When Ohio State accepts a student into its incoming freshman class, it expects the student to hold himself to the university’s standards, and the student agrees to live up to the university’s expectations. Students also agree to an honor code, which is meant to foster education and intellectualism.
OSU’s motto is, “Disciplina in civitatem,” or “Education for Citizenship.” The motto each of our educations carries is an education to prepare us to be citizens of this country and of the world. It is meant to be an education that creates students in the same manner my fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, aims to create men. The fraternity adopted the words of John Walter Wayland’s, “The True Gentleman,” which say our education is meant to create a true citizen.
A true citizen, said Wayland, is someone “whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety,” and whose education “is equal to all emergencies.” A citizen that does not “flatter wealth, cringe before power or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company,” a student “with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.”
But this honor code is not reciprocal. We wait up to two months to see our adviser. If we need to make a change to our schedules, we are not trusted to do so on our own. We are expected to act as adults yet accept the treatment of children. If the university will sanction us for our failures, it must allow us any avenue we believe will bring us successes.
The new construction is someday going to look very nice, yet they too are a violation of the university’s responsibility to the student. At a time when students’ budgets are tightening rather than building, the university should be expanding student services. Rather than building, the university should set its funds toward the expansion of advising services, or set students free to be their own advisers.
When tuition is paid, the university has no care whether that student earns an A. That is the student’s responsibility. If a student fails, it does not reflect on those who do not, but if the university fails the student, what is the penalty? There simply is none.
In the same manner, when a nation fails its citizens, its citizens will still fly its flag and hold faith in its ideals, the student will still enroll with faith in OSU’s ideals.
The homepage of osu.edu contains a picture of President E. Gordon Gee, with a quote from his speech to the faculty, “a revolution is under way at Ohio State.” There are new buildings, there is national recognition for this or that, but this revolution seems to miss out on we the students.
It has come time for we the students to come before the university. This would require drastic changes to the way in which this university operates, and to that I say O-H.