Too fat to graduate?
Discrimination makes the news often – incidences of prejudice against gays, blacks and women are in the headlines every day, and the media is right to shine a spotlight on them. But discrimination against obese people seems to be a type of bias that goes virtually ignored.
Inside Higher Ed, however, has highlighted a story out of Oxford, Pa., where 25 students are in danger of not being able to graduate because their body mass index was above 30 when they entered college, and they’ve done nothing to prove to Lincoln University officials that they’ve tried to change it.
The students are part of the first class required to have an under-30 BMI, or to take a one-semester class that emphasizes healthy living and the risks posed by obesity.
Though many students are obviously indignant about the news, James L. DeBoy, chair of Lincoln’s health, physical education and recreation department, told Inside Higher Ed he sees it as his “professional responsibility to be honest and tell students they’re not healthy.”
DeBoy also said that African-Americans especially (the school is historically black) are hit hard by health issues like diabetes and obesity, which is why the school has a special responsibility to educate students about their own health.
Good intentions aside, though, it seems like a particularly cruel way for the administration to drill the message into its students’ heads – and let’s not forget that most students shell out tens of thousands of dollars for college degrees, and often take on crippling loans to get through school. Should officials be able to take all that money, and withhold a degree for reasons having nothing to do with academics?
Certainly there must be a good amount of thin students at the school who drink excessively, have unprotected sex and drive too fast – why should they be allowed to collect their diplomas? It would be impossible to police all types of dangerous and unhealthy behavior, so targeting a particular kind is no less discriminatory than if the students hadn’t been accepted to the school to begin with because of their obesity.
In addition to being applied unfairly, the very standard by which the school is using to measure obesity has come under fire lately. The medical journals Obesity and Circulation have criticized how BMI is used. According to Slate, “critics of the body mass index have griped that it fails to distinguish between lean and fatty mass. (Muscular people are often misclassifed as overweight or obese.) The measure is mum, too, about the distribution of body fat, which makes a big difference when it comes to health risks. And the BMI cutoffs for ‘underweight,’ ‘normal,’ ‘overweight,’ and ‘obese’ have an undeserved air of mathematical authority.”
Colleges are right to be concerned about students’ overall health – whether that means classes on alcohol for freshman, free counseling services or even mandatory fitness classes. But going so far as to withhold a person’s degree after he or she has fulfilled its requirements over four years is clearly an overstep. I’m guessing the students being made an example of have gotten the message by now.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sara Libby, Tweets Tube. Tweets Tube said: Too fat to graduate? http://bit.ly/08De3RG [...]
This is horrifying to me. When will people stop conflating “overweight” and “unhealthy”? Should women who are severely underweight and struggle with the mental instability and physical repercussions of an eating disorder be granted their diploma and sent off into the world? And that’s just one counterexample. You raise many more excellent ones. The kind of “fix this or don’t graduate” “solution” isn’t a solution – because there’s no clear, clean way to delineate suitable graduates from non. And, you know, that’s discriminatory anyway, unless its on the grounds of academics. Thanks for writing this up.
I recently had a date with a guy during which the conversation ranged from the derangement of the media to food to music. Sounds pleasant enough on paper, but in reality it amounted to a monotonous lecture on how I should spend less time on the internet, not shop at grocery stores, avoid just about any food you can imagine besides vegetables grown in my own back yard in specially sanitized soil, and not work for any corporation (besides his, apparently.)
He was a modern ascetic, food neurotic and a dietary schoolmarm. So for my next drink (our date was over coffee) I switched from house coffee to a hot cocoa with extra sugar and extra syrup. As is my habit, I immediately undertook a vigorous inner self-analysis, faintly serenaded by sounds coming out of his mouth that sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
Why did I order that? I don’t even want that! The drink was sickly sweet and over-flavored. Obviously I was reacting to my date’s snobbery. Suddenly it started making sense to me how conservatives can so often view liberals as being authoritarian snobs. Never before did it make any sense to me how Jonah Goldberg (who is a terrible writer, by the way) could sell a book called “Liberal Fascism” or how people could earnestly respond to Sarah Palin’s tripe about only the undeveloped half of the country is Real America.
This story is another example. Imperfect people being tut-tutted about their imperfections by the same gaggle of self-righteous do-gooders that harangue me about smoking, drinking, owning a car and eating french fries. It’s as if they would like each of us to have, perched upon our shoulder, our own personal douchestached Morgan Spurlock to remind us that for every action we perform in a given day, we could have done it better.
Matt Taibbi has a fantastic article here about Sarah Palin and how she has cornered the political market for white resentment. The only flaw I saw in the otherwise brilliantly sharp piece was that he dismisses that resentment as unhinged and irrational; the crazed bitterness of people kicking against imaginary assholes who seem to exist only through their warped prism, but not in reality.
Well, here’s proof. This article is about the assholes, and the assholes are real. If you are too fat, you are not going to get through Lincoln University without getting harassed by assholes who will mindlessly assume that if you are fat you must also be ignorant, and that skinny people are skinny because they know something that you don’t, Lard-ass.
This story just makes me want to hop in my Hummer, drive straight to the nearest McDonald’s, and eat double cheeseburgers while I watch Fox News. It’s kind of no wonder why there are people who actually do it.
[...] second article that struck me was this post from Sara Libby about how fat people at Lincoln University are being forced to become un-fat or else take a [...]