Students have right to a private life

SHANDONG FOREIGN LANGUAGE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE recently provoked fierce debate because it insisted on shooting videos of student couples with pre-installed cameras on campus and posting them on their website as a “warning” to other students. Many people criticized the college, but the college administrators responded that “campus love was uncivilized”. Beijing News comments:

Shandong Foreign Language Vocational College is not alone in its attitude. About a week ago, Binzhou University, also in Shandong province, organized a student discipline group, whose members surrounded and beat a young couple on campus who did not obey their orders, although the university later said it had punished the students responsible.

It seems there is a tendency for some domestic colleges to intervene in students’ private lives, unilaterally defining campus romances as “uncivilized”.

It is natural for young people to fall in love and they have the right to a private life. It is OK for some students to refrain from having a boyfriend or girlfriend at college, just as it is OK for other students to find a lover. It is each student’s personal right and the colleges should not intervene.

An undeniable fact is that the young students today, mostly born in the 1990s, are in general more open than their parents’ generation, who are the ones that hold the power in colleges. If the latter insist on imposing their conservative thoughts upon the former, the result will be an ever growing generation gap.

Some argue that some of the young people born after 1990 are conservative too. That is true, but others are not so conservative. By trying to prohibit students from finding a partner, certain college authorities are favoring the conservative students at the expense of the others. That’s unfair.

Therefore, the related college authorities should think twice before they interfere in students’ personal lives. They should help to protect their rights, rather than infringing on them.