In the course of my experience with student affairs at Iowa State University, there has been an alarming return to the parental attitudes of in loco parentis, especially within organizational life.

Personnel within both the Dean of Students Office and — I dare say — the Office for Business and Finance, are apparently unfamiliar with so-called student rights tenets put forth in the 1969 and 1991 Interassociational Task Force Joint Statement on Student Rights and Freedoms.

While the outwardly communicated missions of various offices related to organizational life are to foster growth, communication and the valuable relationships between members of the university community, those tenets endorsed by the American Association of University Professors as well as the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators as well as other professional organizations, are largely ignored and often adversarially challenged by administrators close to organizational life at ISU.

The Student Organization Resource Manual is revised largely in secret while its mission is interdispersed with phrases such as “protect the image of the university.”

A Student Rights Task Force was abandoned by the new Dean of Students though the GSB was promised last year that its existence would help provide recommendations for the revision of an antiquated conduct code.

Last week, I was told, in a public forum, that the university would consider denying student organizations their constitutional rights to freedom of expression and association, again, if the image of the university were threatened — this time because of potentially embarrassing coverage of the crowd-pleaser Veishea.

The Council on Student Affairs was seemingly abandoned in favor of what Assistant to the Vice President Rebecca Miller once told me was “inspired by the peasant forums of middle eastern emirs.”

These forums, she told me, would collect input from all students and eventually make obsolete the committee system.

In the world of TQM, I was told, the students would have a diminishing role.

The reason: “Do the engineers of a Nissan ask the driver how to design every detail of the engine? No, maybe cupholders and the stereo, but the ‘experts’ run the factory.”

Well, indeed, TQM has enforced the tenets of in loco parentis in that regard. I have seen this increasingly alarming trend toward alienating students at Iowa State University.

Most recently, my challenges of the violation of Chapter 266.20 of the Iowa Code within the Campus Organization Auditor Office and my insistence that the university adhere to public records laws, as well as to the before mentioned, outwardly communicated missions of “growth” and “positive experience,” have been met with hostility within the Office for Business and Finance.

The increasingly dichotomous relationship between students and administrators is not as blurry as it once was.

Students are beginning to realize that there is often a status quo agenda related to administrators’ claims of “working relationships.”

This is especially true of many “bad faith” agreements between administrators and students. If university administrators are unfavorable to such agreements, they are usually lost in the wind.

When students recognize that some of these agreements were based on lies, administrators demand adherence based on good faith.

I assert that there is no longer any good faith within the university administration at Iowa State University, if there ever was.

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David Cmelik is a senior in English literature at Iowa State University.