Puffin’s Place

Thanks to today’s Daily Beast for alerting me to yet another incursion into personal rights: a university that may not graduate students it deems too fat.

A Different Kind of Test
November 20, 2009

More than two dozen seniors at Lincoln University, in Oxford, Pa., are in danger of not being able to graduate this spring — not because they’re under disciplinary probation or haven’t fulfilled the requirements of their majors, but because they were obese as freshmen.

All had body mass index (BMI) scores above 30 — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ threshold for obesity — when they arrived on campus in the fall of 2006, but none have taken college-sanctioned steps to show they’ve lost weight or at least tried. They’re in the historically black university’s first graduating class required to either have a BMI below 30 or to take “Fitness for Life,” a one semester class that mixes exercise, nutritional instruction and discussion of the risks of obesity.

It might sound like a joke, or a violation of individual rights, but James L. DeBoy, chair of Lincoln’s health, physical education and recreation department, said he sees it as his “professional responsibility to be honest and tell students they’re not healthy.”

How do you like that? Without doubt this same university at least occasionally hands a diploma to a drunk or drug user, to a woman who cheats on her partner or a guy that beats his wife, not to mention the number of undergraduate degrees that go annually to the minimally literate. But Lincoln University has taken upon itself to deny earned degrees to those whose BMI displeases the university. Morality clearly is of less importance than physical geography.

It’s pretty nifty to see at least one US university has its eye on what is really important. I surely hope its donors are aware of this policy. Especially the heavy ones.