University shifts responsibility for discipline appeals process to deans

Students received a campus-wide e-mail Monday informing them of recent changes to Rights, Rules, Responsibilities that, beginning April 1, will affect the composition of the disciplinary committee and the process through which students can appeal its rulings.

The present language of the process calls for students who are appealing committee decisions to take up their complaints with President Shapiro, who has the authority to decide to either uphold, lessen or increase the penalty. Under the new plan, Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel will now assume this role, special assistant to the president Ann Halliday explained yesterday.

To avoid a conflict of interest, the Dean of the College's seat on the committee has been transferred to the Dean of Student Life, whose position as the non-voting committee chair is now assigned to the Dean of the Undergraduates. The overall composition of the committee has not changed, however.

The reasons behind the rules change are twofold, according to Halliday — to clarify the convoluted wording of the rule and to alleviate the appeals' burden on the president's office, which has proved inconvenient and unfair to students and the University.

"The process will be the same — it will just be a different face at the end of the table," committee member Ian Hagemann '00 said. "The number of appeals — and each appeal — puts a certain burden on the president's office and on his assistant. The feeling was that it would be handled equally well if not better within the structure of the Dean of the College office."

Because Shapiro's schedule leaves little time to review the cases, delegating the responsibility to a different office would be less likely to "string people along for an extended period of time," a welcome change for all parties involved, Hagemann said.

All parties except maybe one — Malkiel, who will take on the appeals workload. "I think it will be manageable," she said, "[though] it's my impression that a good number of people do appeal."

Slavic languages professor Olga Hasty, one of the committee's four faculty members, said the change seems logical. "What we are doing as a committee is interpreting what is written in the Rights, Rules, Responsibilities and evaluating the information brought before us," she explained. "The official function of the deans does not play any role as long as it is an informed member of the administration."

Predating former University President William Bowen's administration in the 1970s and 1980s, the appeals process was a vestige of the days when the University was much smaller. By allowing the president to review appeals, conflict of interest can be more easily avoided, Halliday noted.

"This goes back a long way. I am sure it was from a very different University with a different administration that had fewer routes of appeal. When you look at other institutions, it is really an anomaly," she said. "I think everybody believes this was a change for the better."