Sickness is excusable
Being ill should be counted as an excused absence
COMMENTARY
Jenny Specht

Sickness happens. As my doctor likes to remind me, college is a germy place. High traffic areas can spread disease, but illness especially abounds in college residence halls, where countless students share the same bathroom and put their grimy hands on the same doorknobs, time after time.

In elementary, middle and high school, sickness was easy. Your mom took your temperature, made vegetable soup and called the school secretary, who then marked you off with an excused absence. No harm done and you could relax on the couch and wait to feel better.

In college, our mothers have disappeared, but more than that, so have unexcused absences. In professors’ eyes, generally every absence is equal, whether it is an emergency appendectomy, an alarm failure or just a plain old skip.

And rightly so. Were your elementary teachers the final say on attendance? Of course not. The process went through the administration.

However, at TCU, there are no “excused absences.” Well, not exactly.

There is the University Excused Absence, the Grand Poo-bah that will get you out of anything. This is the golden hall pass, issued directly by Campus Life.

I got a University Excused Absence once — rare because I am not an athlete. It was my freshman year and I was excused from my Friday 2 p.m. International Politics class to attend the University Leadership Retreat. Technically, the buses didn’t leave until 3:15, but the instructions specified that they wanted us to have time to pack and get ready for the overnight trip.

I didn’t use it. I had a midterm in the class the next Monday, and well, I was a freshman.

But part of my class attendance did stem from the idea that it was silly that I should get excused from a brief 50 minute class to pack. First of all, it does not take me 50 minutes to pack for an overnight trip; secondly, what was prevented me from packing earlier?

What I did that Friday was simply trek back to Colby and pick up a sleeping bag and backpack, making it back to the Student Center in time. If I had been a commuter, of course, I might not have made it home, but I could have stuck my bags in the trunk of my car.

Anyway, I wished that absence could have carried over to finals week my senior year, as I came down with the stomach flu and couldn’t make it out of bed. I wanted to study more than I ever have in my entire life, and I simply did not have the strength. My doctor forbade contagious-me from coming into contact with people, and sent me to bed.

How simple would it have been if I could have turned in a doctor’s note to Campus Life, and they could have notified my professors? How silly was it that I could be officially excused for packing, and not for puking?

In the end, I had to turn to my professors, begging for mercy, trying to make phone calls when I could hardly have a coherent conversation. They were helpful and let me make up my finals later in the week with a proctor.

Being sick is an accident, something one cannot control. Fortunately, my professors understood this. Campus Life does not.

Jenny Specht is a senior English and political science major from Fort Worth. She can be reached at (j.l.specht@tcu.edu).