Respect the rights of students
By Huang Haiying (Shanghai Star)
Updated: 2004-09-06 08:35

Recently, the Ministry of Education announced that all university students in China were forbidden from renting houses off-campus. Officials explained that the purpose of issuing the ban was to better ensure the safety of students.

It sounds very reasonable, doesn't it? University students are considered to be the future of the nation. Surely, they must be well protected.

Hold on a second, please.

Under the current accommodation system in most Chinese universities, a student is usually allocated to a dormitory without having the chance to choose their room or roommates. Very often, there is also a rule that students must go to bed before a fixed time (around 11:00pm), after which all the lights will be turned off by the school.

Moreover, in order to ensure the tidiness of the dormitories, special administrators are sent to inspect each dormitory every week. If a dormitory fails to meet the standards for cleanliness set by the school, all the students in the dormitory face punishment. Put simply: students residing on campus are treated like children in China.

But there is something wrong. Despite their lack of life experience, there is an undeniable fact that university students are adults. In legal sense, an adult means a person with the full capacity for civil conduct and the right to independently engage in civil activities.

What is more, in the accommodation relationship, the university and the student are in the positions of lessor and lessee. To put it more accurately, the university is the service provider, while the student is the consumer. As we all know, consumers must have the right to freely make choices.

As consumers, students should have the right to choose their own service provider for their accommodation. In any case, there is no justification for force consumers to accept unwanted services.

Students who choose to live off campus may have different reasons for doing so. According to one survey, 40 per cent of the students polled said they lived off-campus in order to co-habit with their girlfriends or boyfriends. Some 30 per cent of students said they rented apartments outside the university because they wanted to avoid the strict rules in the dormitory. And 22 per cent said they just wanted a quieter environment.

Due to the cohabitation motive, the ban does have some supporters. However, to live or not to live with a girlfriend/boyfriend is a matter of personal choice for adults. I am not saying that such a choice should be encouraged. Of course there are consequences. Nevertheless, merely prohibiting people from living off the campus is not the solution.

As for so called "security issues", I believe these have more to do with the security situation in the whole of society.

Furthermore, even if students choose to live on campus, they should have the right to choose their own rooms and roommates. As consumers, they shouldn't have to obey the schools' allocation decisions unconditionally.

Perhaps some may claim that students could be spoiled by having the right to choose. But why deny them their rights? Frankly speaking, universities in this country have too much control over students. Over the last few decades, students have been taught to obey all school rules without any challenge. When I was in university, I was allocated to a dormitory which I had to share with nine other girls. I didn't have the chance to select my room. Neither was I given the right to choose my roommates. Instead, I was taught that it was a wonderful opportunity to learn how to communicate with people from different backgrounds. During my four-year stay, I was never formally informed that I had some rights with respect to the accommodation.

Of course, despite strong opposition, the authorities can still enforce the ban. As a matter of fact, Guangdong Province has already issued a notice saying that any university student who refuses to move back to campus could face expulsion from the university. But I'm wondering how far the policy can go when the rights of students are not respected at all.

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