Open books. Drooping heads. Buzzing cell-phones. Student behavior during All-School Meeting has long been a problem. The chapel is rarely quiet on Wednesdays, and students defile the place with garbage. Some students are often too busy cramming for tests or reading text messages to pay attention to any speaker. On Monday night, Carlos Hoyt, All-School Meeting Coordinator and Assistant Dean of Students, sent an email to all students regarding community expectations in the Chapel and the subsequent punishments for violations of these expectations. The exact policies are covered in this week’s Phillipian. The Phillipian commends Carlos Hoyt for taking an initiative to improve ASM behavior. All-School Meeting is a rare opportunity for people outside the PA community to interact with Andover students. It is critical that we represent the school to the best of our ability. We support many of the policies that Hoyt has instituted, but we also acknowledge that they could be improved. Obviously, food and drink should be discarded and any type of electronic entertainment device should be confiscated. Students can go 45 minutes without listening to their iPods or playing Cube Runner. And while it is an enormous inconvenience to have a cell phone confiscated for two days, students can easily refrain from opening their phones for the duration of an ASM. Enforcing rules against schoolwork and sleep is where the policies get more complicated. If a student’s books are confiscated, he will inevitably fall behind in class over the next two days, which would be an unfortunate consequence of attending an ASM. But we see no viable alternative. If an assignment is so important that a student must complete it before seventh period, he should have finished it prior to ASM. It is nearly impossible to do productive work during ASM, and, if students really need the time, they are better off just taking the cut. In addition, a one-day confiscation period would not deter students from studying, particularly if they are reviewing material from a class that day, as Wednesday and Thursday class periods do not overlap, and students would effectively face no additional punishment. But unlike the other offenders, students who sleep at ASM may break the rule inadvertently. Instead of giving students a cut for nodding off, why can’t faculty wake them up? This is what happens in a classroom, and it allows students who may have been trying to fight through their fatigue to still listen to the speaker. It is well within the school’s right to regulate behavior at ASM, despite cries that these policies are curtailing student freedom. Increased regulation from the administration is not a violation of trust in Andover’s students but necessary when we continually fail to meet community expectations. If we want more freedoms, let’s act like we deserve them. This editorial represents the views of the Editorial Board CXXXII.
