[reikonomusha]

The way you’re communicating is wildly unempathetic, and I truly hope your zero-tolerance faux-friendly “better for everyone” attitude isn’t ruining other students’ experiences. You’re painting the author as some sort of lazy individual who does things on his own accord. “Sleeping in” and “ignoring emails” doesn’t seem to be accurately portraying. Being online at 8AM is not “sleeping in” by most people’s standards. Perusing and participating in discussions is “not ignoring emails”. He made a mistake, RC has zero tolerance for it.

Why not just say “We have a zero tolerance policy for missing mandatory events” without all of the non-sequitur pseudo-rationalization? That’s OK. People may not agree with it, and it may hurt other people financially, but at least it’s direct and honest.