BFC set to debate new student code

The first thing you might notice when you pick up the proposed revisions to the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities and Conduct is that it's shorter.\nMuch shorter. Fifty-one pages shorter. \nAnd for Mary Popp, chairwoman of Bloomington Faculty Council's Student Affairs Committee, it's taken a long time to get it that way. \n"The last time we tried to revise it, really in earnest, was about 1 1/2 to almost two years ago," Popp said. At that time, the IU board of trustees ratified chiefly cosmetic changes to the code regarding the increased presence of technology on campus. \n"But the code has gotten too long and too unwieldy," she added, "so we decided to make it shorter so that someone will actually read it."\nThe new 14-page code -- IU's skeletal outline of the basic rights, responsibilities and expectations of all students and student groups -- takes its first step toward adoption today, when the BFC will be the first organization to debate potential changes to the code.\nSome potentially topics are particularly likely to draw attention at today's meeting. The council is expected to discuss sections of the code addressing off-campus misconduct, information about cheating and plagiarism, a recommendation to allow alcohol to be consumed by legal drinkers in campus living areas and word choice in a provision defining amorous relationships between faculty and students. \nThe BFC is scheduled to vote on the entire code at its March 22 meeting. After that, the University Faculty Council and the trustees will have to approve the code by the end of this summer so it can be printed and distributed for the fall semester. Simplifying the code is meant to address multiple system-wide concerns, Popp said. The committee wants to ensure the code is intended to be a broad statement that applies to all IU campuses, not just branch campuses following Bloomington's lead.\n"One of the things that complicates our code is it has to be written for all of the campuses," Dean of Students Richard McKaig said. "The level of complexity you get on the Bloomington campus frankly makes no sense at all on the Kokomo or Southeast campuses."\nThe drafting committee would like each campus to develop its own procedural code for student complaints and student discipline to fit its size and necessity. These due process procedures diagram the course of action a student must take to file a complaint related to any violation of the code, as well as disciplinary action against a student.\nPopp said she was unsure whether the procedural code would become available in separate printed documents for students or whether IU might utilize a Web-based interface.\n"We don't want it to be more like a tax code than a student code," McKaig said. "I think it will be an improvement when all is said and done, but if I have any anxiety at all in the process of simplifying, it's that we not lose something for student rights and not make it more difficult for students to find out what their rights are."\nIn eliminating the procedural process, another Big Ten school's code -- the University of Michigan's -- served as a guiding tool.\n"What I noticed in studying the University of Michigan code," McKaig said, "or what they call the code in Michigan, is really only a portion of what we were calling a code. The procedures sections were not in their code and were in separate documents."\nRemoving the legal procedures sections considerably shortened the code and allowed the committee to clarify its language.\nTo achieve this clarity, they sought student input, spearheaded by IUSA. Scott Norman, vice president for the IUSA Congress, said the Congress spent 2 1/2 hours going through the proposed revision, almost line-by-line.\n"We don't know when the code is going to be revised again," Norman said. "Any changes that students want to be made need to be done now."\nBrian Clifford, chief justice of the Student Body Supreme Court, said it wasn't feasible to get all the students to submit concerns or comments regarding the revisions, so IUSA surveyed the larger student groups to catch a narrowed glimpse of campus-wide concerns. \nStudents have responded, Clifford said, but not overwhelmingly to provide input on what he called "perhaps the most important document for students in the University community."\n"Your right to protest, the student government, whether you can drink on campus, issues of academic misconduct -- anything about student life that isn't related to class or your grade -- is going to be contained in this document," Clifford said.\nNorman said students voiced concerns about racial and political discrimination, the campus's alcohol policy, double-jeopardy off-campus behavior policies -- in which a student can be penalized by both the University and the city of Bloomington -- and strictly defining plagiarism and paraphrasing. And students can continue to give input all the way up to consideration by the trustees this summer, Clifford noted.\n"It's a process. The fact of the matter is the University and the administration set a lot of the policies, but the students have a lot of power, too, because they're the ones paying the tuition and the professors," Clifford said. "I think IU is unique in the weight they give to the student voice. They really look at the comments students have and student government has. They look at it as if it's another administrator talking to them." \n-- Contact Senior Writer Tony Sams at ajsams@indiana.edu.