New draft revisions of the Student Disciplinary Code were presented by four employees at a University of Idaho Faculty Senate meeting. Deputy General Counsel Jim Craig, Dean of Students Blaine Eckles and Faculty Senate Secretary Liz Brandt gave the senate an overview of the changes included in their new proposals.
The new investigatory process would include four stages, according to the presenters: investigation, Student Conduct Administrator, Student Conduct board and appeal. If added into the code, this process will eliminate many of the current mandatory hearings and processes during disciplinary investigations.
At the Faculty Senate meeting Oct. 10, Craig spoke of new revisions to the proposed changes to the student disciplinary process since the previous Faculty Senate meeting. Two of these changes added a section of confidentiality and defined what an investigator is. The senate ultimately voted to approve these amendments. At the same meeting, the Faculty Senate unanimously voted to create the Student Conduct Board, which merged the Student Appeals Committee and the Student Disciplinary Review Board.
According to Brandt, who served on the student disciplinary code task force and wrote the newest draft revisions, the last revision of the Student Code of Conduct in 2013 and 2014 was highly contested. She said what emerged was a mixture between two different models regarding disciplinary processes. Since then, the Faculty Senate has passed some emergency revisions to the Student Disciplinary Code, one the revisions creating the Student Appeals Committee in 2016.
According to the group of presenters, the primary goal of the new revisions aims to make the investigatory and hearing process regarding disciplinary actions move quicker. Brandt said the goal is not to change any of the substantive provisions in the conduct, but to change the process in which they investigate and conclude cases.
Brandt became involved in this process when she found herself disappointed with the way a case, on which she sat on the appeals board, was processed. Brandt said she also heard about issues that had occurred in several other cases with the Student Disciplinary code as it had been drafted. In the Fall 2015, the Faculty Senate put together a task force to examine the code. Brandt was the chair of that task force and has been working on the code ever since.
“We can’t have too complicated of a process that the university simply doesn’t have the resources or the ability to keep up with,” Brandt said regarding the complexity of the current code and the task force’s attempt to make it simpler.
Brandt said the thing she deems most important out of the task force’s work is the changes to the investigation process under the new code. Brandt said the new code revisions provide a better opportunity to exchange documents before a hearing. One of the new changes is that the investigator must write a report. The student who is being investigated as well as the complainant in a Title IX case may get a copy of that report.
The report must include all details regarding the case, so that the complainant, or student being investigated, may write a response to that report before a hearing is conducted. Brandt said this would decrease the amount of witness statements given at a hearing and the overall time of a hearing. Witness statements would instead be given within that initial investigative report.
“Before, I think students felt like they couldn’t trust student services to participate, which left student services in the position where they only had one side of the story some of the time. Then it was just a big sandbag before they got to a hearing. So, I think this is much better,” Brandt said.
ASUI Representative to the Faculty Senate, Jesse Watson, served as a student representative on the student disciplinary code task force. According to Watson, ASUI appointed representatives to sit on the Student Code of Conduct task force to help revise the process and improve it. The ASUI representatives on the task force also included ASUI Vice President Catherine Yenne and Chief of Staff Jordan Johnson.
“ASUI believes the new changes will help streamline how we deal with all disciplinary procedures. We believe it is a huge victory for our university,” Watson said.
According to Watson, the most important thing for students to know regarding the changes it that it will speed up the process in which the university handles violations of the Student Code of Conduct.
Elizabeth Marshall can be reached at [email protected]