A Punishing Year

There are lasting images of the spring surge in pro-Palestinian campus protests: seas of tents on grassy lawns, smashed glass in occupied buildings, keffiyeh-clad students in handcuffs.

What came next typically happens behind closed doors. But not this time.

Student protesters accused of violating campus rules have been subject to months of meetings with the staff members who enforce those rules. Some students have faced hearings before panels of peers and professors. In a few cases, the possibility of long-term suspension or expulsion looms.

The student-conduct system is a routine part of campus life. But over the past year, the tidal wave of disciplinary cases from pro-Palestinian protests, the scrutiny from politicians and advocacy organizations, and the lawsuits claiming unfair treatment have been anything but routine.

Student-conduct officers say they’ve tried to do what they’ve always done: balance enforcement with education. For many students, that message isn’t resonating.

Protesters argue that their actions have been largely peaceful and should be recognized in the long lineage of campus activism. They say any punishments should take into account the justness of their cause: ending Israel’s war in Gaza. Even when violence and property damage have occurred, student activists have emphasized the disruptive nature of protests and pointed fingers at other parties, including police officers and counterprotesters, for escalating situations.

Meanwhile, politicians — mostly Republicans — and Jewish advocacy groups say conduct offices have handled rule violators with kid gloves and allowed hostile environments to fester. President-elect Donald J. Trump himself reportedly said in May that he would deport international students who were protesting.

Amid that resistance, some college presidents have wanted to send a message about demonstrations that they felt crossed a line. This spring, they seemed more willing to call the police on protesters than in the past. With many local prosecutors unwilling to pursue criminal cases against student protesters, conduct offices have shouldered the accountability burden.

Student-conduct leaders say that while they maintain faith in the mission of their work, the caseload and the barrage of criticism have saddled them with burnout and anxiety. They worry about the long-term health of their field.

The fallout from student-discipline proceedings threatens to magnify colleges’ legal and reputational woes, especially as powerful critics — including newly emboldened Republicans in Congress and state capitols — watch closely.

The scale and scope of disciplinary action related to last year’s protests have broken through the national consciousness. “Student Protesters Face Same Suspensions as Those Who Bring Assault Rifles to Campus,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Times in May. “Why Is N.Y.U. Forcing Protesters to Write Apology Letters?” asked a columnist in The New York Times later that month.

Such coverage suggests a departure in colleges’ treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters. Critics say college leaders seemed more emboldened to punish students than they had before.

Much of the harm, students and their advocates say, came in the form of interim suspensions that kept students from attending classes or participating in campus life for weeks or months. Those stopgap measures were often issued while students were still at the encampments.

Interim suspensions could also yank away access to dining halls and dorms. Barnard College temporarily removed 53 students from its housing and meal plans over their involvement in Columbia University’s encampment. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology took a similar action against some students who refused to leave an encampment on its campus.

Other interim measures cast a shadow over graduation. The University of Chicago and Harvard University, for example, both withheld degrees from students suspected of being involved in encampments. (Most received their diplomas several months later.)

Long-term suspensions and expulsions were less common and generally targeted at a handful of students whom colleges determined played significant roles in organizing or escalating protests.

Vanderbilt University expelled three students for occupying its main administrative building. The University of South Florida suspended one student for a year and expelled another for their behavior during April protests.

In several cases, administrators set aside the recommendations of hearing panels in order to hand out harsher penalties. The University of Florida’s dean of students suspended several arrested protesters for three to four years, ignoring hearing boards’ recommendations for lighter punishments. The University of Texas at Austin suspended the leader of UT’s Palestine Solidarity Committee for three semesters for inciting disruptive activity at a protest, after the conduct office appealed a student board’s recommendation against the suspension.

Conduct officials say they’ve tried to follow the same protocols as before, targeting prohibited actions but not the speech itself. (Public institutions can only restrict the time, place, and manner of speech. Many private colleges adhere to these principles as well.)

But now, more people are watching and taking notes — as if the door to the conduct office has been torn off of its hinges. The choices conduct officers make, including on procedure and punishment, have captured the attention of upper-level administrators, national media, free-speech advocacy groups, and politicians like never before.

Public demands for harsher punishments run counter to the inclinations of people in student-affairs offices, who will say they got into the field to help young people, including when they do something wrong.

Conduct officers are also defensive about their work. They stress that when students shared details about their disciplinary processes this past year, they typically have been unable to respond without violating privacy laws.

Skeptical students insist that administrators are treating them differently because of their pro-Palestinian views, instead of following standard procedures, said Dianne Tanjuaquio, director of student conduct and community standards at the University of Oregon.

“They feel like when there is a conduct response to [a protest], it’s because they are expressing that viewpoint,” Tanjuaquio said. “But the conduct response is for events, for protests, demonstrations, that are held in a manner that violates our code.”

Oregon played host to a pro-Palestinian encampment that lasted several weeks before the university and organizers reached an agreement to end it. The conduct office is now reviewing 14 cases against students for behavior that occurred during the spring demonstrations and is initiating an additional 10 or so cases based on new information.

Tanjuaquio said the university did not issue charges for encampment participation itself but for actions that were “otherwise disruptive, or caused damage and destruction, or violated university policies related to reserved space and disruptive sound.”

Students may receive a conduct warning, disciplinary probation, or an informal admonition for these offenses, according to Tanjuaquio, but are not looking at suspension, expulsion, or a negative mark on their transcript.

Despite the minimal sanctions, there’s been resistance, she said: “The students that have been charged, the communities that they engage in, I think that they feel a certain way about having been charged in the first place.”

Over the past two decades, offices that adjudicate violations of campus policy have doubled down on their educational mission, moving away from legal terminology and embracing restorative-justice and alternative-resolution practices. The Association for Student Judicial Affairs changed its name to the Association for Student Conduct Administration in 2008. Some campus offices have updated their names to reflect their new orientation.

Thomas Hardiman, director of student conduct at North Carolina State University, said many conduct officials have adopted the perspective that if one only has a hammer, one will see every problem as a nail.

“Conduct offices across the country are actually opening up their toolbox a little bit and figuring out, ‘Hey, what are other ways to be able to address this?’” he said.

His own office has created new procedures in the last two years that give students charged with lower-level violations more ownership over their involvement in the process.

But the educational ambitions haven’t registered with pro-Palestinian activists, who have left discipline hearings not enlightened but indignant.

Over the summer, Zian Aldrich, a senior at the University of California at San Diego, was brought up on disciplinary charges related to participation in an encampment. He said the conduct office’s actions did not suggest education was a motivation, even though administrators claimed the goal was getting students on the right track.

He was given one academic year of probation, 15 hours of community service, and instructions to complete a decision-making course. All students who have gone through the process have received the same sanctions, Aldrich and a lawyer coordinating the students’ defense said.

Aldrich said it felt as if the conduct office was trying to “grasp at anything” to punish him.

“The whole process was super unprofessional, but they were trying to keep an authoritative tone to their whole process,” Aldrich said. “It gave them a paper tiger kind of look — very weak but trying to come off as strong and dominating.”

Reana Akthar, a sophomore at Wesleyan University, and seven peers were charged in connection with a September 21 rally calling for divestment from Israel that took place outside of a Board of Trustees meeting. The allegations included disturbance of the peace, property misuse, harassment and abuse, and disruption, according to documentation Akthar provided to The Chronicle.

All of the students were able to reach resolutions with the university and avoid the most severe punishments. Akthar was placed on deferred suspension, meaning that if she gets in trouble again, she will be suspended.

“It’s fundamentally wrong for our actions to not be situated in a long history of activism at Wesleyan,” Akthar said. “The very basis of the disciplinary hearing is unfair because what political demonstration isn’t a disturbance of the peace or a disruption?”

A spokeswoman for Wesleyan said the university does not comment on student disciplinary matters.

Students on a handful of campuses — including the University of California at Irvine, Portland State University, and Columbia University — have sued over their disciplinary treatment, alleging due-process violations, retaliation, and discrimination.

Zoha Khalili, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, said she could understand a college issuing a severe sanction in cases where a student injured or threatened a peer or caused serious property damage. But that’s not something the firm has seen in the vast majority of cases, Khalili said.

“The very extreme reactions of three-year suspension or expulsion — it’s hard to imagine how that’s serving an educational mission in these situations,” she said.

Even when student behavior has been more serious, students and their supporters have resisted conduct probes into their actions. Students at Rutgers University even vowed to boycott their disciplinary hearings related to the New Brunswick encampment, calling it a “sham process.”

Dozens of faculty members at Portland State University signed a petition calling on the institution not to expel, suspend, or take away financial aid from students who participated in its spring protests. Those included a four-day building occupation, which caused $1.2 million in property damage.

Cornell University received a groundswell of opposition after an international student said he was suspended and faced deportation over his participation in a protest that disrupted a campus job fair. The university later reversed the suspension.

Though campus outrage and lawsuits about the severity of student punishments have been one source of pressure, administrators say they’re also taking heat for not being punitive enough.

The loudest voices in favor of more consequences have originated off campus, including politicians and advocates for Jewish and Zionist students.

In April, Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, then Columbia University’s president, appeared before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce and was grilled by Republicans on how she would punish students and employees who participated in disruptive protests or contributed to a hostile environment for Jewish students.

Shafik outlined the ways Columbia had disciplined misbehaving students, clubs, and faculty members, and promised lawmakers that she would not allow antisemitic harassment on campus. When she returned to New York City, Shafik called the police on an emerging pro-Palestinian encampment, and dozens of students were arrested.

Later that month when protesters took over Hamilton Hall, the university said students who occupied the building would “face expulsion.” But in August, the chair of the House education committee revealed that most arrested students remained in good standing.

“By allowing its own disciplinary process to be thwarted by radical students and faculty, Columbia has waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card to those who participated in these unlawful actions,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican of North Carolina, said in a statement.

In a staff report released in October, the House education committee’s Republican majority eviscerated college administrators for failing to adequately manage conduct violations targeting Jewish students.

The report notes that six of the 11 institutions it collected disciplinary data from did not suspend any students for “antisemitic conduct violations,” and there were no expulsions. It listed as examples of light or absent discipline a George Washington University student receiving probation for tearing down posters of Israeli hostages in a Hillel building, and a Northwestern student getting only a warning after posting “I’m going [to] start punching Zionists in the head” on social media.

Julia Jassey, a co-founder and chief executive officer of the advocacy group Jewish on Campus, said Jewish students have been hoping for more action from administrators.

“We’ve seen students who engage in harassment and threats and really dangerous behavior, and they’re getting a pass,” Jassey said. “That’s something that we think is contributing to a campus environment that normalizes hate and normalizes hostility instead of having conversations toward a more productive future on campus.”

State officials are paying attention, too. In March, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican of Texas, issued an executive order requiring the state’s higher-education institutions to revise their free-speech policies to address antisemitism and punish those who break the rules.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested that the lack of sanctions for students should lead to sanctions for colleges, such as loss of federal funding. Meanwhile, the Democrat-led Education Department has opened investigations into dozens of colleges over complaints that they failed to combat a hostile environment for Jewish students. Both sides of the aisle have leveraged Title VI, the federal civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin within institutions that receive federal funding.

A few colleges have responded by opening Title VI offices or hiring Title VI coordinators and giving them the responsibility of maintaining compliance and, by extension, placating critics.

Hardiman, at N.C. State, said his office did not deal with many disciplinary cases related to last year’s protests. But he noted that while case law and state law affect colleges’ student-conduct processes, institutional values also play a large role.

“Telling an institution what the outcome of a process should be and what the disciplinary action should look like is kind of like telling someone how to parent,” Hardiman said. “Every parent, every family, is going to have their own kind of values that drive how they hold their kids accountable.”

Of course, sometimes the greatest pressure comes from colleges’ own presidents.

Kristi Patrickus, a former student-advocacy lawyer and volunteer leader with the Association for Student Conduct Administration (ASCA), said this problem manifested last year with student-conduct administrators and college leaders having different expectations for what could be done in a short amount of time.

“The volume was out of nowhere,” Patrickus said. “You have hundreds of students now that you’re being expected to charge, but maybe you don’t know those students’ names. Maybe those students are not coming in for meetings, or they’re all coming in with lawyers. It just really changed the status quo of student conduct.”

Any high-stress event on a campus will draw scrutiny from outsiders and nudges from administrators who want to show that the college is doing something, said Brian Glick, director of student conduct and community standards at Adelphi University and ASCA’s treasurer.

“Officially, it is the president who has the authority for student conduct on their campus,” Glick said. “That it may be delegated out to the conduct office often is the case, but there is still that reporting requirement. There is still that external influence.”

As student-conduct officials see it, they aren’t letting rule-breakers off easy. They haven’t been out to get protesters, either. They’re doing what student-affairs administrators do: case-by-case evaluations that take into account nuances like intention and willingness to accept responsibility.

But the attacks from different corners — a swell that’s been building over several years — has created an environment where student-conduct officers are no longer sure they can accomplish what they’ve set out to do: help students.

The protests, after all, came on the heels of the Covid era, when conduct officers had to enforce ever-changing rules, and during the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which has created all sorts of headaches for those who arbitrate academic-honesty policies.

The harsh spotlight can even migrate to the supermarket or the commute. Conduct officers, in small towns especially, are aware that others may know where they live. According to Tess Barker, executive director of ASCA, campus-security officers have offered to accompany conduct personnel to their cars.

A few weeks ago, Barker was at an event where an ASCA member was training other members. The campus official’s work email had just been placed on a petition website, and over the course of half an hour, she received hundreds of emails as a national organization advertised the petition on its social media.

“She had to set up a special folder and triage it so that she could filter through,” Barker said. “And that was just the time I was sitting with her; it had been going on all morning. And that impacts her ability then to get to the other emails that she needs to help other cases move forward.”

It’s easy to imagine, Barker said, how someone could find a conduct official’s personal email address or cellphone number and blast them there.

Valerie Glassman, who worked in student conduct at Duke University for 13 years, said the quantity and complexity of cases stemming from the pandemic and protests have taken a toll.

“We want to have a positive impact on the student. We want to be able to say that we followed our procedures to the best of our ability,” said Glassman, now senior director for student affairs at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “And one’s capacity is only so much.”

Glassman pointed to another factor that’s negatively altered the process: creeping litigiousness.

“When there is a student who is litigious, who threatens a lawsuit or starts the papers, the framework of these encounters in the student-conduct process is shifted,” she said. “And so we are more stressed, we are more tense, and we focus more on not messing up than on the actual care of the student.”

Oregon’s Tanjuaquio added, “I wake up every day and I’m just like, ‘What new is going to happen?’” Students facing disciplinary allegations have interacted with her in more hostile ways since the pandemic. “It’s not like I am rushing to leave the field,” Tanjuaquio said. “It’s just recognizing that it’s so much more challenging than it felt like before.”

Student-conduct leaders say they have not noticed an increase in colleagues leaving the field, but they worry about attrition. Student affairs, as a whole, struggles with turnover. The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources’ 2023 staff-retention survey found that 39 percent of student-affairs employees said they were likely or very likely to seek a new job in the next year.

Léna Crain, dean of students at Baldwin Wallace University and a member of ASCA’s board, said she visits graduate higher-education programs often and has noticed, over the past several years, limited interest in student conduct, fraternity and sorority life, and equity.

“The commonality there is that those are the most risk-laden areas,” Crain said. “There is a complexity in all three, a complexity of compliance. There’s a heaviness of that work.”

At its core, the traditional undergraduate college campus is a society of imperfect people held to high standards. Students are learning how to live with one another and how to grapple with risk and accountability. Administrators are trying to guide them while keeping the campus safe, making human decisions that sometimes miss the mark.

If the student-conduct system doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, though, critical developmental parts of college — like making and learning from mistakes — will diminish.

When campus functions become troublesome, colleges often turn to outsourcing. Some colleges enlisted third-party firms last year to help with conduct offices’ caseloads and training.

Jay K. Wilgus, principal of the dispute-resolution firm Klancy Street, which mostly works with colleges, said the company’s “caseload related to expressive activity” tripled last year because of the war in the Middle East and the protests it inspired.

Firms like Klancy Street facilitate dialogue or restorative-justice practices among students, faculty, or staff, said Wilgus, who previously served as director of the Office of Student Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

A new complication is looming on the horizon: the Trump presidency. The president-elect, as well as the Republican-controlled Congress, has promised to usher in an era of heightened Title VI enforcement, including a promise to strip colleges that tolerate antisemitism of their federal funding.

In an implicit call for action by student-conduct enforcers, those politicians have alleged that the language used by many students during pro-Palestinian protests and on social-media accounts is antisemitic, and those students need to be punished.

Prior to the election, a handful of colleges started Title VI offices or designated Title VI coordinators. This nascent Title VI infrastructure could pull some conduct officers away from their normal caseloads. That happened in 2011 when the Obama administration spelled out colleges’ obligations to combat sexual violence under Title IX, and institutions opened Title IX offices in droves.

Until then, conduct officers’ caseloads will look a lot like they did before the protests and before the pandemic: academic dishonesty, underage drinking, noise violations.

“It is important to remember that the other cases do not stop just because we have an expressive event going on,” Glick said. “We still have the academic misconduct. We still have the residential violations. All of these things need to be handled.”