National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (majorly known as FAST NUCES), Lahore has recently expelled students accused of making memes on their administration.
The decision came forward on Sunday, June 28, in a campus-wide Campus Disciplinary Committee (CDC) email. Earlier this month, students had been engaged in inter-university meme wars with other universities and some had made memes on the university’s administration and policies. Among the 14 students and 12 alumni punished, some were in their final year, while students that are graduated have been told that their degrees would be revoked – all career destroying punishments.
It must be noted that there were two meme groups – a general all-inclusive “FAST Lahore Posting Group”, and another “FAST NUCES Dank Posting”. As soon as emails were sent out by the university that they were looking into penalizing students on basis of these Facebook groups, most members of the dank meme group left it, and the group was deleted.
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Students called in for Disciplinary Committee (DC) hearings were from the general all-inclusive meme group – for memes that were not offensive, indecent or vulgar.
The university seems to be scapegoating their failure to reprimand the real culprits from the dank meme group by making examples out of students who didn’t have any involvement with it.
Students were given the choice to choose letter grades, or a simple Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory status in their courses. Students made their choices before the exams started on Monday, the 22nd.
Punishments of students include reduction of all grades by 1 if students chose letter grades, and ‘Fail’ if they opted for a Pass/Fail status, “community-service” – cleaning the university campus for 4-6 weeks, and 1 semester expulsion from the university.
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Some of those accused had not even posted any meme, while some of them were incorrectly called for DC hearings since multiple students had the same names. Some students were not even allowed to share their perspective or give justifications in their CDC hearing, as the CDC committee seemed adamant on giving out punishments without listening to explanations.
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After the CDC email was circulated among students, the university faced a tremendous amount of backlash online from social media influencers, students and journalists alike. A few extremely vulgar memes against the faculty of FAST surfaced, and those who found it claimed that the punishment were justified. These afore-mentioned “vulgar” memes were actually posted in “FAST NUCES Dank Posting”, and worse still, students who posted these were not even sent a CDC Notice by the university.
This isn’t the first case of the administration overstepping its bounds, there being limits on clothing, inappropriate comments made to female students and faculty, fines for mixed sports like badminton and more.
Can a university monitor behavior of students off-campus as well? Does a university have the right to monitor private social media profiles of its students? Can a university revoke a degree of its students for non-academic reasons?
While all of these questions remain hanging in the air, one thing is for certain – the law should never be retrospective, and any punishments or CDC judgement must follow a pre-defined protocol, rather than being on-the-spur decisions.
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