Expelled Student Sues College Over Morality Issue

At a school where students probe the western world’s greatest minds, 23-year-old Aliya Peerzada says that college officials are being awfully small-minded for expelling her for spending nights with her fiance.

Angered by the decision by Thomas Aquinas College, the Ojai resident is suing the acclaimed Catholic school for invading her privacy and violating her civil rights.

For Peerzada, the legal battle is more a matter of principle than a quest for money or academic reinstatement.

“It’s just too bad because the school did a lot of good,” said Peerzada, the first student to sue the college in its 26-year history.

“It’s a great education,” she said. “They’re the ones who showed me to think for yourself, investigate everything, have principles. They’re the ones who taught me that.”

But school officials, who declined to discuss the lawsuit directly, say rules are rules. And Peerzada broke them.

“The rules are designed to make the intellectual life more possible,” said Peter DeLuca III, vice president for finance and administration and one of the college’s founders. “We would expel students for behavior they might not be expelled for at other schools. . . . I’ve always said I’m willing to discuss rules in an unlimited way--until they are broken.”

Nestled in the hills of Los Padres National Forest between Santa Paula and Ojai, the 225-student college is a well-regarded liberal arts school.

Publications such as Barron’s and Money magazine regularly rank it among the best buys in college education, while the National Review has lauded its high academic standards.

Tuition, room and board cost $19,200 a year, but 83% of students receive institutional financial aid. Officials proudly note that one of the college’s tenets is that lack of money should not prevent a qualified student from receiving an education.

Thomas Aquinas is the world’s only four-year Catholic college that bases its curriculum solely upon the seminal and often revolutionary writings of some of western civilization’s greatest minds.

Textbooks are nonexistent. Instead, students go to the source, plowing through the best works of Plato and Aristotle, Keats and de Tocqueville, Marx and Einstein.

In short, the college touts itself as an oasis of academic order and tradition in a world where students elsewhere receive credit for such courses as the philosophy of sex and love.

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Against this backdrop is a quest for truth that dictates that the teachings of Kant and Copernicus play second fiddle to the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

“Theology is seen as the queen of the sciences and the other sciences are seen as the handmaidens,” said R. Glen Coughlin, college dean and a former student. “We see the faith as a kind of stimulus for the academic life.”

As such, the ordered life of the close-knit community borders upon the austere. The intent is to foster reflection and contemplation for subjects that demand rigorous discipline and sustained concentration. The student handbook calls for “exemplary personal conduct” to maintain “the moral atmosphere essential to intellectual pursuits.”

“It would be inconsistent to seek high and serious things in class and live outside of class by unruled appetites,” reads the student handbook. “It is essential that social order and good habits be achieved and maintained if the purpose of the college is to be achieved.”

Rules designed to reinforce that premise include a dress code that bans jeans and requires women to wear dresses of modest length. Curfews limit late-night excursions, and usually only married students are permitted to live off campus.

Dorms occupied by the opposite sex are off-limits, alcohol use brings expulsion and students and teachers routinely address each other as “Miss” and “Mr.” in class.

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Even videocassette recorders in students’ rooms are banned as contradictory to “the high dignity of the intellectual life.”

The all-consuming academic environment--the college has a mandatory Friday night lecture or concert series--can lead to insularity, Peerzada said.

But worse, she maintains, the regulations and attitudes breed an atmosphere of intolerance and even fear.

“You don’t really get a sense it is this free-thinking school,” she said. “It’s very hypocritical. . . . It’s extreme, it’s controlling--and I know they don’t do this to men.”

Peerzada describes herself as “very conservative”--as a California Republican Assembly member she voted for black Catholic commentator Alan Keyes during the 1996 presidential campaign--but nonetheless discovered the campus culture could be stifling.

She recalls being requested to don a different outfit rather than the snug, sequined dress she wore to a campus dance.

Peerzada refused and suspects it was the flashiness of her attire that some people objected to, since other women were wearing tight dresses.

“I was a student that was a loud, in-your-face kind of leader, and I always had the feeling they were trying to suppress my personality,” she said. “I’ve actually had students argue with me that women shouldn’t be involved in things that would make them impure.”

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Peerzada, a New Hampshire native, began attending the college in 1993 after a year at an East Coast prep school en route to what she believed would be an Ivy League education.

An older brother had attended Thomas Aquinas and an older sister graduated from the college. Peerzada said she visited the college at age 16 and hated it.

But at age 19, she had a “huge urge” to immerse herself in the sort of education only available at Thomas Aquinas and enrolled.

“It’s sort of an education for life,” she said. “It’s not an education for a career.”

After completing the first two years, Peerzada put her academic career on hold to earn money to complete her education.

During her year off, she got engaged and moved in with her fiance.

After returning to school, Peerzada spent some nights at her fiance’s house, according to her lawsuit. Staying off campus overnight is permitted, as long as students sign out and do not return to campus after curfew.

There is not a specific mention in the student handbook about spending the night off campus with a member of the opposite sex.

But the rules do say students must “respect the standards of Christian conduct.” Failure to do so can result in expulsion, the handbooks says.

Peerzada concedes she did not consistently sign out, believing the rule was not strictly enforced. Other Thomas Aquinas students concur the rule is not always followed.

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But last fall, Peerzada said, she was called into three meetings by the college’s assistant dean of students to discuss her overnight off-campus absences and her failure to consistently sign out.

As a result, Peerzada agreed to stay on campus during weeknights and not leave the campus at all for three weeks as punishment for not adhering to college rules.

Peerzada requested she be allowed to keep her car on campus on weekends so that she could return to her dorm to sleep after visiting her fiance. But college officials were unwilling to grant the request, so the dispute remained unresolved.

The student handbook states the privilege of keeping a vehicle on campus may be revoked if rules are not followed.

Finally, at a Dec. 12 meeting--the day before Christmas break--school officials demanded that Peerzada stop staying overnight at her fiance’s house at any time, including the upcoming holidays.

Peerzada said she was given 24 hours to agree.

She did not, and without her knowledge a college committee that enforces disciplinary matters decided her behavior was harming the school’s reputation, according to her lawsuit.

Peerzada was given no recourse to appeal the decision, something she contends was arbitrary and unfair.

“The ante just kept on going further and further,” she said. “Here’s a school that has people of all religions, all thoughts, and they think they can be as controlling as telling a person where they can go on their holidays, and they enforce it selectively. . . . They just kept on saying, ‘There’s scandal, there’s scandal. . . . We have to repair the scandal.’ ”

Peerzada was given the option of withdrawing. She did not. In a Dec. 13 letter from college Dean Coughlin, which is included in the lawsuit, she was notified of her expulsion.

“The Instruction Committee . . . has decided that you should leave the college, because you are now not willing to agree not to stay overnight at your fiance’s house, and this action would harm the reputation of the college,” the letter reads in part.

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Andrew Koenig, Peerzada’s Ventura attorney, sees an interesting tension in the case--still months from trial--between a student’s right to privacy and a private organization’s right to religious freedom.

But he believes college officials went too far, noting there are no school rules requiring Peerzada to live on campus on weekends, let alone holidays.

“This is a unique suit,” he said. “She enrolled in college. She didn’t enroll in a convent.”

Two of the handful of students who remained on campus during the summer vacation said they were unaware of the circumstances that led to the suit.

Nevertheless, they said students must abide by college rules.

“Anybody should be prepared to suffer the consequences of not following a rule regardless of whether anybody else followed it,” said Jacinta Bolin, 19, referring to Peerzada’s failure to sign out.

Added 18-year-old Katherine Ellis: “If you’re a troublemaker they’ll keep a special watch over you, but that does make sense.”

Thomas Aquinas officials say it is impossible to have an intellectual life amid moral disorder.

“We have to be concerned with the students’ actions for the very sake of the intellectual program,” DeLuca said.

But Peerzada sees the college’s actions as a betrayal of the trust she placed in the institution.

Furthermore, not only does she view the administration’s actions as invasive, capricious and discriminatory, but on a practical level the college credits she has accrued may not fully transfer to another school.

Peerzada was recently accepted to UC Santa Barbara, where she intends to study geophysics.

“I don’t want this to happen to another student, and I want students to know they have to keep questioning because that’s why they are there,” she said. “When you get to that extreme of moral scrutiny, they were never going to back off. . . . I told them I would make sure everybody would know. I’m not ashamed.”