USM Student Council Chair Brady Walker
As the university system continues to develop a “porn policy,” student leaders throughout the system are trying to make sure the policy isn’t too restrictive.
“I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a group of students who want a policy,” said Brady Walker, a second-year law student at the University of Baltimore and the chair of the USM Student Council.
Walker said students have two main concerns: first, how restrictive the policy will be; second, how much freedom will individual campuses have to create and implement their own indiviual policies.
Students want a policy that has “the least chance of interfering with student activities, and of course, the least chance of abridging academic freedom,” Walker said, raising the possibility that in future years, the policy could be used to restrict the showing of non-pornographic films. In general, he said, the eventual rules should “apply to the fewest number of films possible.”
At the Board of Regents meeting Friday, both Walker and Student Regent Sarah Elfreth seemed more concerned than the rank-and-file (i.e., adult) regents about how the policy was developing.
Walker said he hoped individual campuses would get to create their own policies, because students were more likely to be able to influence campus administrators compared to system ones.
Student Government Associations from throughout the system are expected to take positions on the guidelines, and Walker said he wouldn’t be surprised to see some of them reject the policy entirely. Here in College Park, the SGA has tentatively scheduled a forum on the subject for mid-October, but is still hammering out details, Press Secretary Joel Cohen wrote in an e-mail.