My question is what exactly is covered under student safety and discipline? Va Code 23-9.2:3(A)(2) grants the university the authority to “To establish rules and regulations for the conduct of students while attending such institution”, wouldn’t this kind of thing be covered? To me that seems to be a pretty broad grant of powers.
If the General Assembly has to enumerate exactly what behaviors can be policed by the University wouldn’t this in fact leave them pretty limited with their powers over students? For example, can they set a noise policy? Can they enforce a nuisance policy? Could they stop someone from setting up a campus KKK? Can they prohibit smoking in the campus buildings?
No, it’s like the turkey who hands the farmer an ax in June, then sees the public attitude toward eating turkey reverse itself over the course of the summer. Come November when some retrograde farmer approaches him with an ax he thought long discarded, the turkey and his lefty friends cry out STOP. Because this outcry, not any appeal to the Farm Legislature, is the only thing that can stop the bird’s eminent demise.
It’s neither foolish nor counterproductive. It is a quite reasonable, and if it serves to get the law changed, then a quite productive process. I, lefty, don’t see it as a problem.
You are right that this does differ from a conservative “don’t question authority, the law is the law (until somehow it gets changed)” approach.
ETA- sorry, gotta go deal with an eagle. I’ll check back later. I’m not just abandoning the thread.
I guess my question is to reiterate what Caffeine.addict wrote just above.
There are a slew of rules and regulations the university imposes on students. Rules for which there is nothing in Virginia law saying the same thing.
The state has granted the universities broad powers to apply such rules. It would obviously be absurd to try to get Virginia law to match university regulations and any need for a change in regulation needing to go through the Virginia general assembly. I doubt anyone disagrees on this point.
So, why is sexual orientation “special”? How could the AG stand in court and make a case that sexual orientation is a standout among university regulations of which the vast majority the GA has not said anything about either?
Or is the law allowed to be selective? Which is to say, in theory, the AG could carp about university noise laws not adhering to Virginia law but if he makes no fuss about it then the university rules are fine. The only laws that matter are the ones the AG decides matter.
No. There’s a maxim: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. The explicit mention of one thing excludes all others not explicitly mentioned. When the General Assembly provides a list of protected classes, we know two things: (1) That’s the list, and (2) There’s nothing else on the list.
The GA doesn’t give a list pf prohibited behaviors. But to the extent the university wants to say, “This punishment is magnified because it involved treading on a protected class,” then they are limited to what the protected classes are.
They can stop the KKK, because the GA does include race among its list of protected classes. They could stop them anyway on general gorunds of behavior, but they may enhance the sanctions applied because the KKK sought to infringe on the rights of a protected class.
Because it’s faster to ignore it, and more just for people who would still suffer through it while the law is slowly being changed. I have no sympathies for people trying to uphold unjust laws. All of those laws should be ignored until properly stricken from the law books, not followed until beauracracy made them disappear
I don’t know how old you are, but I am curious what your reaction would be if you were alive and an adult in the 50’s and 60’s when all those discriminatory laws were being overturned. Would you have declared the police right in their attack on peaceful marchers with fire hoses, batons, and dogs? Or is there something else other than the law that, in your mind, should rightly move men’s minds?
The problem with this attitude is that it places your personal judgment first. That’s great if your personal judgment is correct, but it sucks if you’re wrong. Part of the agreement we make by living in a society is the method of making rules for that society. If you concede to yourself the freedom to break the law because it’s unjust, you must concede that power to me, too… and maybe I don’t agree with you about which laws are just and which laws are unjust.
Perfect example. Of my point, not yours.
There was no law directing Bull Connor to turn firehoses and attack dogs on peaceful marchers. What directed him to do that was his own sense of right and wrong. He was placing that sense above the law, following your guidance precisely. To him, the mixing of the races, the accord to blacks of a status equal to whites, was wrong, and he had a choice: obey the law, or obey his conscience.
He chose to follow his conscience.
Now, it’s also true that the law DID discriminate against blacks in ways that should not have been ignored. But what was effective in getting those laws changed? Disobeying them? Or working through legal means? Which had more effect on Montgomery buses? Hint: they didn’t care about marchers until the “marching” was to work and back, in lieu of riding the buses.
I took your first post as implying not that officials mustn’t be attacked for their views in general, but rather that you argued against those who ignore the law completely in favor of personal attacks. Although Diogenes did attack the (well-known!) views of Cuccinelli, the substantive portion of his post:
That is an argument that the law may not, possibly, be interpreted in the fashion preferred by Cuccinelli. Whether he is right or he is wrong, he is not ignoring the law.
He’s attacking the spin that Cuccinelli puts on the law, not arguing for the law to be changed. And the entire para is an attack on Cuccinelli personally, anyway.
He’s ignoring the fact that regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the application of Dillion’s Rule to universities, it is a conclusively settled fact that it does apply to localities, and that THIS is what needs to be changed. His immediate instinct, well-trained liberal that he is, is to attack the person deciding to enforce the law, instead of focusing on a change in the law, where the change affects the possibly unsettled state of university codes and the completely rock-solid settled state of towns, cities, and counties.
So if I am a student at a Virginia public university and I get caught using drugs they cannot kick me out but only apply the law as the Virginia General Assembly has written it? Afterall they cannot make my punishment worse than the state has already deemed fitting and explicitly laid out right?
I read it as written: “they may not enhance Joey’s penalty”
According to this a first offense in Virginia of possession of a joint is a misdemeanor punishable by: "a maximum penalty or 30 days in jail, and a $500 fine for a first offense. "
So, if the university has a zero tolerance policy and kicks me out then they have “enhanced” my punishment right? Not only do I get the state penalty but an added penalty from the university. Per your take, since the state has explicitly listed the punishments for this crime and since it does not include being kicked out of school then the university is exceeding its authority in punishing me further.
I’m arguing that the the law may not be what Cuccinelli says it is. There’s no reason to discuss changing the law unless you can first support your premeise that the law says what you want it to say, and I contend that it does not. The assembly has gven universities the power to set its own rules for hiring and student conduct. Game over.
Your argument that the university cannot include protected classes within its own internal rules is without merit, Universities have internal autonomy, period.
I’d still like a straight answer as to what kind of discrimination the university would have to allow in order to be in compliance with your unique interpretation of the law, by the way. I’d also like to see some support for you assertion that people who harrass gay kids are punished more severely than people who harrass an unprotected “class.”
So… better to undergo a protracted court journey, with both sides paying their expenses with public dollars, to settle the issue? Or better to foregt about it and get the GA to pass a change that affects the university crowd AND the localities?
No, they don’t. Period. And other punctuation marks, as well.
What if UVA has a rule against bringing food or drink inside a campus computer lab? Is the OP saying that such a regulation would be void since the General Assembly has not made Eating in A Technology Center a state crime?
Perhaps you two can settle this among yourselves. (Just for the record, which of the Brickers is black on the right side and white on the left side, and which is the other way around?)
Court battle. Better to do the court battle. We don’t have rule by AG fiat in this country. He’s wrong on the law, anyway, and he will lose. Hell, the Governor has already told the universities to ignore him.
Yep. They do. Sorry. The assembly already gave it to them. They don’t need permission to stop gay kids from being harrassed on campus.
You still have not address the fact that this cannot be correct, because it leads directly to an irresolvable logical pardox:
The General Assembly has created a list of things upon which state universities are forbidden to discriminate (e.g. race).
The General Assembly has created a list of things upon which state universities are required to discriminate (e.g. out-of-state residency).
Some items are found on neither list.
The application of this maxim to items found on neither list makes it impossible for universities to take either of the options which, between them, comprise the full gamut of possibilities.
The main problem with your ultra-confident predictions is that when they’re wrong, you just shrug and claim that you never really cared about the issue, anyway.