The University of Iowa has instituted a policy that they will evict students from the dorms if they are arrested with a high blood alcohol level. It doesn’t matter if the drinking happened in the dorms, or if the person drinking was doing so legally.

When I was an undergraduate, starting in 1976 people had beer and booze in their dorm rooms, and the dorms had sanctioned events that served alcohol every weekend. You could go to the Iowa Memorial Union and have beers at the Wheel Room. The implicit social contract was this: you show up for class and do the work, and what you did outside class was your business.

Now, under President Sally Mason, the Univeristy has made the private behavior of students an issue relevant to their education. The rationale for this is, on its surface, admirable: it’s a health and safety issue. But it means to me that students at the University — even 35-year-old graduate students — are no longer treated as adults. They are subject to sanctions for things that didn’t occur on campus, and that don’t pertain to their academic performance.

I would never assert that it’s a good idea for people to get pie-eyed drunk and behave in ways that attract the attention of the police. For some this is a symptom of alcoholism, which is a disease. For others it just represents a lack of good judgement. In either case, I think someone who gets arrested with a BAC of .2 has enough problems without worrying about being made homeless by the University.

Beyond the specifics of this policy, I object to the paternalism (or maternalism). There’s a whole panoply of ways the University now regulates the behavior of adult students. This marks a return to the In Loco Parentis philosophy that was in place until the 1960s. It didn’t work then and it’s not going to change behavior now. It establishes consequences for actions above and beyond the sanctions already in place in the legal code. And it means, effectively, that students no longer have private lives.

Time rates the best College President

I noticed former Iowa president Mary Sue Coleman made the list, and it crystalized for me a real dissatisfaction about the University of Iowa, my alma mater and current employer. To wit: Why was the last ‘career’ President of the University of Iowa Sandy Boyd? He was here for 12 years, and even came back for 2 years to act as interim president. Virgil Hancher was at Iowa for 24 years!

If you look back, it seems like anyone of actual talent and ability in the job gets hired away by higher-profile Universities after a few years in the job here. James O Friedman? 5 years here and then to Dartmouth, Hunter Rawlngs 7 years, and then on to Cornell U, Mary Sue Coleman 7 years, then on to University of Michigan, David Skorton 3 years, and then to Cornell.

I guess I should be resigned to this happening. In my field, staying 3 years is certainly respectable before moving on. But I wonder why it is that they can’t retain people for longer than that. It’s not a prestige thing, per se. Iowa’s not Harvard, but it’s not a Honduran diploma mill either. I suspect that the real fault comes down to the Iowa Legislature. A significant minority of the people in the legislature actively hate the University, and regard Iowa City as a hotbed of sin and subversion. When it comes time to fund higher education, the University has continually had to make do with less.

I first attended Iowa in 1976, and it was a completely different place. Tuition was dirt cheap — it’s gone up drastically since then, even adjusting for inflation. There were more tenured faculty teaching undergraduates, and there were more tenure track faculty positions, period. It’s depressing to have stayed around for the intervening 33 years, watching things gradually go more and more down-market.

But when it comes to our current president Sally Mason, I think that we may be stuck with her for the long run. Her signature action in the office was failing to agressively manage the official response to the rape of a student athelete, and then throwing two distinguished college administrators under the bus to save her job. That’s not such a resume builder.