No matter how much they would like to, the deans at Fundy U can’t get away with using corporal punishment on the students. In lieu of lashings, however, the administration has devised a litany of fiendishly clever punishments suitable to fit any crime real or imagined.
Demerits
Demerits can be thought of as the currency of sin at Fundy U. Want to skip your room job? Listen to non-approved music? Miss a class?  You’ll pay for each offence out of your store of demerits. Take care, however, hit 150 and you’ll be on a plane back home to mom and dad faster than you can say “arbitrary rule system.”  Demerits are also an easy way for the admin to gauge your spiritual health. They’ll even send a helpful letter to your parents letting them know how you did the semester before.
Socialing
Being “socialed” is a punishment reserved for those who have committed a crime of passion such as talking to a girl in the Library, shaking a boy’s hand, or using the wrong elevator.  While enduring this punishment, you will not be able to speak to, write to, sit next to, or breath the same air as a member of the opposite sex. If you should be so unfortunate to be socialed, you’ll soon learn who your real friends are — they’re the ones who will leave their own significant others to come keep you company at dinner so you don’t have to eat alone.
Campusing
There is an odd sort of cognitive dissonance to this particular punishment. Having spent thousands of dollars in advertising to convince students that their campus is the happiest place on earth, the administration then decides that the worst punishment they can imagine short of expulsion is to confine students to that selfsame little slice of heaven. In addition to not being able to leave, no campused student may talk to or room with any other campused student. This gives the powers-that-be the ability break up groups of friends that they believe are a bad element.
Shadowing
When a Fundy U student has sinned unto death and is having their fate decided by the deans office they spent their time as the shadow of a floor leader.  This means that they will follow everywhere and have no communication with anybody except for the deans office and their current guardian. Being shadowed at Fundy U is the kiss of death. In a very real sense the shadowed student is dead to his classmates.  They cannot speak to him, look at him, or even acknowledge his presence.  Even attempting to say “goodbye” can result in the expulsion of any student who commits this defiant act.
Call Slips
One of the most terrifying moments at Fundy U is the moment after opening your mailbox when you spot that green square of paper that requests your presence in the Dean’s office. This almost never ends well because the deans are masters of…
Interrogations
If you’ve ever been repeatedly pulled out of bed after midnight and given hours of interrogation in the freezing cold by a power hungry Fundy U Residence Manager in an attempt to make you confess, please know that you are not alone. The tactics used in attempt to get students to make a confession or turn in their friends would make any intelligence service proud. Fundy U deans will divide and conquer, attempt to use guilt and coercion, promise to cut deals, and (if all else fails) outright lie in order to extract the answers they want from a student. You don’t get a judge and jury. You certainly don’t get a last cigarette.
Somehow this regiment of shame and terror in enforcing the ever-changing and often unwritten body of rules never makes it into the glossy brochures or the sales pitches from traveling singing groups. At Fundy U you are always guilty until proven innocent and suspected of evil just by virtue being alive. caveat emptor.
Oy. This is too accurate. . . . They do it to faculty too. Same thing.
“guilty until proven inncocent”
Exactly right.
It’s not about any mitigating circumstances, it’s all about the guilty verdict. Had a friend that went through that, and even though he was inncocent, there was TREMENDOUS pressure by the Dean of Men to confess, and every time that he would deny involvement, the DOM would tell him that he was lying. The sheer amount of psychological manipulation/abuse is frightening.
I’ve always said that it’s never good if the Dean of Men/Women know you on a first name basis. 🙂
During one of my trips to the dean of men’s office I asked to be able to call my pastor, and was promptly told that my request betrayed my rebellious heart.
Yup – I graduated from Fundy U and had the distinct (dis)pleasure of enjoying almost every one of the punishments of the arbitrary rule system. Everything but the grand daddy – expulsion (thus shadowing). Fun stuff.
My 1st day at Jonestown I was told my hair was too long so I went the next day and got a haircut. Needless to say I was busted walking into FMA a few days later and given a slip of paper requiring my presence in the DOM’s office. Some whack job there tells me my hair in the back does not appear to be tapered to FU standards. I didn’t have much money then but I had to go pay for another haircut.
Over the 4 years there I am proud to say I was campused, socialled, put on spiritual probation, appeared before the discipline committee regularly, and interrogated like it was my part time job. They couldn’t pin a whole lot on me and my friends but they knew there was something wrong.
This is one of your best posts yet. The campusing section is spot-on.
I was vice president of my society one year and therefore had the dubious honor of sitting in on meetings of the discipline committee. Don’t know if any other fundy colleges do it the way Bob Jones does (or did when I was there), but the meatgrinder bureaucracy involved was a postmodern miracle. The students file in, state their ID number, a computer presents the authority figure with a code representing the student’s offense, and the offender has roughly ten seconds to explain themselves. I think having society presidents and VPs sit in on the DC was supposed to have some kind of mitigating influence, like a paraclete for the accused, but in my experience we sat there and held a binder. It was incredibly uncomfortable.
The most surreal moment of my time shouldering this burden came when I got a call from the Dean of Students’ office. They had a meeting with a potential expel-ee and needed a representative of the student body present. That was the longest meeting of my life, and I was on the sidelines.
I didn’t run for society office my final year.
My best dean’s story was we would go eat off campus every Sunday afternoon, and usually make an extracurricular stop or 2. Apparently assistant Dean of Mean saw me pulling out of a wal-mart (campus book store had stopped cause my brother wanted a copy of the paper and they had stopped selling it on campus cause News Journal had reported on their tax fraud situation.) Anyway get the call to come to the Deans office. BTW when you work off campus you can almost always scan out to work & skip at least the first meeting request). They love it when you do that. Anyway finally get up to the Dean’s office and he tells me “someone” saw & reported you shopping in wal mart on Sunday. After a few moments of confusion about who would say that when I pulled up to a news paper stand and pulled off, never actually exiting my vehicle, I replied whoever said that is pretty confused, and just stuck w/ the fact I was never in any wal mart on Sunday. We went around about that for like half an hour before he finally admitted it was him who saw me pulling OUT of wal mart not in walmart, and tried to portray it as absolute proof. Told him I was changing a flat, thanks for stopping to help. You could SEE the glee at having caught a “big one” leave him. I can’t imagine what kind of a life it is that you get that kind of fulfillment from “catching” a college student at a wal-mart. I don’t think I ever got off their *s* list after that though. Was just fun to out duel him/them. He thought he had both a off campus violation & a lying one. Fail & fail! 🙂
I always wondered why the dean of men was married but the dean of women was unmarried (and when I was there, about 3x older than the students).
@JMP re DC. By my junior year I had quit caring about DC. Had figured out if it was important you had to go to the Dean’s office not DC. Would just go hand them the current list of infractions (usually attendance cards I refused to turn in — more on that later), and would just confess non-chalantly to “sure of course I did it”, or better if it was a dean or someone that thought you should feel guilty, would give them “oh yeah, that was kind of fun, totally guilty”. They didn’t really appreciate that either. Humor isn’t part of the DC process. Or at least they try for it not to be.
As far as attendance cards, by my senior year PCC had to split campus church into 2 services and used attendance cards to verify you went to one or the other. They would color code the 8AM service to keep the DHA filled for TV audience purposes. I don’t know if anyone else thought of it, but I would just hoard my attendance card from other events (they all have the same ID # (72022) on the bar code & look the same to the ushers), so I’d end up in DC for the events I had hoarded my card for about half the time, and have to ‘confess’ to losing the card & not turning one in. Turns out you get less demerits that way than filling out a peice of paper that says you lost your card, cause they demerit all those poeple, and often missed you if you turned nothing in. The cat & mouse games I played at least entertained me & my friends. I don’t think the deans appreciated it much.
Good times.
My story goes like this. I never got in trouble until my senior year. I had under 30 demerits every semester, usually under 10. I’m a rule-follower (in public) by nature and I was APL one year, and PL two others.
Then my senior year a few months before graduation I made the fatal mistake of calling a floor leader out on his enforcement of an antiquated rule that, while still on the books, was not being enforced by anybody else on campus. He decided that I was a threat to his authority and needed to be put in my place so he put pressure on my young freshman roommates to confess their crimes (contraband cell phones, video games, music that didn’t check) to him and using that as leverage got them to implicate me as being a baddie as well.
Then the interrogations started. I was twice pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, marched down the the RMs office and made to sit in a wobbly chair while being questioned at length about what I knew about my roommates and what I rules I personally had broken. It was like something out of a bad cop movie. I just smiled and told them that I had no idea what they were talking about. It was a fishing expedition and I had been there long enough to know that if they had something I would have been written up and punished not questioned.
From that point until the end of the year I had nightmares almost every night that I was being expelled before I could graduate. I would wake up in a cold sweat thinking that they were coming to pull me out of bed again this time to tell me to pack my bags. Four years of struggling to be a model student wasted. Thousands of dollars down the drain. Countless hours of pain and anxiety for nothing. Just because a floor leader wanted to prove that I couldn’t defy him.
I never received a demerit for that incident. I graduated with honors a few months later.
Fundy U taught me a lot of things but the biggest lesson I learned was that power corrupts. I spent 4 years living inside a real-life version of the Stanford prison experiment. I’m just glad that the nightmares don’t come as often any more. (Although after writing this series, I expect I’m due for one).
One time I got 10 DM for forgetting to fill out the vesper attendance report even though I had a witness that I went to vespers. That’s what you get for sending out the vespers report before the actual vespers.
Different story. I was basically stuck at BJU for 2 summers because my home was in Europe. So I made good friends (also mostly from europe,; MK) with other students that were stuck working at BJU during the summer. The only thing that we were allowed to do after 5 is go eat at the dining common and then either go to the social parlor behind the girls dorm or go back to the dorm. The social parlor closed at 9 so you still had to be in your dorm with nothing to do for a couple of hours.
Anyway we had a stack of bootlegged movies that half of the hall would distribute with each other and watch. Person A was one of those people and he watched a G rated movie with Person B (who was not part of our ring). Person B felt guilty afterwards and turned himself in and said that Person A did it too. That should’ve been the end of that but instead person A rattled off half of the hall. So one night we were all interrogated one by one. That was a very fun night! They didn’t kick us out and couldn’t give us any demerits (because there was no such system for summer workers) but they did put that on our permanent record. Luckily that was my last summer at BJU since I became a town student that year.
We ruined for everybody else that works there now during the summer as a student. There are now demerits for summer workers and room checks and hall leaders which we did not have during my 2 summers. Sorry folks
And yes I was guilty of watching movies so I am not bitter or upset at them for questioning or punishing me.
The punishments were different at my version of Fundy U, but still weird. For example, I had to work right after class, and received demerits for not “getting the bathroom cleaned by 5:00 p.m.” those days. I tried to reason with the R.A., and offered to clean the bathroom after work, as soon as I returned home. However, the R.A. (who, btw, had NEVER worked a normal job a day in her life), informed me that I should tell my boss I needed to leave work early to come back and clean the bathroom.
Therefore, after receiving five demerits, I was responsible for “white glove” cleaning every bathroom in the dorm. Yeah, that was the stupid punishment they gave me. I think I might have gotten a dumb fine too.
Another time, I was interrogated by the R.A. at night because my roommate was sleeping with a boyfriend off campus. Did I know she was? Sure. Was I going to rat her out? No, that’s between her and God. After that interrogation, I got called to the dean’s office. The first question out of the Dean of Women’s mouth was “Is your roommate truly saved?” I was quite surprised at the question. I finally said, “That’s something I would never be able to say because only God knows.” And the Dean persisted with “Well, what’s YOUR opinion?” Ahhh. . the good old days!
@Darrell – in the story that you link to in your post above, it mentions a Timothy Dow being kicked out – is that one of your relations?
My cousin. I was also interviewed and am quoted in the story. Note that not all the fact the reporter cites are entirely accurate. I was somewhat disappointed with the story overall.
Betrayals, interrogations, sleep deprivation, spying: all very useful job skills. Did the KGB ever come recruiting?
“From that point until the end of the year I had nightmares almost every night that I was being expelled before I could graduate.”
Oh my word I know what you mean. I didn’t have any incidents, but my last year of grad school there was a possible expel now ask questions later that if the person had turned me in would have been my last breath on that campus. It, obviously, didn’t happen and I graduated. So I escaped unscathed never having to endure any of this punishment.
However, I do recall two incidents that prove the prove the point, “guilty till proven innocent.” The first was a friend who was called into the dean of men for or attempted to view porn on his machine. Of course they brought out the “crystal clear” evidence of logs showing that his machine was trying to reach certain dirty sites. My friend swore that he had no idea and that it wasn’t him trying to access those sites. He did, however, remember that he had a virus and said perhaps this was one of those dialer viruses (yes they did exist and would dial out to thousands of porn sites in the background and occasionally pop up an add). Of course they didn’t believe him. At BJU, apparently, you could appeal and appeal he did. During that time IT finally gave it a second look and realized that the logs showed that he tried to access over 1000 porn sites in less than a second. Which even the best of em can’t go that fast. I do believe he got demerits for some odd reason.
A second involved and art student roommate of mine. He was on a website that had art and along came a photo or perhaps a painting, I don’t remember, of a naked women. He immediately closed the tab…leaving his total time on the page with that picture less than 5 seconds. When the Dean of Men called him in they had “crystal clear” proof that he had been on that page for 30 seconds…enough time for the dirty work to happen so they thought. My roommate protested, but they would have none of it. I thought it was absurd and told him to fight. After all he is an art student. Some of the text books he owns have pictures like that. He shouldn’t be punished for pursuing his interest relating to his major. It came down to the final appeal. Unless he could prove otherwise they assumed that he was guilty of looking at art or as they called it porn. That is when IT looked at the logs and realized that he was only on the site for 3 seconds not 30 seconds.
Both cases I don’t think it was ITs fault. They just pass on what they got. I think it was the DoM who jumped to conclusions and or misread what was going on. They see one site that is bad and they assume the kid is addicted to porn. Little do they know that a porn dialer was on the machine…and in the other case Maybe the time on the website is recorded in ms rather than s…I don’t know, but boy did they jump the gun. Guilty unless irrefutable evidence is presented that may make us liable if we did kick you out.
@Darrell,
From that article you link to there is this:
“When he was a student, Mr. Harding traveled with a singing group that promoted Pensacola. When prospective students asked about accreditation, Mr. Harding says the singers were instructed to tell them that Harvard and Yale are not accredited, either, and so accreditation doesn’t matter.”
Do you know if that is true from PCC? I kind of think BJU plays it lose with their whole accreditation stance. They basically led you to believe that their lack of accreditation never stopped anyone, and now lead you to believe that national accreditation = regional accreditation, but what is above would be an outright lie of the highest magnitude. Just curious if you or anyone else has heard this from PCC?
I have heard from others that ensembles have been directed to downplay questions about accreditation. They’ll usually just change the subject as quickly as possible.
@Darrell: Whoa–that is a wild story. My sympathies. I’ve had friends who were manhandled something like that but your story takes the cake.
@RobM: You wrote:
I mentioned a few posts back that forthrightness disarms most would-be interrogators to the point of harmlessness. Here’s my story.
Like Darrell, I generally follow the rules. But by my fifth year on campus, I had somehow made it to PC (still don’t know why) and had a room of guys who had pretty much the same common-sense mindset I did. We had a lot of fun. I’d made it to my fifth year and was pretty confident that I’d get through unscathed.
That year the Man decided to crack down on room jobs, especially clutter. “Clutter” was unfortunately vague, and quickly turned into a carte blanche for hall leaders to dump scads of demerits on guys with a few books, sheets of paper, or whatnot on their desks. I got several of these demerits for what I felt were minor messes, but shrugged it off and tidied up. The situation grew steadily worse. One day I returned from chapel and found a demerit on my desk. It read “clutter,” and bore the initials of my hall leader.
My desk, at that time, held my laptop, my printer, and a single sheet of 8.5×11″ paper that I had printed off and squared with my laptop. Whether I have the real thing of not, I’m often accused of having OCD, and everything on my desk was placed at neat right angles to the other objects. It was spic and span. But I got a demerit for that sheet of paper.
I consulted the handbook and it backed me up–that’s not clutter. I figured it was an aberration and, again, took the hit.
That was in January. A few weeks later I came back from chapel and had another demerit on my desk. By now I had learnt my lesson and my desk held nothing but my laptop and printer, neatly squared with each other. The demerit read “hoodie on chair,” and bore the initials of another hall leader. (Hall leaders rotated halls for dorm check.) My hoody, which I wore to the gym in cold weather, was draped neatly over the back of my deskchair, and that was it. I got a clutter demerit for that.
I’d had enough. Some of you have probably noticed that I’m a work freak and a stickler, and this misapplication of the word “clutter” to what was essentially nitpicking at an unatainable standard of tidiness drove me nuts. I took a photo of the clean desk with a demerit on it and then recreated the single-sheet-of-paper situation and took a photo of that. I created a poster with both photos, and added the American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “clutter.” (I’ll e-mail a .jpeg to Darrell, in case anyone wants to see it.) I e-mailed it to a few friends.
By prayer group that evening, there was a copy of that poster on every other door in our dorm.
The hall leaders were not happy. But the system there thrives on passive aggression (hence having room job check during chapel, when no one is there to protest), and so the only immediate action they took was to take down some of the posters while we slept. The next night, new copies were up on most of those doors.
I’m running on too long, so I’ll wind up quickly. They traced the photo to me, of course, which wasn’t hard–I wasn’t hiding. My hall leader felt he was being mocked (even though I’d named no names whatsoever) and showed up one day to extract an apology. I had gotten nervous when I realized that there might be repercussions from creating that poster, but settled on absolute forthrightness as the best means of defending myself. When he walked in, he hemmed and hawed and eventually got around to asking if I had, indeed, made that poster.
“Yeah,” I said, “that was pretty funny, huh?”
Silence for a moment. More hemming and hawing. I explained that it started off as an inside joke between me and the other rooms in my prayer group (mostly true, since we constantly mocked him for what military men call “chickenshit”) and was surprised by how big a hit the poster had become (true, though I’d hope for just that). To sum up quickly, he stuck around for ten or fifteen minutes, during which I chatted enjoyably about the poster and why I had made it, how much I loved the OED and the meanings of words. And so forth. Then he left.
As soon as the door shut, my roommate–who had been in his bed behind his “privacy blanket” the whole time–lifted his blanket and started laughing his head off. “You are my hero. He came in looking for an apology and you were like: ‘No.'”
I eventually met with the dorm supervisor, which made me even more nervous. But I approached the meeting with the same tactic and got off scot free.
I found that the authorities were so myopic they didn’t know what to do with someone who didn’t see the offense in what he did. I got one e-mail from a self-appointed scold, two anemic talkings-to, no demerits, and the joy of knowing I created a poster that–according to friends–still shows up on dorm-room doors from time to time. But I think the best part is when I overheard rumors that “the guy who made that poster got, like, a ton of Ds for it.”
Demerits caused me more anxiety and stress then anything else in my year and a half 😛 That and the pink dorm cleaning slips, especially with the new inspector *shudders*
At mine, socialized and campused were the same: it was work fines after 50 and 75 dems, two week campus after 100, 200 hundred was due for expulsion. But as it was a small, more personal school, just have 200 dems didn’t automatically expel you. One of the benefits of having less than 100 students -_- Which was convenient: the youth pastor’s brother got up to 200 regularly….
I was also fortunate that we had a new college president my first year: he made some very very good changes and was a lot of fun. His “call slips” weren’t scary at all, he genuinely wanted to talk and get to know you. I miss him.
I never got campused or shadowed or interrogated, simply because I caused no trouble. I learned to skirt things my last semester (uh-hum), but I never talked or gossiped or openly did anything. Made straight As, the works. I was low-risk. But some students, oh goodness.
Thanks Darrell, now I’m going to need therapy.
I’ve been the victim of interrogation in the Dean’s office and the parking lot. In the latter scenario I felt I was in danger of physical violence. Could be worse. They could employ body cavity searches.
Spot on post. I always found the room job demerits totally arbitrary and capricious.
ahh the bedtime interrogation, i remember it well. in the fall of 1996 that was almost a regular thing for me. that semester i was pulled out of bed around midnight to be accused of the most outlandish things from having unapproved( i refuse to call it illegal) music to stealing. i got pulled out of bed so many times that semester that i swear andy dennis had a crush on me or something.
all those meetings escalated to being pulled out of class to see the assistant dean. the dean of men at pcc, at least when i was a student, was never a problem at least you could reason with him. guys like springs didn’t care about anything but getting their man. the stuff i actually did i admitted to weeks ago, the stuff i didn’t, such as stealing, i refused to admit. needless to say they didn’t like that. the conclusion to this story i go 75 demerits for something and i had to move to a strict floorleader’s room ( the funny thing about that was he was actually kind of nice strict but fair.)
afterwards i became a recluse on campus, i think i only had like 5-7 actual friends. i preferred hanging out with people who lived in pensacola.
@Darrell Ah the joys of passive aggressive floor leaders enabled to w/o any pushback or justification spend an entire school year grinding various grudges for as long as they feel like it. Pure joy, and clearly is the students poor attitude & room keeping. I was a huge fan of the baby powder bomb. If I was gonna get demerits for room inspection, might as well have the slip smell baby powder fresh!
i once was interrogated by the dean of men and the dean of students and was told that i had been stalking a girl and sending her threatening messages over instant message… they told me i had said things like, “lucifer will seek you” and “i need 12 more bodies to complete my project”… i didnt know whether to laugh or be terrified. looking back on it thought… it was pretty funny. obviously it wasnt me… they found out who the real dude was… a fact which they never bothered to tell me… you know, just keep a student hanging, not knowing whether he’s going to be expelled or arrested any day now, while he tries to focus on studies… right. yeah i found out a few weeks later through someone else. so lame.
@Jim hahaha! I once got pulled out of class to go to the deans office, and interrogated about they claimed someone had sent via campus mail some urine and a girl drank it. I seriously have my doubts it happened, but according to deans it did and it was in the bag I delivered. Also dunno how they thought I would know anything about it. Presumably just throw a wide enough fishing net and hope they found someone doing something. Also never heard anything about resolution. Never had the joy of late night interrogations. I think I would’ve enjoyed behaving inappropriately (gaseous emissions, scratching, etc) if I had been.
That waking students up in the middle of the night is nothing less than abuse. I just can’t get my head around that. I can imagine why they did not want regional accreditation.
That poster, WIN. Absolutely love the sarcasm dripping from it. People in authority hate sarcasm as much as out and out defiance I think: it shows you’re in control and relatively unemotional. They can deal with a screaming banshee: it’s the calm and collected ones who know exactly what they’re doing that’s scary.
“The desk chair is virtually impossible to use in these circumstances, as are the desk itself, the shelves, the air conditioning unit, and the student’s car.” Full kukos to Jordan M. Ross, you are my fundy college hero.
College deans and deans assistants, at least at the institution I attended seemed to not have the ability to deal with students with anything less than a hammer to the head approach. The deans office was reactionary, prudish group of people. They treated good kids who messed up, or had a difference of opinion with them with the same intolerant ferocity as the kids who were blatant scornful rebels. The heavy-handedness seems to by symptomatic of controlling, insecure leadership, out of touch with reality and the students who were at least 20 years their junior. It seems like colleges employ a lot of single-too-long, in-the-bubble too long, bitter people who don’t have restoration after offense in mind – but tend to take revenge through correction.
I speak from experience – my own experience and that of my siblings and later as a youth pastor – sending other’s kids to the same college. Finally I saw the light of what was happening and realized that we weren’t the problem. When you stepped out of line you were treated as if you were a 5th grader and often times they pursued and harassed you until you broke or left the college. It was not even remotely biblical or Christian in any sense. When it comes right down to it – we have a lot of fleshly, spiteful, legalistic people running our deans offices at fundy colleges. That is why it is my goal that my children which have yet to born will never, ever know about the idiocies of that genre of Christianity.
At Fundy U it is not “guilty until proven inncocent.” It is “guilty and if you say otherwise you have a bad attitude.”
Wow. Wow. Wow. Seeing it all spelled out like that…I’m speechless. Camille’s right. They do the exact same stuff to the faculty and staff (in more “grown up” ways).
Ah, yes. I recall my first visit to the Discipline Committee. I stood before the Dean of Men, who read the infraction: “Laundry basket too full.” We just kind of looked at each other. What else could I say, other than, “Yes, it was pretty full.” I think that was 3 demerits or so. Looking back, I should have asked how having a full laundry basket (in the closet, no less) violated the handbook. That was odd.
I’ve never commented here before, but the stories are all bringing back memories. I, too attended Fundy U, and managed to stay in good graces until my last year. But then, I became associated with about six students who were reported by an offended Arminian roommate for discussing Calvinism (a bit too favorably) in the dorms. There were about six of them called up to the admin wing, where they were interrogated, screamed at, and verbally abused for several hours. Because it was near the end of the year, they were allowed to stay the remainder of the semester, but with a strict warning from the Dean of Students, bearing the official college seal, reading, in part, “You may not discuss Calvinism, Election, or related theological issues with any students on or off campus while you are a student at [___]…. Failure to comply with this directive will result in immediate dismissal”.
It seems all too surreal, now, but I remember often sneaking out of bed at 1:00 AM to hide in the boiler room and discuss Calvinistic themes. We loved the gospel, were trying to work through the scriptural testimony to the greatness of God’s grace, and could not forbear discussing theology. And yet, we were scared that some night a security guard or RA would find us, and we would lose the thousands of dollars we’d spent on credits that very well may not transfer to any reputable institution, when we were so close to being finished. A transfer student born in Moscow, who later married one of those Calvinistic hooligans, was amazed at how similar it was to the underground church hiding from the KGB in communist Russia. Sad and scary. I could tell other stories, but the midnight boiler room gospel discussions seem the most bizarre. And yet, oh, how true it was…
Speaking of campusing – when you’re campused, the admin takes your car keys. Yep. They confiscate them. I was facing campusing for something or other (was found not guilty for whatever it was). The Ass. Dean of Men mentioned that I’d have to surrender my keys if I were convicted. Problem was, I had an off-campus job as a delivery driver. Didn’t matter; “you’ll have to trust God to supply your missed wages, as you’ll still need to turn in your keys” (good summary of what he said).
This was the same clown who would slowly roll through the men’s parking lot with his voice recorder, reading off license plates (and presumably checking to make sure 1) the vehicles were on campus or the owner had a pass to be off at that moment, and 2) the vehicles were parked in their assigned, rented spots). I rarely wish violence on anyone, but I must confess to a desire to rip his braces from his teeth with a crowbar back in those days. The guy was the archetypal smug authority weasel; remove the power vested in him, and you reveal the worthless person within.
Love the poster! It got a laugh out of me for sure. 😀 Luckily the college I went to wasn’t like that at all, for which I am eternally grateful. I went to Biola…which I know is considered a heathen liberal institution in the fundy world, lol! I was once talking with one of my friends who went to a fundy college (GSBC) and she said that if I was a student there, I’d more than likely get expelled within the first one or two weeks of the semester. Probably due to the fact that I like to say things to people (regarding what I believe about the Bible and Christianity, etc) just for the shock value and enjoy their facial expressions after, hehehe 🙂
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True of every last single one of them. Every one.
@KoB that wasn’t PCC was it? I delievered Pizza for 2 years, and stopped caring about getting campused cause we were allowed to go to work off campus (the only exception), and I would just say everything was work, and go to the beach or movies, etc anyway.
@ ExFundie, “They treated good kids who messed up, or had a difference of opinion with them with the same intolerant ferocity as the kids who were blatant scornful rebels.” I saw this. No nuances, no mercy, no understanding (unless it perhaps applied to kids they personally knew).
In four years of undergrad, I only had to stand in the DC line once (for sleeping through a Saturday meeting when I was president of my society) so I’m not a “bad kid who’s bitter.” But what I observed could be downright scary mean and cloaking it in spirituality makes it even more destructive.
@Jordan: That is amazing, and you are my hero.
@all y’all: WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN
@JMP somehow I missed your story till just now and only saw the poster. Totally agree on the passive aggressive nature of the power hungry FL’s. I still blame growing up in those gothard or whatever households where parents are determined to “break the will”, and they develop into the same monsters their parents are. I’m saving my stories of revenge we took against those passive aggressive FL’s for a later post. Lots of fun, and I still think those floor leaders got way more pain from me than they ever inflicted! 🙂
For sure. A part of my story that I left out was that one of my APCs, who was sick to death of our hall leader, got aggressive with the hall leader’s repeated theft of the poster from the APC’s door. He actually started a shouting match with him in the hall one day, accusing him of stealing and vandalism, because “what I put on my door is my property.” Of course, the hall leader looked like he wanted to die. That APC was my hero after that.
I once had a dean at the place I went to ask a friend to surrender his cell phone. He was like ha ha you’re joking Mr. Dean of men. The dean said no I am not joking – so my friend said no! Imagine telling a 23 year old man that he has to surrender his phone like he is a 12 year old.
yeah, my wife got socialed one time when we were dating, so she would bake me brownies and leave them on my desk so when I got there they would be there waiting on me, not breaking any rules.
Little did they know she left a NOTE UNDER THE BROWNIES!!!
MUHAHAHAHAHA~!!!~~!~!!!
MY SIN IS REVEALED! SHE IS A REBEL!
Darrell. What a story. At least my nightmares didn’t start until I was gone . . .
Clutter poster – too funny.
I actually a letter for not getting more than 5 demerits – or zero!! one semester, but for the most part I viewed it as a bank acct. – not more than 75 and I was still fine.
But those nighttime interrogations – how is that even legal? I don’t know if they did that at BJU or not.
One year a roommate and I posted our roomjob demerit slips along the ceiling line of the walls in our dormroom. We kept a running tally to see who got the most slips. We made it to Christmas break before we had to take it down. It was the tiny acts of defiance like that (in between the larger acts of defiance) that kept me sane for those years.
Power Corrupts. Another great Tshirt.
I think you can continue college week for another week. There’s lots of stuff here. Colleges are able to carry fundamentalism farther than the churches were ever able to, having complete control of the students that churches only dreamed of.
I was a rule follower too, however much I disagreed with them. It seems so many of us were able to glide along until the last year, when it just really got under our skin.
It’s true the staff were subject to rules almost as much as students. In many cases that I observed, it just made them mean and they took it out on students. I was a nursing major at college. Second semester Jr year, I failed a class. I had good grades, and had a C in that particular class, but in our hospital rotations we had a grad student over us. She would give us class equivalents to demerits for forgetting equipment, uniform or nails not right, minor stuff. I got too many minor infractions from her, and failed out of nursing. I didn’t have any other issues with any of the other teachers. There were over 60 nursing students with me that were Juniors, less than 20 of us passed. It was all because of that grad student whom we found out later was failing her courses and was taking it out on us. We tried to appeal to the college president but the teacher was right and 60% of the class was wrong! You aren’t supposed to fail that far along in school, basically all we had left was administrative classes to take before graduation. Once you fail, you could wait a year and retake the class, but you have little chance of making it the next year too, the teachers had you marked and would fail you again. the nursing program was really rough. I left thinking I could transfer my credits. The college had assured us the nursing program was accredited. It wasn’t and I couldn’t transfer. I gave up. So cruel the lengths they go through to ruin your self esteem.
@Laura LOL! FundyU corrupts absolutely.
@escapee there’s only so long I can take re-living all this stuff. After tomorrow it will be time to lock it back up for a while and think happier thoughts.