College Hearing Board is known to be where the most severe cases of violations of college policies go for appropriate ruling. Before last year, College Hearing Board had no student-selected peer representation to take part in the decision making processes.
During the summer, SGA decided to take initiatives to put communally selected students on the board. Harry Krejsa ’10, SGA President, and Joanna Demars ’10, SGA Vice President of Academic Adivising, who wrote the initiatives, decided to take the reform of the boards a few steps further: make their records of cases public and reveal the identities of student jurors.
“What is one of the biggest goals of this year’s administration is to enhance students’ stake in all parts of the college,” Krejsa said. “That’s especially important in these Hearing Boards because we’re dealing with people who have violated the standards of our self governing community and an inherently personal and important part of how we perceive ourselves as a community is how we treat others who have violated it.”
The first part of the reforms aims to give students the opportunity to apply to both Hearing Board and Judicial Council as one body of applicants, which SGA interviews and selects from, making their presence on Hearing Board more institutionally supported. Also, SGA will train the new jurors in an orientation before classes start in August.
Not only will the students have a more legitimate presence on the board, their identities will be made public from now on,even though who is deciding any given case will still be kept confidential.
The availability of records of the cases put before Hearing Board will also come into public knowledge. In order to protect the individuals involved in the cases, SGA will redact any identifying information within the records when they are released.
The records will be released at the end of the semester in order to foil any attempt to chronologically organize the cases and find out the students involved. “I think that’s a really important piece of self governance that needs to be celebrated and utilized,” Demars said. “[…]It’s important that students realize this is a really good thing that’s happening on campus and hopefully better things will come of it.”