Maybe Robert Champion Jr. should have been home, studying

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December 04, 2011

The hazing death of band member Robert Champion Jr. at Florida A&M University has opened a rumor mill at the university, with its president James Ammons in enough deep water to make people wonder if he could lose his job even after the reprimand recently by the FAMU Board of Trustees.

FAMU will be in a bad place if it loses a surefooted president who seems to care what goes on around campus. A lot of decisions have been forced upon him by budgetary cuts that have left him without two dimes to rub together. The university has somehow survived this fiscal nightmare only to be confronted this semester with a Scylla for its Charybdis.

Hazing has been going on in the marching band for many years, and I can recall one instance where it was reported that former band members attacked members of the marching band and threatened them. A gun may have been involved.

Once, the band members marched up to the school newspaper and tossed newspapers from the windows. I don’t remember whether these band members were disciplined, or whether director at the time, the late Dr. William Foster, deigned to comment to the press.

As a journalism faculty member myself for 30 years at FAMU, it is my most humble opinion that failure to comment to the press usually puts the university in a bad light. Hiring a private “crisis management” company even gives a worse impression to the taxpaying public.

Students who are out of control need to be disciplined. Of course, students who haze or engage in harmful or violent actions against others should be arrested and prosecuted.

Let’s look at some of the rules that ought to be in place. These rules might be called “tough love” rules.

Surely, rule number one is that students who are not in school should not be marching in the band. If money is being spent on students who are not in school, then it should be stopped immediately, simply as a matter of legally spending tax money.

The second rule should read that students who fail to make a cumulative grade point average of 2.0 for two semesters should be suspended from school for either the next fall or spring semester, not just the summer term, and that should include athletes as well as band members and members of student government. If the university decides to keep its “one term” suspension rule, the student needs to be seen by a counselor.

In either case, a young man or woman should not be allowed to march until a grade point average is brought up to a respectable level. It seems to me that a student who wants to engage in demanding activities should be required to maintain at least a 2.25 GPA.

A student placed under academic suspension by the university should be placed into a separate category. He or she should only be allowed to focus on the basic courses needed to survive - the English, the history, the math courses. If a student isn’t able to pass these courses, he or she should be advised by a caring adviser to go back and take them and raise the grades to 2.25, a very low C.

FAMU’s liberal forgiveness policy which replaces the old grade with the new grade gives a grand opportunity. This rational policy is actually similar to that of many schools, including FSU.

Students recovering from “suspension” when the GPA falls below 2.0, need to know that consequences follow actions. Students, even with a 2.0, are on the cusp of failure. When the university rules allow them to undertake other time-consuming activities like band, we are entitled to ask how that decision affects the promise of “excellence with caring.”

And giving that extra guidance might be, in larger respects, a way of addressing both the university’s retention problem and poor graduation rate.

There are a lot of ways of caring. The application of the law is one of them. Tough love is one of them.

Perhaps Robert Champion shouldn’t have been on that bus to Orlando.

Maybe he should have been home, studying.