Students Evicted From Dorms for Poor Grades
NEW YORK _ State University of New York-Old Westbury has removed 87 residential students from their dormitories for having grade point averages below 2.0.
The policy has been blasted by faculty and students, but an administrator said Friday that the rule _ which he described as an effort to raise academic standards _ would continue.
“Our goal is to have students with us who are serious about their studies,” said Michael Kinane, assistant to the president.
The students were removed from their dorm rooms last month. The Faculty Senate then unanimously passed three resolutions seeking to have the policy suspended, largely because that group feels it is inconsistent with best practices and disproportionately impacts freshmen, said Faculty Senate chair Maureen Dolan, a mathematics and computer science professor.
“I have not heard yet a single faculty member support this policy,” she said.
Twenty-three of the evicted students did not register for the spring term, Kinane said.
Sandy Pierre, 20, who said she is a junior, said she received a letter during winter break that she would have to leave her dorm because her grade point average was 1.9.
“It came as a shock to me,” said Pierre, who wants to go into public relations and said she is on the school’s dance team. “I was thinking of withdrawing from this semester, which I don’t want to do.”
Pierre said her mother now drives her to and from campus each day, but the travel is taking a toll. “I am enrolled, but it’s really hard for me to actually have to commute,” Pierre said.
About 1,000 of the school’s 3,500 students live in dorms.
The policy has been in effect since at least 1994, Kinane said, but had not previously been enforced. University president Calvin O. Butts III had sought to do so two years ago, Kinane said, but didn’t feel the school had communicated it well enough to students.
As the fall semester began, students received letters and each dorm had a meeting about the policy, Kinane said.
The overall grade point average for Old Westbury students is 2.83, down from 2.84 in fall 2006, Kinane said, while the freshman class score from fall 2007 was 2.87, up from 2.80 for the previous year’s class. It is too soon to tell how the policy impacts grades, he said.
Professor Runi Mukherji, chair of the school’s psychology department, said the policy is “draconian” and punishes vulnerable students.
“I support the idea that we should have high standards and high expectations for our students,” she said. “This is not the way we should achieve it.”
Freshmen, who have taken few classes and may have trouble adjusting to college life, are the most at risk, she said.
Mukherji said some students removed from the dorms were unable to commute and did not have anywhere to go. Kinane said the college did not offer assistance for affected students to find alternative housing.
Esther Goodcuff, an associate vice president at Adelphi University, which has no policy linking grades to residential life, said in a statement: “Isolating students from campus may exacerbate the student’s poor academic performance, rather than help them.”
On Old Westbury’s campus, students voiced mixed feelings about the policy.
“There’s some people that got affected by it. They were partying,” said Faith Rivera, 26, a senior. “But then there were people who were trying their hardest.”
But other students, including Joseph Walker, 19, a sophomore, said the policy is fair. “A 2.0 is not really that hard,” he said.
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