The Student Code of Conduct is a document reviled by most of the student body — or at least, it has been.
New recommendations made by the Judicial Quality Team suggest that students next year may have better luck when facing matters that have, in the past, led to judicial procedure (see Page 1). The two main recommendations focus on the “standard of evidence” that is required to prove a student’s guilt and the determination of culpability, also known as “transferred culpability.”
As the Code stands now, students are found guilty by a “preponderance of evidence,” which means only that it is “more likely than not” that the student is guilty. Next year, a guilty verdict will be determined by “clear and convincing evidence,” which necessitates that the evidence show that the student is “substantially more likely [to be guilty] than not.” Call us crazy, but it seems only logical that evidence be as close to conclusive as possible, and we applaud the decision to adopt this higher requirement.
The other major change addresses an issue near and dear to many of us — that is, who gets in trouble for doing what. By next fall, students will no longer be held responsible for being present when violations are committed, but rather will only be charged for directly participating in the infraction. No longer will we be held responsible for suitemates that we didn’t (or did) choose to live with in the first place. Our roommates will no longer possess the means to drag our records down with their own, and we find this nothing short of monumental in its simplicity. Nevertheless, we support this change in no uncertain terms.
In short, we are pleased to discover that not only will it be necessary to prove us guilty before tarnishing our good names, but that it will also be necessary for us to actually do something wrong to earn punishment. These days, it is a breath of fresh air to have some tangible changes emerge from a group on campus, and in a timely fashion to boot. We can only hope that this is the beginning of a new era in bureaucratic efficiency for the various administrative groups on campus.