Letter: University should kick flawed OSD off campus

In his essay "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," former English Department chair Stanley Fish writes that academic administrators are "so weak that they provide no protection against the pressures exerted by higher level administrators or so tyrannical that there is no protection against the pressures they exert."

One cannot help but wonder whether Fish would have held this same sentiment had he not encountered the University's Office of Student Development.

I write this as an OSD survivor.

Last year, an OSD dean e-mailed to inform me I had "been (allegedly) involved" in a certain offense. OSD's decision to parenthesize the word "allegedly" is wholly typical of its modus operandi.

OSD deans make certain, expected nods to due process, but are fully aware any rights possessed by their intended victim are ultimately perfunctory.

I acknowledge that even if such an office were to perform flawlessly, widespread complaint of its performance might be the norm; the deans of OSD are arbiters of a huge amount of power, and most any employment of this power is likely to infringe on what some group sees as its interests.

However, simply because we as a student body may be predisposed to complain is not sufficient rationale to assume such complaints are without merit.

And when complaints from such a varied group are so similar-an unwillingness or inability on OSD's part to respond to students' arguments against OSD decisions, an intentional vagueness which leaves students at the mercy of however OSD chooses to interpret a given policy or rule, levity towards notions of dealing with students consistently-it seems clear that something is wrong at the systematic level with OSD's methods.