don't want to get sick. I don't want anyone I care for to get sick. I don't want a complete stranger to get sick on my account. Maybe I will get sick. Maybe after a quick trip to CVS I'll only wash my hands through one chorus of happy birthday. Maybe I'll be a spreader. 

I hope not, and I'm doing my best to make sure this won't be the case. And I want everyone else in the world to be careful, too.

But I really hate the idea of a university setting up a student spy and judicial network. This just doesn't sit right.

Again, what's wrong with a gentle reminder. Or, if someone's being a shit about things, trying to get their friends to apply peer pressure. Or rolling your eyes, scorning, and muttering about the scofflaws. Or avoiding them. 

The people next door used to put their garbage out in open, brown paper, rat-attracting bags. I left them a note and, when they persisted - and I never seemed to see them in person - I mentioned something to their landlords. I suppose that if they'd really kept it up, I would have filed a complaint with the City of Boston. But it never came to that. I don't believe in ratting out as the first course. 

Most were aware of the [student court] and said it was a necessary measure for policing student behavior. If you’re following the rules, their thinking went, you don’t have anything to worry about.

Nothing to worry about, you say? Ask anyone who lived in a totalitarian society - or any Black American - how that type of thinking works out.