AS ISIS prepares to shepherd us through another exhilarating season of online course registration, many students find themselves preoccupied by the seemingly disparate issue of health insurance. On Oct. 14, the University administration slapped just under 3,000 students with a registration block, to remain effective until these students could provide proof that they were enrolled in health insurance plans. As it turns out, it has been University policy since the 1960s to require students to have health insurance, but only this year have administrators begun enforcing it. Virginia Carter, director of external relations for the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, said in a phone interview that this requirement exists to serve the interest of students. As she put it, "we want them to have health care so they're protected in the event they get very sick or injured." Yet despite such warm motivations, this health insurance requirement is ultimately nothing but a paternalistic infringement on students' personal lives.
In a free society, it's up to each individual to decide for himself how to live his own life. This includes the liberty to decide whether or not health insurance is worth the thousands of dollars in premiums that insurance companies demand each year. For healthy college students, many of whom are on strictly limited budgets, it is far from clear that their best interest is served by forking over large chunks of their cash to some health care corporation. For each student, the value of insurance depends on personal circumstances and preferences. Do you want to be protected against the unlikely contingency of a medical emergency, or would you rather start a stock portfolio, buy a used car or reduce your student loans? The answers to such questions are not universal, but rather highly personal. It's your money, it's your life and it should be your choice.
Now, it's true that when students enroll at the University, they voluntarily place themselves under the authority of the administration. As such, they agree to adhere to the University's regulations, secure in the knowledge that they can withdraw at any time. But this doesn't mean that our administrators should feel free to pass whatever paternalistic regulations they want, without constraint or regard for the personal liberty of their students. In some cases, such as those involving free speech or disciplinary due process, public universities like ours are bound by the Constitution to uphold the individual rights of their students. But even in the absence of such a legal obligation, the University is still bound by a clear ethical obligation not to interfere unnecessarily with the personal lives of its students.
What institutional goal does the University serve by forcing all of its students to have health insurance? Is this coercion necessary to ensure the proper functioning of the academic community? Of course it isn't. Given the free choice, most students would obtain health insurance policies voluntarily or from their parents, and those who didn't would freely carry their own risk. But as it stands now, administrators seem to think that they know what's best for all 12,000 of their students' personal lives, and they have opted to deprive these students of the liberty to disagree.
It is an axiom of liberal society that people have diverse values and goals in life, so that widespread individual flourishing requires self-direction on the part of each person, free from inflexible regulations. This is especially true on college campuses, where the give and take of academic life breeds eccentricity, and divergent conceptions of value abound. These features of the University demand that students' individual freedom and autonomy should be maximized, not minimized by the administration. Among other things, this means that personal health care decisions must be made by individual free choice, not administrative dictate.
Speaking practically, this issue provides a much-needed opportunity for Student Council to take some substantive action on behalf of its constituents. Deservedly or not, Council has a growing reputation as a thoroughly unrepresentative body that becomes daily less responsive to student concerns, and ever more absorbed by petty internal quibbling. By standing up against administrative paternalism, representatives could do a good deal to combat this negative image, while safeguarding students' individual freedom along the way.
Anthony Dick's column appears Monday's in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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