The Code and Procedures Review Committee has recommended changes to the Student Code of Conduct, which are currently open for public comment until April 20. Reforms are needed, but the proposals of the CPRC will not correct the failures we have observed or provide adequate protection to students. 

The Cornell AAUP chapter has an analysis with recommended revisions at our chapter website. Here we want to step back, and ask what a Code of Conduct should look like. 

For much of the 20th century, universities and colleges were treated as having in loco parentis authority over students: schools stood in for the parents, with the same authority for regulating conduct and imposing discipline that a parent has over a child. Students had few procedural protections, and restrictions on their behavior could be quite intrusive. 

The partial democratizations of higher education that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement helped break apart this explicitly authoritarian relationship. Students at public schools were recognized as having First Amendment rights after sit-ins and other actions at schools across the South. The logic was extended to private colleges and universities, relying less on the First Amendment and more on implied contracts, as well as a broader cultural shift accompanying schools’ competitive efforts to attract students. The vibrant political life at colleges and universities simultaneously produced this change and was enabled by it. 

Historically, Cornell’s disciplinary procedures were intended to be educational, most critically by placing them under faculty control. Cornell also had a single Code of Conduct, applicable to faculty, students and staff alike. While the different positions of each meant that there was never total uniformity, a common Code had the advantage of creating shared expectations (it is also a requirement of New York’s Henderson Law). In 2020, the Code was revised to be........

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