Faculty wary of new Student Judicial Charter

Some doubt its potential impact The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but reaction to proposals advanced this week by the Student Judicial Reform Committee has been strong and immediate. Faculty members such as History Professor Bruce Kuklick, who felt the sting of repeated cheating scandals five years ago in his History 451 class -- or Alan Kors, who represented College junior and Daily Pennsylvanian staff photographer Eden Jacobowitz during the "water buffalo" case in 1993 -- contend that the new charter is seriously flawed. But Provost Stanley Chodorow said he is "very pleased" with the proposed Student Judicial Charter and Code of Academic Integrity, drafts of which are currently available for comment. Still, disagreement lingers about the function of student-faculty hearing boards that the charter creates. Chodorow believes they should make recommendations to him or his designee, while SJRC members want to empower the boards to render binding decisions. Chodorow, however, remains optimistic. "I had a series of very good meetings with the committee," he said. "We were able to clarify the issues and to have very good discussions of them." Kuklick said his sense of the draft -- from prior discussion with Chodorow -- is that the charter "gives students much more leeway than they ought to have," since it provides for near-equal student and faculty representation on the hearing boards. "It is absolutely clear that students should be summarily punished, and my feeling is that all of this stuff weighs things too heavily in favor of the poor, beleaguered students who might be wrongly accused," Kuklick said. Kuklick also said he understands Chodorow's contention that a student-run honor system would work best, because it would allow students to police themselves. But Kuklick said he believes that at a large school like the University, where many students think they can cheat without consequence, such an honor system is "naive and idealistic." "I hope that if I catch students cheating, this [charter] will not prevent me from making decisions about what I ought to do," he said. "I hope it will be a help and not a hindrance?I don't want to see a system in place that will diminish the prerogatives of the faculty in dealing with this." Kors said he is opposed to University intervention in any criminal or civil matter that would ordinarily be argued and settled in a court of law. Characterizing the draft document as "a nightmare of structural detail without procedural protection," he added that as the charter now stands, it deprives the parties involved of rules of fairness and stipulations of due process. "It gives absolute discretion to the judicial system to put someone through the terror of hearings," Kors said. He cited the proposed charter's lack of a presumption of innocence, burden of proof, specific time-frame, right to confront one's accusers, to cross-examination of witnesses and to an advisor who can intervene on a respondent's behalf as among its many problems. But even when dealing with alleged violations of the academic integrity code -- a function that Kors said is within the University's jurisdiction -- he stressed the importance of system-wide due process aimed at protecting the accused from arbitrary persecution. "Since there are no procedural or substantive protections of one who is accused, this is only not a kangaroo court if one imagines saints and the just administering it," Kors said. College junior Wilton Levine, who chaired the student judicial charter working group, said he hopes that before Feb. 17, members of the University community who have concrete suggestions for improving the draft document -- which appears today in Almanac -- will send their ideas to the SJRC's e-mail account, judicial@pobox. Chodorow said he is confident that after receiving feedback from the University community, he and University President Judith Rodin will resolve the issue of hearing board jurisdiction based on the system's organizing principles. Following that decision, the final document will be referred to the University's General Counsel's Office, which will develop "the detailed regulations," said Chodorow.

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