If a student were involved in a fight in the middle of Kincaid Street, near Rennie’s Landing and the University’s Computing Center, would the University be able to discipline the student?
If a student were accused of rape, and the case was brought before a “Community Standards Hearing Board,” how much should his or her lawyer be allowed to speak before the board?
If the ASUO Executive were found to be corrupt, would the University Senate be allowed to sanction it as a student group?
These three hypothetical situations reflect the larger issues debated at the first townhall meeting organized by the ad hoc Senate
Committee on the Student Conduct Code on Monday night. Questions about the University’s geographical jurisdiction, student legal representation and student government vs. University Senate authority were discussed by about 20 people. Most people present were current and future ASUO officials, and the rest were ad hoc committee members, individual students and University officials.
For the past 12 years, the Student Conduct Committee had been revising the current code until the Senate decided last May to take that committee’s most recent version and create a different committee with the same job of updating the code. The new committee has until May 10 to create a final draft for the full Senate to vote on.
The proposed changes to the code are intended to make the University’s code more similar to the Model Code of Student Conduct, a document 80 percent of U.S. colleges and universities currently use verbatim or as a basis for their codes.
Of the 5,100 conduct cases brought to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs this year, only seven will result in a formal hearing, and the rest are settled through an informal hearing with one referee, said Chris Loschiavo, director of the student judicial affairs office.
Formal hearings are currently modeled after the criminal legal system, and lawyers can speak on behalf of students. The proposed changes are aimed at making formal hearings less legalistic to encourage students to use the process.
“The changes we’ve made are that it’s going to be much more in keeping with how we do things in classrooms,” ad hoc committee chairwoman Lisa Freinkel said. “It’s the level of a conversation.
“What we’re saying is that the only people who can help us promulgate our standards and have a fair community are lawyers who are outside of our community,” Freinkel said. “To me this is all about ownership of our conduct code and our community and our standards.”
For Casey Campbell, a psychology graduate student, the changes that lessen the presence of a student’s lawyer in the formal hearing are problematic, particularly for non-native English speakers and people who are disabled or otherwise disadvantaged in their ability to communicate articulately.
The committee added “adjacent sidewalks and streets” to the University’s geographic jurisdiction, drawing criticism from student government officials who said the language is too vague.
Both Freinkel and Loschiavo said the language changes were based on the Model Code of Student Conduct and the boundaries defined by the federal Cleary Act, which regulates how colleges and universities must report crimes on campus.
ASUO Programs Administrator David Goward pointed out a conflict between the code’s ability to revoke a student group’s official recognition and sanction and the same authority held by the ASUO.Goward asked whose authority is superior, and how a conflict of authority would be resolved.
President Adam Walsh strongly advocated taking away the code’s ability to revoke groups’ charters, saying it flat out didn’t belong in the code.
Freinkel said she had not been aware of the conflict until the meeting and said she would address it at the next meeting.
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