The Code and Procedures Review Committee has recommended changes to the Student Code of Conduct, which are currently open for public comment until April 20. Reforms are needed, but the proposals of the CPRC will not correct the failures we have observed or provide adequate protection to students.
The Cornell AAUP chapter has an analysis with recommended revisions at our chapter website. Here we want to step back, and ask what a Code of Conduct should look like.
For much of the 20th century, universities and colleges were treated as having in loco parentis authority over students: schools stood in for the parents, with the same authority for regulating conduct and imposing discipline that a parent has over a child. Students had few procedural protections, and restrictions on their behavior could be quite intrusive.
The partial democratizations of higher education that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement helped break apart this explicitly authoritarian relationship. Students at public schools were recognized as having First Amendment rights after sit-ins and other actions at schools across the South. The logic was extended to private colleges and universities, relying less on the First Amendment and more on implied contracts, as well as a broader cultural shift accompanying schools’ competitive efforts to attract students. The vibrant political life at colleges and universities simultaneously produced this change and was enabled by it.
Historically, Cornell’s disciplinary procedures were intended to be educational, most critically by placing them under faculty control. Cornell also had a single Code of Conduct, applicable to faculty, students and staff alike. While the different positions of each meant that there was never total uniformity, a common Code had the advantage of creating shared expectations (it is also a requirement of New York’s Henderson Law). In 2020, the Code was revised to be limited to students, and the new code continued a broader centralization of governance and disciplinary procedures at Cornell, one occurring within the context of a nationwide trend towards increased university liability.
Even today, however, faculty, students and staff are the ultimate authorities responsible for student discipline. Determining responsibility for Code violations, as well as for deciding upon sanctions, is the authority of Cornell’s existing hearing panels composed of faculty, students and staff, in which administration officers have only a facilitating role. These officers cannot vote on responsibility or sanctions, nor can they participate in the substantive deliberations other than as a resource.
Over the last few years, extraordinary demands for repressing student activism across the country led administrations to get creative. At Cornell, what had been an infrequently used provision — temporary suspensions, issued without any adjudication on the merits, and at the discretion of University administrators but limited to cases where “immediate action” was needed to protect the community — became the go-to instrument for dealing with protestors.
Suspensions impose severe costs: loss of equity in courses, loss of tuition, exclusion from housing, being cut off from friends, among others. Perverse abuses resulted. Lawyers for student protestors worried more about the consequences of our internal disciplinary processes than legal sanctions. The cases dragged on, in one case for nearly a year, after which the student was acquitted. Students were deemed unsafe to be on campus for courses or social events, but, if they were graduate students, were required to continue teaching. Temporary suspensions were a form of prosecutorial overcharging, allowing the administration to coerce students into extremely restrictive “alternative resolutions.”
Administrators still cannot vote on determinations of responsibility, but who needs to when they can impose much more severe consequences with almost no procedural checks, calling them “temporary” or “interim” or “emergency” measures?
In December 2024, the Cornell Committee on Expressive Activity expressed dismay about the time before temporary suspensions were resolved, the severe consequences without “a full investigation and finding of fact,” their punitive use and their being issued for “non-violent conduct, without adequate due process.” It recommended reforms to re-establish the “protective rather than punitive” nature of such suspensions. The Faculty Senate, the Student Assembly, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, CGSU-UE and the University Assembly, have all passed resolutions or statements opposing the abuses of temporary suspensions and/or calling for specific reforms to the process.
So, what should the Code look like? The language limiting temporary suspensions was insufficient to prevent abuses. As anyone who knows their U.S. constitutional history can tell us, when parchment barriers fail, you need more structural checks and restrictions.
(1) One of the most common forms is to sunset extraordinary measures after a short period, unless reauthorized by a different body (e.g., the War Powers Resolution of 1973). This might take the form of requiring interim or emergency measures to end after 30 days unless reimposed by a body independent of that which initially issued them.
(2) Extraordinary measures need to be accompanied by extraordinary responsibilities, instead of the most severe consequences imposing the fewest demands on administrators. An easy solution would be to require the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards to commit to a specific date, not extending beyond 30 days, for a final resolution by a Hearing Panel at the time measures are imposed.
(3) Separate institutions check abuses of power. The appeals body needs to be genuinely independent of the decision to impose interim measures, meaning not just different people but different lines of authority. The closest the CPRC recommendations come is including a Dean on an appeals panel otherwise composed of central administration officers. Luckily, we have a body of already-trained faculty, students and staff — the existing hearing panelists — who should be included on the appeals panel.
Across the country, we are seeing revisions of conduct codes that re-establish much of the authoritarian relationship that existed during the bygone in loco parentis era. Perversely, the repressive measures are being developed primarily to target political expression.
We have lost the plot.
University codes of conduct should be educational and restorative. They should, as much as possible, set common expectations for students, faculty and staff. They should be maximally protective of speech. They should treat universities and colleges not as tightly regulated spaces, where any unprescribed activity is a disruption to be repressed, but as vibrant microcosms of a free and open society. Of course, University administration has legal responsibilities to provide for campus safety, so some interim measures are appropriate.
What the last few years has shown, however, is that if such measures are available to use without any real check, they will be.
The Cornell Chapter of the American Association of University Professors is an inclusive and broad based association of teachers and researchers at Cornell, committed to academic freedom, shared governance and education for all. Their president can be contacted at dab465@cornell.edu.
