When campus administrators charged John Muir College alumnus Bryan Barton with violations of the student conduct code stemming from his failed bid to take control of the student government in a coup nearly two years ago, he turned to a more democratic institution to make his defense: an independent judiciary. Barton maintains he was serious, but few fear the former Koala editor for his autocratic tendencies.
However, Barton was an anomaly. Every year, the university’s student conduct coordinator processes approximately 2,000 alleged nonacademic conduct violations — one for every 12.5 students, though some are by repeat offenders; nearly all get settled informally between the students and the deans, and few ever bother to take their case to one of the campus’ six student judicial boards.
“It’s a big problem,” Earl Warren College Judicial Board Chair Ryan Raam said. “A lot of students are sometimes discouraged — not by the deans, not by the administration — because of the length of the process, because of the bureaucracy. A lot of times, students just want a quick resolution, and they’ll take a sanction from the dean.”
In the UC system, each campus has its own scheme for discerning the guilt of students accused of misconduct. What makes UCSD unusual, compared to most other campuses across the nation, is that the judicial bodies making these decisions are made up exclusively of students.
“The courts in California, as all of the states, by and large defer to colleges and universities to establish a system that adjudicates misconduct, and they imposed very large generic standards of due process,” acting Student Policies and Judicial Affairs Director Anthony Valladolid said. “Essentially, it’s about fairness.”
At UCLA, a special committee of students and four faculty members — “at least two of whom shall have training in the law or experience or arbitration of disputes,” according to campus policies — meet to rule on cases brought by university deans; in UCSD’s system, hearings before a panel of peers is what Valladolid calls an “absolute right.”
An informal poll of the nation’s top universities in 2000 conducted by the Dartmouth, the student paper at Dartmouth College, found that most colleges allow students to play a role in campus judicial bodies, though that responsibility is usually shared with faculty, staff and administrators. At Harvard University, it found that not a single student sat on the judicial board.
Though deans at some of UCSD’s colleges are involved in appointing students to the boards, most of those active in the system agree that they function with an unprecedented degree of independence. At John Muir College, the student affairs dean is not permitted to sit in on the hearings, and at Thurgood Marshall College, new judicial board members are elected by current ones.
“I would say that having a jury of your peers is more authentic in college than it is in the real world, because these really are your peers,” John Muir College Judicial Board Chair John Perry said. “I think it’s important to be able to offer students this trial system.”
Over the past two years, Perry’s board has ruled on everything from the Barton case to allegations of theft from Sierra Summit and alcohol write-ups. By and large, though, few students take their cases to the panels; Raam’s board hasn’t met since the last academic year.
Under the university’s conduct code, students accused of violations are allowed to retain a student advocate to accompany them to meetings with the deans, a right few know about or exercise, according to A.S. Commissioner of Student Advocacy Travis Silva. Even when students admit their guilt and agree to a sanction, they have five days to change their mind and ask for a hearing (the admission cannot be used as evidence against them).
Until quite recently, the university allowed students to hire actual attorneys to represent them before the boards, though administrators changed the policy to forbid them from asking questions after a particularly contentious case several years ago.
The process, however, differs markedly from the authentic judicial system: In criminal court, prosecutors must prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt; at UCSD (and many other universities), they must do so merely by a “preponderance” of the evidence, showing that guilt is simply more likely than innocence.
“The burden of proof is dangerously low,” Silva stated in an e-mail. “When it’s a case of he-said-she-said, a lot of students lose even though there’s not really any evidence against them. It’s illogical that students can be expelled from the university when there’s no real evidence against them.”
Board chairs and Valladolid, though, defend the more relaxed standard.
“In a criminal case … there is a potential for a loss of liberty and, potentially, in a capital case, for a loss of life,” Valladolid said. “When you’re dealing on that magnitude, the standard has to be very high. Preponderance of the evidence does two things: It recognizes that the punishment is much reduced, and it recognizes that you will not have the complexities in the system that does the adjudication.”
In addition, though the judicial boards’ discretion over guilt is absolute, they have little control over sanctions, which are determined later by the college deans. The separation, Valladolid argues, provides a more equitable outcome, allowing the boards to hear the facts of the case without being prejudiced by things like prior offenses, which are considered separately by the deans.
“No system established or constructed by human beings will be perfect,” said Vic Merjanian, chair of the Thurgood Marshall College Judicial Board. “But the system we have on campus is as close to perfect as I think we can get. … It really is fair to every person involved in the system.”
However, even Merjanian admits there could be improvements, especially in expanding student awareness and allowing the six college judicial boards to work more closely together. None of the chairs interviewed for this story, for example, knew the identity of his equivalent in the other colleges, or had any knowledge about how the other boards function.
For Barton, the judicial board system failed; he maintains that the students on the body hearing his case were merely “tools of the administration.” After being found guilty by the Muir College board, he appealed to the college’s provost, who upheld the conviction.
“What I got is that they were really new students that lived on campus,” he said. “And I got the feeling that they were very cozy with the dean.”
Overall, there are few documented complaints about the system. But that may be because so few students actually use it.
