Te Radar: A thump will teach some students what they need to learn

If youths on the streets of South Auckland or Porirua or Ruatoria were to regularly rain bottles on to police during periods of drunken rioting and celebratory couch-burning, the righteous indignation of the nation would be vein-poppingly palpable.

However, when those considered to be the country's best and brightest engage in such behaviour we are asked to consider it as mere hi-jinks and skylarking.

This is why Otago University students are so distressed as they discover that their actions off campus may now have a repercussion on campus.

Under the university's new Code of Conduct, students can be suspended, or expelled, for lighting fires, vandalism, throwing bottles and other types of antisocial behaviour.

None of these actions seem like the sort of activities that should be encouraged in any students, other than student revolutionaries in the act of overthrowing a despotic government. This nation is not quite at that stage - yet.

Unsurprisingly, student leaders have shrieked about how the move may breach the Bill of Rights. This bill seems to be the fallback option for all of those who wish to oppress the rights of others by continuing their antisocial antics.

Student president Paul Chong says burning couches and smashing bottles are not serious enough offences to justify bringing in baton-wielding police. Perhaps not. But if couches were not burnt, and bottles were not smashed, fun could still be had and there would be little reason for police to be in the area belting sense into senseless students.

What seems to escape the mental capacity of some of the students is that fun and hi-jinks can be had without leaving the remnants of wanton destruction.

Every time the police are called in to quell what they, and the media, often call riots but what students think of as demonstrations of their freedom of expression, students subsequently claim that police overreacted. Perhaps they do. Who could blame them?

Many a time while I attended the educational institution, I observed students whose behaviour could have been improved not through applied learning but by the swift application of a police baton.

If students can't make a link between their conduct and its repercussions then the university would be doing them a favour by expelling them and saving them from the expense of an education that they may not be intellectually qualified for.

I stumbled often through the chill breeze of a Dunedin night, many sheets to the wind, but never did I think it was my right as a supposed intellectual superior to shoplift, vandalise or vomit in anyone's dahlia bed. In rose beds? Occasionally. Over fences? Certainly. In the hood of my friend Phil's woven poncho. Regrettably.

Thankfully though the youths of South Auckland aren't burning couches and leaving streets ankle deep in glass. They are killing a lot of themselves though. I am not sure a code of conduct would work for them.