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)