You’ve decided to participate on your college’s “conduct board,” meaning you will help adjudicate cases in which a student has allegedly violated university standards. These can range from harassment to sexual assault.
If this first-person account of getting trained for a conduct board is indicative of other schools’ processes, then heaven help whoever gets hauled before these quixotic juries of their peers.
Southern Oregon University student Stephanie Keaveney, a summer intern for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, describes going through “a few hours of training” to join a pool of “specially trained students” who decide if their accused peers were “more likely than not” to have violated university standards:
What the training didn’t include was information about the rights of students. The training did not impress upon us the importance of academic freedom, nor did we learn how to tell the difference between constitutionally protected and unprotected speech.
So when we were asked to decide cases involving students accused of violating harassment policies, irresponsible use of technology, or other violations involving constitutionally questionable community standards, we, like the accused students, were ill-equipped to decipher the difference between actual harassment and protected speech. As those who follow FIRE’s work have seen, many college conduct boards have a great deal of discretion in their proceedings and usually don’t strictly adhere to the principles of due process or freedom of speech on campus. …
It is imperative that all members of university conduct boards, especially students, are trained to understand due process as it pertains to university proceedings and constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. Without adequate training, it is impossible for conduct board members to decide properly that a student in fact violated university policy and is not being punished for expressive actions or speech which may be protected.
Read her whole entry here.
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