On Oct. 29, the academic fates of all UCSD students will be in the hands of the Representative Assembly.

The Academic Senate’s Committee on Educational Policy’s proposal, which dismantles the UCSD Policy on Integrity of Scholarship, will be up for a vote.

Through its proposal, the CEP effectively annuls the current system and proposes a new system of academic dishonesty procedures that is completely alien and hostile to the inherent due process rights guaranteed to students.

Under the current procedures outlined in the UCSD Policy on Integrity of Scholarship, if a professor suspects you of having committed academic dishonesty, he or she contacts your dean with suspicions and evidence. The dean calls you in for a meeting, where you are offered an informal resolution (known in the real world as a plea agreement), where you admit responsibility and accept the offered minimum sanctions. Otherwise, if you are innocent or feel the punishment is too harsh, you can request a formal hearing before the Academic Dishonesty Hearing Board. If the hearing board finds enough evidence to merit a verdict of guilt, your dean then decides the administrative penalties to be imposed.

However, under the new CEP proposal, the academic dishonesty procedures are centralized in the office of the Student Conduct Coordinator, thereby removing the deans’ responsibilities from the process and to their students, instead entrusting god-like powers to the SCC, who acts as the prosecutor and executioner.

The all-important separation of powers inherent in the current system, in which the deans are precluded from both prosecuting and imposing sanctions, is nonexistent in the proposed system under the domain of the SCC.

All bets are off; the lines of separation are permanently erased. The SCC not only determines whether to bring charges, but also prosecutes the case if it goes to the hearing board, and in the event of a guilty verdict, the SCC then determines the sanctions.

How convenient for the administration to have a prosecutor and executioner all in one office. The requisite impartiality to impose a sentence will be wholly absent if this radical change is implemented. The very act of the SCC in prosecuting the case against a student nixes the neutrality that is required in order to determine a fair and nonpunitive sanction.

Any conflict of interest the SCC may have are of no apparent interest to the Academic Senate. But it must be a matter of grave concern for the Representative Assembly, for allowing this all-mighty power to be centered in one set of hands is not only reckless and foolhardy, but also illegal under the due process provisions of UC General Policy 103.10.

The CEP proposal is so ridden with flaws that it puts the academic future of every student at risk.

The belittled role of the deans in the CEP proposal gives rise to the increased role of the faculty. The faculty members bringing the charges are no longer mere complainants; they now play an active part in the formation of the administrative penalties for academic misconduct. By heavily involving the very professor who accused the student in the first place, it breaks the required standard of impartiality of the proceedings, thus rendering the outcome as nothing but vindictive, preferential and unjust.

With these grand assaults on the due process rights of students, the very legitimacy that is needed to make the proceedings fair and just is effectively null and void.

Without the fundamental due process safeguards and protections in place, a climate of fear will reign because no one will be safe.

The UCSD Policy on Integrity of Scholarship is like our Bill of Rights. Just as we would be helpless and defenseless to arbitrary government attacks without being able to hold up our amendments as a shield of protection, so too can we not survive on this campus without fair procedures set forth in our Integrity of Scholarship Bill of Rights.

Even though the CEP proposal only immediately affects those students who are charged with academic misconduct, it doesn’t excuse the rest of us to mindlessly play at recess while the university eliminates many fundamental rights.

The rights of every student will be on the chopping block Oct. 29. And it will take a community of united students to influence the Representative Assembly to affirm our Integrity of Scholarship Bill of Rights, not dismantle it one right at a time.

We all win or we all lose. What’s it going to be?