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Kate Hawkesby: Why aren't we allowed to make adult decisions anymore?

Author
Kate Hawkesby,
Publish Date
Wed, 7 Mar 2018, 8:06AM
Otago University law students are petitioning to get their camp back with a petition.
Otago University law students are petitioning to get their camp back with a petition.

Kate Hawkesby: Why aren't we allowed to make adult decisions anymore?

Author
Kate Hawkesby,
Publish Date
Wed, 7 Mar 2018, 8:06AM

I see the Otago law students are doing what students do best - protesting the cancellation of their law camp with a petition. This is more like it. Being a varsity student, especially at Otago, is about challenging the staus quo, setting fire to couches, drinking your body weight of Speights from a keg, living in squalor, and generally being a menace. Isn’t it? Since time immemorial, students have been rabble rousing, trouble causing, anarchy seeking rebels. It’s what they do.

Students know this going in. When I started at university, I knew toga parties would involve beer and half naked people. That’s when you make an adult decision about whether to attend or not. If beer and half-naked people and all that that inevitably spirals into aren’t your thing, stay at home. As a texter wrote to me yesterday, “I dropped out of University 40 years ago because I was moderately intelligent and middle class. I didn’t feel I belonged.”

READ MORE: Mhairi Mackenzie-Everitt - Taking away our camp is 'a lot to deal with'

That text resonated with me because I had similar thoughts at uni. The parties, drinking games, pub crawl part of it wasn’t really me - it didn’t stop me dabbling in it of course - but it was a great lesson and an eye opener, after the bubble of high school, of what the real world is like. Not everyone is the same as you, not everyone shares your belief system or values, not everyone behaves the same way. That’s actually life.

And that’s a critical role University plays in our society. It shows you all sides of people, it operates outside of the realms of rules and boundaries of school, where everyone is expected to be uniformly the same. University is your first foray into life outside of the playground. You are expected to work stuff out for yourself.  It’s an important lesson to learn."

Where the wowsers do have a point, however, is if students are being pressured or made to do things they don’t want to do. If there is coercion or taking advantage of drunk people, that’s not cool. But beyond that, what have we got? Because if we want to cancel everything that even remotely looks like fun, then what we’re saying is we all need to be sanitised bland versions of each other, just so we can avoid offence. Well that’s not realistic.

Kids do seem better these days at working stuff out. They’re growing up in changing times, the evidence of that is the improved collective social conscience.

In petitioning for the reinstatement of the law camp, the student behind it says they should still be able to have fun without sexual harassment. People should be comfortable and respectful of  individual boundaries, privacy and people’s rights to say no.

>And there’s the key. You have the right to say no. If nude jelly wrestling isn’t your thing, just say no.

 

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