Quickie: Power Abuse in my University

Good (whatever time of day it is for ya'll) Steemit community!

I was talking to @akrid and he told me about a contest that had caught his attention. The contest, linked below, is a writing competition where participants must write a <200 word short story about an example of abuse of power. 

I am not competing, but it got me thinking about something that had happened at my university this past year. 

If you would like to participate or just see the incredible work provided so far, check out the competition here:

 Contest Link

Anyway, here's my story. 

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Back in my first semester of university, there was an incident where a friend of mine tried to kill themselves by jumping off of the roof of their dorm. I had to restrain her for a half hour before we finally convinced her to calm down. We took her to the counseling center the next morning so she could talk about what happened.

The counseling center said they couldn't do anything for her, but made sure to inform the school administration of what had happened. 

This is the same counseling center that has 

• Discussed patients with their other counselors
• Recommended couples break up despite there being no issues with their relationship
• Sends troubled students to the hospital without a second thought

Image Source

My friend was called into the administrator's office, and I came along since she was too afraid she would make decisions based out of fear of the officials rather than for her own safety. This made the administrative officials slightly irritated. 

They told her she could no longer stay on campus. They said she would have a small window to clear her belongings out of her room on the top floor. They said something to the effect of "If you're going to kill yourself, we don't want you doing it in our dorm". I admit I'm paraphrasing but the meaning is the same; they were trying to save themselves legally. 

I fought back on her behalf. Every opportunity they had they tried to shut me out but I'm not one to be silenced by the single-minded hammer of bureaucracy. When they realized they couldn't convince her to leave campus during that session, they asked if we could meet a second time at a later date when there was more time. 

We foolishly agreed, thinking this could give us more time to collect our thoughts and to recover from the traumatic events from the nights before. The next day we received an email stating that a new administrative policy had been instated. The new policy dictated that students dealing with mental health related issues could no longer bring a university student with them to meetings. Parents and outside sources were acceptable, but not other students. 

Luckily this story has a semi-happy ending; she was able to convince them to let her stay on campus if she moved to the bottom floor of her dorm and saw a therapist. She is doing much better now and it all worked out. 

But my university changed a university policy because of me. In my book, that constitutes as abuse of one's position of authority.

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