UI plans to form team to monitor hazing day
UI plans to form team to monitor hazing day
DEPOK (JP): The University of Indonesia (UI) will set up teams
to monitor the upcoming student orientation programs for any
mistreatment, a university official said on Friday.
UI's deputy rector for student affairs, Umar Mansyur, said the
teams would be established in all of the university's 28
faculties and would consist of staff members from each faculty.
"We try to make them (orientation program committees)
understand that the hazing program is not an excuse for abusing
freshmen," Umar told reporters.
However, he said the committees would be given freedom to
arrange their programs.
"It will be fair for us if they (committee members) could
behave in a more responsible way.
"And we won't hesitate to press sanctions against committee
members mistreating the new students," he said.
They could either be prohibited from participating in next
year's hazing committee or be suspended for a number of
semesters, he said.
He said the university was also open to complaints from
freshmen if they had been physically or mentally abused during
the program.
He said the quality of the student-organized program had
increased over the past few years, one of the reasons being the
presence of the monitoring teams.
The university has, like many other universities, introduced a
policy allowing freshmen to skip or withdraw from the program if
they disagree with its agenda. However, they will then be denied
entry to the university's student organizations.
The chairman of the law faculty hazing committee, Parulian
Aritonang, said separately that the program was meant to
encourage solidarity among students.
Nearly 480,000 senior high school graduates will this year
begin new academic lives as freshmen in state universities,
including UI, across the nation.
Atma Jaya
Separately, some students organizing the recent hazing day at
Atma Jaya Catholic University protested the campus authority's
one-sided decision to investigate alleged charges of sexual
harassment and other intimidation made against them.
They said the programs on hazing day for the university
freshmen were "proportional and well-controlled".
Speaking to The Jakarta Post on Thursday, senior students from
the faculties of law, engineering, administration sciences and
economics said that "all programs for the freshmen in each
faculty were approved by the campus authority".
"We all conducted demonstrations for each of them," Tanti from
the economic faculty said.
The university deans were ordered by the rector to carry out
an in-depth investigation into reports of sexual harassment and
other intimidation allegedly committed by the senior students
during hazing day.
If there were complaints or reports either of sexual
harassment or intimidation, they should have been disclosed
during the recent evaluation held by the campus authority, Tanti
argued.
"None were revealed during the preliminary evaluation. We were
only criticized for not being punctual in several programs," Bona
of the law faculty said.
Bona stressed that besides the approved programs, the balanced
composition of both sexes on the committee was also meant to
avoid possible harassments from senior students to the freshmen.
"We were all there, it's impossible that we wanted to bully
fellow female students," Sylvie of the economic faculty added.
(03/emf)