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 innocent till proven guilty

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Francie Posted - 2006 January 26 : 07:00:23
While I strongly suspect that there are staff members who ought to be censured for (at least) some of the events described here, I feel I ought to remind you that "innocent until proven guilty" does apply to staff members as well as to students. For one thing, I am inclined to trust the likes of Judy Seeger and David Levine and to suspect that they possess information they are unable to reveal because of their positions. But more to the point, if you are going to use the phrase "false accusation," you need to back it up with proof.

It's not that I don't think you have a point. I agree that a student's word ought to count for more than it seems to have been taken for, and based on the situations with security, insofar as I understand them, security members do appear to have been way out of line. But if you're going to take the student as innocent until proven guilty, you also need to take the staff member as innocent until proven guilty. And you have made some accusations on this site that you have not backed up with proof.
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Chucksville Posted - 2007 March 06 : 17:43:51
Random Freshman has made a good point when he speaks about the rift between staff, administration and students. There seems to be a communication breakdown occuring on campus and the only way it can be fixed is by dialogue.

As an alumni, I feel the rift between myself and the college getting larger with every passing year. This is a shame because Dr. Weigle told my graduation class (back in 1980) that we were now lifetime members of the College, which should, in effect, give us a greater voice than just about anybody who has ever set foot on St. John's soil.

I would like to see the college circulate some sort of survey to us alumni and ask us specifically what we felt about some of the issues that I have read about in this forum. I'm pretty certain that the feedback would reveal that alumni support the students, and their quest for self-discovery, 100% (whether its turning cartwheels in front of Midis or exploring the motivations of people like DeQuincy or the legendary Lotus eaters of Homer).

What the faculty and staff need to do is back off and reread their Rabelais: Remember his guiding principle of "Do What Thou Wilt?"

St. John's is very much like Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It is an insulated private institution that is in the business of protecting the privacy of its students. Only by experimentation and thoughtful meditation can a young man or woman get to know himself. Leave the heavy-handed methods to public institutions.

On the other hand, a forum like this one needs to respect Intellectual Property that is St. John's. To steal the templates that make up this site is absolutely reprehensible. The webmaster who assisted in this faux site needs to remake it immediately.

As far as the press is concerned, I would definitely ask anybody who is inclined to talk to a reporter to think twice. This is a private, family matter that needs to be resolved through dialogue.
Random Freshman Posted - 2006 February 01 : 18:35:38
How do you prove somebody's an asshole? How do you prove that you were wrongly held and interrogated by a person in a position of authority to you? This is bull****. You're bull****. Whatever problems with drugs exist at St. John's will only be aggrivated by this sort of behaviour - the staff that make the students say what they want to hear, and the complacent sheep that allow such actions to take place. If you're not trying to fix the problem, you're part of it, and the problem here is not kids who snort, but the people who unilaterally decide that it is such a problem to the community that it warrants actions like this which will only serve to expand the scarily present rift between staff & administration and students.
Xmeromotu Posted - 2006 January 31 : 00:21:39
If I had not had a similar experience 20 years ago, I would have found it hard to believe that a St. John's tutor would resort to such Stalinesque tactics to beat "confessions" out of students. This is the sort of behavior one would expect of, well, Stalin, or closer to home (for me) of rural southern sherriffs in the 1950's and '60's. If this is true, I am highly offended, as a lawyer, as a United States citizen, and as an alumnus of the College. I am horrified that history is repeating itself, and will investigate further - first by writing to Ms. Seeger and asking her directly exactly what has recently transpired on the former site of the Liberty Tree.

Clinton Pittman
SF '90
Xmeromotu Posted - 2006 January 31 : 00:13:09
No, Francie, you are completely and 100% wrong. You are in effect asserting that the governing authority that is utilizing its police powers to enforce some regulation may avail itself of the "innocent until proven guilty" tradition. You are mistakenly treating Ms. Seeger as an individual, rather than as a representative of the College's power structure. A prosecutor does not enjoy "innocent until proven guilty" because no one is accusing him of anything. It is only when, for example, a policeman, say, one of the guys who shot Amadou Diallo, is brought up on criminal charges himself that he becomes the individual who is subject to the state's (or institution's) police power and thus is able to avail himself of the "innocent until proven guilty" presumption. The government must always prove itself right, especially when it seeks to take away the freedom of its citizens. Likewise, the College must always prove its case if it seeks to punish a student and take away his or her privileges, such as going to school.

quote:
Originally posted by Francie

While I strongly suspect that there are staff members who ought to be censured for (at least) some of the events described here, I feel I ought to remind you that "innocent until proven guilty" does apply to staff members as well as to students. For one thing, I am inclined to trust the likes of Judy Seeger and David Levine and to suspect that they possess information they are unable to reveal because of their positions. But more to the point, if you are going to use the phrase "false accusation," you need to back it up with proof.

It's not that I don't think you have a point. I agree that a student's word ought to count for more than it seems to have been taken for, and based on the situations with security, insofar as I understand them, security members do appear to have been way out of line. But if you're going to take the student as innocent until proven guilty, you also need to take the staff member as innocent until proven guilty. And you have made some accusations on this site that you have not backed up with proof.



Clinton Pittman
SF '90
gillen Posted - 2006 January 29 : 03:18:17
Y'know, I miss the good old days of Barbara Leonard. She started off the year telling parents that the college has no business enforcing the laws of the State of Maryland and that was pretty much it. You might have to talk to her if your substance use became an issue with regards to your classwork, but otherwise as long as you could get your butt to class and weren't bothering anyone it was all good.

I remember working switchboard deadshift one Reality weekend and one of the security guards came in to chat. (This was back when they were there to keep us safe, not bust us) It was almost 4:00am, everything was quiet. He said most folks had gone to sleep except for a couple kids tripping on the quad, and he was going to check back on them in a bit to make sure they were okay. They were, and everyone had a great evening and I'm sure they're all happy little doctors or lawyers somewhere now.

These days, they'd have been busted, the whole school bothered about it with recriminations and new draconian rules, kids would be tossed out and it would all be a "thing". There's no need for that crap. We aren't the outside world. They're the normals - they're stupid, xenophobic, superstitious, selfish and scared. We came to St. John's to get away from their culture, because we didn't fit into their system. We're the misfit toys, the orphans of America. We're not supposed to be like them, dammit.

There's quite a few Johnnies who drank, snorted, smoked and tripped their asses off and still managed to somehow get Honors at their Senior Oral. Christ, half the works we read were written by folks completely ripped on something or other.

I know. I know. Times change. But you know what? They never seem to change for the better.

Bah.
tumnus Posted - 2006 January 27 : 04:34:00
Judy Seeger reportedly used the same or similar language when confronting all the students called into her office during the investigation. Many students accused of using cocaine have denied ever doing so. One student who was not suspended or expelled said that his repeated denials were met with a threat that the school would come down hard on him if he did not confess. People called into the office included people who were close friends of or dating suspected cocaine users. Cocaine use is prevalent on campus, and considering the penalties at stake, students who have used cocaine have a motive for denying it. Therefore it is reasonable to surmise that some of the students' denials are false.
However, students tend to be very open when they describe how it felt to be investigated. When students talk about their experience in Judy Seeger's office, they say that she made harsh accusations. If Judy Seeger had asked students about their cocaine use without stating that she had evidence, she would not have gotten as many people to confess or to name others. After all, most people will not lightly turn in their friends without pressure.
One can prove that someone has used cocaine, but it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove that someone has falsely been accused of cocaine use, for how do you prove that someone has never used cocaine in his life? The accusation against Judy Seeger is not that the accused students did not use cocaine; some certainly did and others certainly did not. The accusation against her is that she claimed to have eyewitness accounts when she did not.
You raise the question of whether Judy Seeger possesses information that she is unable or unwilling to reveal. I do not know the exact number of students that Judy Seeger accused, but I have heard that it is a large number, perhaps forty to fifty. It seems unlikely that she had a single source or a small number of sources who named all these students; based on the sequence of events, it appears that the basis for accusations were the accounts of other accused students. If an accused student says that he believes or has heard that another student is a cocaine user, one could argue that that is an eyewitness account and Judy Seeger is being truthful when she says that she has eyewitness evidence. However, her manner during the interrogations reportedly suggested a certainty that she did not have. One could therefore make the case that she is guilty not of outright dishonesty but of exaggeration.
If you believe that it is vitally important to aggressively deal with the cocaine problem, then you could argue that her ends justified the means used. She has nonetheless paid a price for her actions. Whether she acted honestly or not, she is no longer as highly esteemed or trusted by the students as she was before the investigation.

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