Adults or Children – Make Up Your Minds

While attending Southern there are several things that the university has tried to convince us into believing. Of these misconceptions the biggest is the fact that the university tries to sell us the point that we are “adults”, but every time we try to handle our business as adults the staff feels that they need to send a letter home to our parents.
There have been countless times that I have witnessed my fellow students trying to handle their business in the police station, in the administration building and in the time-consuming registrar’s office lines only to have the personnel treat them as children.
The only way that anything gets done is if your parents are here, and then everybody can help, everybody knows the right person to talk to, and what forms to fill out. It is a shame that even though we are of age; the age to vote, pay taxes, and even fight for our country in distant lands, we are still not old enough to handle our business according to the university.
They have taken away visitation even though we pay our own rent. They have taken away our ability to move about the campus freely with the traffic “cops” writing tickets, and telling us “you don’t have a sticker to go in the back.” They have taken most of the freedoms that other students get at other universities.
But wait, I thought that we are adults, the university has no problem taking our money like we are adults. Even though we don’t have the same things that every other student in the nation has, we write our checks, grit our teeth, and hope that somehow Southern will wake up and realize that this is an institute for higher learning; meaning that there are no children here.
We pay as adults, it is time that they treat us as adults. The students have worked hard to get here and there is only so much that they will take, we are adults; treat us as such.