Opinion > October 18, 2007

By Ryan Durham | Sports editor

Posted throughout campus residence halls this week have been little red flyers informing students that inspections are coming and that students should make sure their rooms are in order. These flyers seemed to be a harbinger out of some Orwellian nightmare where Big Brother is always watching. No longer are students allowed to have their own personal space in which they have some expectation of privacy.

Yes, university officials will likely make the argument that this is clearly stated in the Guide to Community Living and make nuances that this is for the betterment and safety of the university as a whole.

But we as students should not just roll over and allow this happen to our little campus.

I will simply point out the slippery slope that we are quickly beginning to slide down.

First, we have allowed the university to drive parties off-campus in order for the university to have the air that it is looking out for the students’ best interests. Sure, this may seem like a minor issue.

Students will drink, and most are willing to make the commute off-campus to do so, but this does not mean that this is the safest activity to take up considering the possible risks it can create.

Next, the university changed visitation policies, effectively trying to regulate the morality of students on campus and try to prevent college students from doing what they do at schools all over the nation.

With the exception of a few students at this university, everyone here is an adult and thus responsible for their own actions.

Whether this means they never have anyone over or have friends stay over frequently, it is the student’s responsibility to find a happy living standard.

This is especially pertinent to students who live in single rooms. They have no roommate to complain about late hours or non-traditional sleeping arrangements.

Yes, the university has a valid point in trying to prevent unauthorized cohabitation and the like, but this is not something that students should be penalized for on the first offense or even the third offense.

Our residence hall staffs are not ignorant and know the difference between cohabitation and a friend or acquaintance staying over the night. A problem with cohabitation can be easily solved.

The university’s third strike has come in the form of these mid-semester room “inspections.”

Yes, they have posted notices, and only an idiot would be stupid enough to knowingly have contraband items in their rooms during this week.

The fact that they have posted notices and informed students of their intent is not the issue at hand.

The issue is the university’s ever-tightening grip on the personal lives of students and what they choose to do in their own personal space.

Yes, we are renters of our on-campus space and thus have only limited rights associated with our rented space, but some students also do not have an option of whether or not they live on campus.

As a senior, I clearly had a choice of whether to live on or off campus, but freshmen and sophomores no longer have that opportunity available to them.

Upperclassmen running away to off-campus housing is not the answer to this problem.

In order to answer the current predicament that the university is putting its students in, we must determine what we are willing to live and abide with within reason.

Do we want to slowly revert back to the days of curfews and dorms separated by genders or do we want to live on a progressive campus in which the administration works with students to determine what are suitable rules and living conditions?

I for one feel that the current measures that the university is undertaking are grossly out of order and have begun to border on an invasion of my reasonable expectation of privacy.

I do not want to feel like a criminal every time I try and have a drink with friends on campus or have a friend spend the night in my room during the week.

As an adult, I feel that these are all choices I should be able to make without interference from our morality minders.

I am not calling for widespread anarchy among the student body to be favorable in the university’s sight, but that we be able to have an expectation of privacy in which we can live our own lives.If we as students continue to allow the university to overstep its bounds and continually choose what activities are right and wrong, we will soon lose what I have come to know as Wake Forest.

We will have to look over our shoulder to ensure that university officials are not watching as we make decisions about our personal lives.

Yes, safety is important to the university, but the current measures being used are not effective nor relavant to the situation at hand.

Ryan Durham is a senior economics major from Gallatin, Tenn.