A "student bill of rights"?

I think it should be my right not to have to hear state lawmakers invoke the term "bill of rights" in any legislation without my direct approval.

One of my professors from last year, Greg Downey, is blogging about a "student bill of rights" that has been proposed in the state legislature by Rep. Marlin Schneider, D-Wisconsin Rapids.

Prompted by a few bad experiences Schneider had with the University system, the bill attempts to regulate weights for text books and prevent professors from assigning texts the professor has written without approval from the student government.

It's not like a professor might actually know, write and publish information about the subject she's teaching.

From the La Crosse Tribune Article:

Specifically, the bill would:

- Require an instructor to approve or deny a request to add a course within five days of the request.

— Require the suspension of all parking rules for the week preceding and following each semester.

— Require grades to be submitted no later than 10 days after the final examination for the course.

— Prohibit an instructor from requiring students to purchase or use a textbook the instructor has authored unless student government approves.

— Require the chancellor to revoke tenure of a faculty member or deduct six months' pay for an untenured instructor whose academic advising causes a student to be enrolled at least one semester more than he or she otherwise would have been enrolled.

— Prohibit an instructor from requiring students to complete a course evaluation until after the final examination is given.

— Requires by 2012 that audio or video recordings of all lectures and course sections be made available for downloading on the Internet.

— Require an instructor who adopts the policy of reducing the grades of a student due to illness resulting in absenteeism to state that policy in writing, and permit a student to appeal any decision based on that policy to the appropriate academic dean.

— Require an instructor to excuse the absence of a student whose family member, fiance, or fiancee dies or becomes extremely ill, and to allow a student to take any examination missed because of a funeral of a family member, fiance or fiancee.

— Require an instructor to meet with a parent or guardian who wants to discuss academic performance within a week, as long as the student approves in writing.

— Limit the work day of a medical intern to 16 hours.

— Prohibit the Board of Regents from entering into a contract that grants naming rights to a university arena, playing field or stadium.

— Direct the state Department of Public Instruction, the UW Board of Regents and the Technical College Board to adopt maximum weight standards for textbooks.

A "bill of rights" may sound good, but like the "taxpayer's bill of rights", this bill may end up putting harmful restraints on those whose job it is to create these policies in the first place. It just may be that, since it is their job, they might know a little more about the details of the administration process than a state representative.

Oh, and you'd think that in the creation of a "student bill of rights", they might ask for some input from students. As it stands, the bill is much more a "student's parents' bill of ways to intrude on the administrative process of the university system".

I doubt too many students feel that it should be their right to "Require the chancellor to revoke tenure of a faculty member or deduct six months' pay for an untenured instructor whose academic advising causes a student to be enrolled at least one semester more than he or she otherwise would have been enrolled." In fact, a good number of students would consider that to be some pretty good advising.

Professor Downey has some thoughtful analysis of the bill's extraneous nature:

Some of these wildly unrelated proposals might sound like "common sense" at first blush. But the idea that the state assembly needs to micromanage such rules and regulations for the whole university system (including the flagship research school UW-Madison, consistently ranked in the top tier of public universities across the nation) is something of an insult.

Unlike, say, regulation over privately-owned, non-democratic, secretive, individually-competing capitalist business firms, the state university system is a coordinated, cooperating, open to public scrutiny, and democratically-operating institution. Faculty serve both within departments and within the university as a whole to make policy and evaluate that policy. Paid administrators, lawyers, and human resources specialists balance those faculty decisions with professional, legal, and bureaucratic expertise.

If there is anything that legislators Schneider and Kreibich -- or any of their constituents -- would like to object to with regard to the way the university works, they already have a well-functioning mechanism to make those recommendations or air those issues.

Anyone interested in "the relations between information/communication technology, global political-economy, and the lived world of human labor" would benefit from visiting Professor Downey's blog, Uncovering Information Labor.