<p>I don’t understand why you wouldn’t go & defend yourself at the hearing. You leave the board no option if neither you nor room mate show up at the hearing & they have to assume that your absence implies your guilt. It’s unfortunate that your room mate did not attend, but he had warned you that he wouldn’t. I would NOT be willing to absent myself from something that involved me and allow myself to be put on probation for something I had no control over and no participation in! You are fortunate that the probation did not appear to have had bad long term consequences for you.</p>
<p>nepop, I am on record around here as being strongly opposed to ratting out one’s peers, but in your situation if your room mate outright refused to do the right and decent thing I would have gone to the meeting and defended myself. I’m glad you have suffered any negative consequences, but I don’t think others should take that chance.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of ground between actually calling campus security and ratting someone out and passively allowing the school to assign blame to you when you are innocent! </p>
<p>OP, I think the idea that your S is guilty of a violation because he “permitted” his older room mate and friends to have alcohol in the suite is farfetched. As mathmomvt pointed out, there is a significant imbalance of power there.</p>
<p>When I say “many years ago,” I am talking 25+. Really nothing more than a somewhat amusing memory at this point. Not so much when having to answer the question many years ago on the law school and bar applications. At the time, I simply did not think about any long term conseqeunces, and my thinking was that I was moving off campus anyway, so disciplinary probation did not mean anything. To the extent I can remember, it was as “I’m not going to rat him out,” thing. As I said, in hindsight, I should have done it differently. The purpose of my post was to give that advice to the OP–your son should not refrain from telling the disciplinary people here what happened out of any sense that he would be ratting his rm out.</p>
<p>Not commenting on any possible degree of guilt on the part of the student here in question, but only commenting on the last sentence in post 19.</p>
<p>I strongly disagree the school is partly at fault because there was booze in a dorm room. It would be great if we could blame someone else for our actions or inactions, to escape blame ourselves. But in this case, I don’t see it as the school’s fault.
The school did not buy the booze. The school did not OK having a party with hooch in the room. Most importantly, alcohol wasn’t in the room because a student in that room is 21. There might be alcohol in a room where no one is 21.
There was alcohol in the room because one(or more) students brought booze into a room where no booze was permitted. A student of any age might have brought alcohol in. The school gets no blame for that.</p>
<p>This isn’t a family party in one’s home. It is a dorm room on campus with a specific set of rules required by the school. I’m not addressing the right or wrong of the rule, only saying that an on campus rented room is not fairly compared to laws affecting one’s own home.</p>
<p>oh another thing is that i’ve been in somewhat of a similar situation, but with marijuana, not alcohol. </p>
<p>it happens that my boyfriend and a lot of my friends tend to smoke a lot, and this one one time at the very end of the year (finals week) when they had decided to smoke and for the first time ever (i guess they weren’t as careful) the RA called the police/they were caught. </p>
<p>me and another friend happened to be in the room at the time the cops entered (even though, that particular day, we weren’t hanging out with them while they were smoking) simply because they had ordered sandwiches for delivery and they had come to the room, so we wanted to pick ours up. </p>
<p>it was nervewracking at the time, and the people who were smoking got JA’s for that, as well as possession of alcohol (because there happened to be some leftover liquor in the fridge), but nothing on their record. They took my information as well as our friends, but when we had our meeting with the RA we explained that we were not involved in what happened and they understood and let us go, it wasn’t difficult to deal with at all.</p>