KU grants more rights to students than some other public universities, Daily Kansan reports

Posted by Matt Erickson January 31, 2013 at 4:36 p.m.

KU grants more rights to students than some other public universities, Daily Kansan reports

The University Daily Kansan has an interesting look today at how the rights granted to KU students by the university compare to those of students at other universities in the Midwest.

The newspaper compared KU's Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities to policies at Kansas State University, the University of Missouri, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas. And according to a comparative chart (which didn't make it into the online version), KU appears to grant more rights to its students than any of the others.

Two notable rights KU students have that the others don't are freedom of expression in the classroom ("subject only to the responsibility of the instructor to maintain order") and a protection against receiving an academic punishment for committing a crime off campus.

Some other rights that KU grants that other universities don't: the right to challenge a grade, protection from censorship or unreasonable search and seizure in student housing, and the right to distribute written materials on campus without prior approval. (Edit: Things might be a bit more complicated. Check my comment below.)

That Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities dates to 1970, when the Student Senate wrote it up and the chancellor approved it. Only KU and Oklahoma have such a document devoted to the rights of students, among the universities the Kansan looked at.

You all, of course, have the right to ensure people know what's going on at KU by sending your KU news tips to merickson@ljworld.com.

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question4u 4 months, 2 weeks ago

"Some other rights that KU grants that other universities don't: the right to challenge a grade..."

There doesn't seem to be anything in the Daily Kansan article that says this. It may be that there are some universities somewhere in the world where students don't have the right to appeal a grade, but students at the universities mentioned in this article (K-State, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri) all do.

This can be easily verified through a Google search.

So where are the universities that don't allow grade appeals?

merickson 4 months, 2 weeks ago

question4u: Thanks for pointing this out. The reference to challenging grades was based on that chart that was not posted with the online version of this story. You can see it in the PDF of the print edition here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/123153236/UDK

The chart has the "challenge grades" box checked for KU and Texas, but not for K-State, Mizzou or Oklahoma. And you're right: each of those three universities appears to have a policy in place for challenging or appealing grades, based on Googling. The Kansan's chart notes that OU is the only other university besides KU to have a specific code that lays out students' rights, and that specific document does not have any reference to appealing grades; I'm guessing that's why the Kansan did not check their box. And as for K-State and Mizzou, the note atop the chart says it's based on the schools' "general policy manuals, but separate policy documents for different departments of those universities may also list more rights." So that probably explains why those ones went unchecked.

But anyway, I should have been more clear about mitigating factors like that. So thanks for catching that.

Thanks,

Matt

TheSychophant 4 months, 2 weeks ago

Better hope the current legislature doesn't get wind of this news, or they will invariably pass legislation to lessen student rights.

bearded_gnome 4 months, 2 weeks ago

... and a protection against receiving an academic punishment for committing a crime off campus.

---is this really a good idea? that is, perhaps we don't need a blanket policy that imposes KU sanctions, but I think given some recent cases that sometimes academic repercussions might be better and more useful than standard criminal justice system ones. thus, for some students a KU sanction instead of a criminal record and maybe a little more lenient, and for some others we've seen lately such as Jaeger perhaps a very serious offense and you are perminently penalized with the loss of academic credits you had earned?

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