Faculty will vote to adopt or reject a proposal to change the student discipline process this March. The proposal would get rid of live disciplinary hearings and replace them with a civil rights investigations model used in formal Title IX resolutions.
According to Molly Newton, Senior Associate Dean of Students, the Student Affairs office has been working on revising the policy since 2020 because of evolving student needs.
The primary proposed change addresses Student Conduct Committee (SCC) hearings, which are used for major cases of misconduct that could result in suspension or dismissal (the Bates term for expulsion) if the student is found responsible.
These hearings are uncommon, with only two occurring in the last ten years. One of the cases occurred last spring, involving a Black student who was facing four years of probation and a weapons charge for using a Nerf gun on campus. The case was contentious, and he and his advisors expressed repeated concerns about the magnified negative impact a live hearing can have on students of color.
The student, Seneca Moore ‘27, eventually won his hearing by unanimous vote and received verbal apologies from many of the hearing panel members deciding his case.
Faculty are torn on the legislation, with some feeling unprepared to vote on a new policy with lingering questions about what went wrong last year and others fearing the new model would silence student voices.
Current policy and the proposed changes
Currently, these hearings consist of a two-step process. A student first goes before a Judicial Officer and a hearing panel, where all evidence is presented that will be used in the determination of responsibility. Afterwards, the hearing panel convenes for deliberations and a vote that the hearing officer is not present for. Responsibility is determined “by a preponderance of evidence” (i.e. more likely than not) and if found responsible, sanctions are then determined and presented to the accused student or respondent.
The Judicial Officer is a member of the Student Affairs staff who is charged with facilitating the hearing and the hearing panel consists of two students, two faculty and two staff.
The new system removes the live-hearing model, replacing it with two sets of one-on-one interviews between the parties and an Investigator and Decision Maker. The system is designed to be trauma-informed, modeled after the civil rights investigation model used in formal Title-IX hearings.
“We know people [may] have experienced trauma, maybe completely separate of a conduct case,” Newton said. “They may have had a completely unrelated experience in high school, childhood, before college, but [in] a situation where you’re sitting in front of a panel of other people and they’re asking questions and they’re doing a process that mimics the court system you can find all sorts of criticism of that structure online.”
The proposed system would start with a fact-finding investigation performed by an external or internal investigator. “So instead of sitting in front of a panel of all these people, you’re talking one-on-one to someone who’s going to take the information you share and apply it to an investigation framework,” Newton said. “But you’re not sitting in front of someone acting as a judge, a jury, a prosecutor. The person who may have harmed you isn’t the person asking you questions.”
Currently, the investigative portion of the process is performed by the Judicial Officer But this new model will allow the college to outsource investigations that require more expertise than the college can handle to professionals according to Newton.
“There are people who do this for a living, and there’s a skill set that comes from facilitating an investigation that a lot of people at Bates don’t necessarily use every day,” Newton said. She says that permitting outside investigators is meant to accommodate student needs and make the system more equitable.
“Some students see Bates as a place they feel at home, they feel safe,” Newton said. “It would feel really comfortable to have someone from inside the institution investigating and making a decision and assigning a sanction. Other people don’t feel that way, so they might feel more comfortable with someone from the outside.”
The investigator “is responsible for gathering evidence, interviewing Respondents, Complainants, and Third Parties, analyzing relevant primary evidence (i.e., incident reports, videos, or social media content, etc.) and drafting an investigative report” according to the proposed legislation. Parties will be given two opportunities to review the validity of the evidence and suggest further lines of investigation.
A final investigative report is sent to all parties, advisors and the Decision Maker who will be tasked with making a decision of responsibility or no responsibility and a recommended sanction. Similarly to the Investigator in the proposed policy, the Decision Maker may be internal or external to the college.
The decision and recommended sanction is then sent to a sanctioning panel consisting of one student, staff and faculty who make the final decision on the sanction. This panel mirrors the SCC hearing panel in the current system, however, whereas the SCC makes a finding of responsibility and sanction, the sanctioning panel in the proposed model doesn’t make the finding of responsibility and cannot decide to offer no sanction.
“I can’t think of a situation in which a case would have no sanction for a student who is found responsible,” Newton said. “Usually, when someone’s found responsible, there has to be some sort of follow up outcome.”
Additionally, the new model would reduce the number of faculty, staff and students from two to one each. Newton cites student privacy concerns as the explanation.
“The biggest critique from students and the biggest worry I hear every day is, ‘who’s going to know about this?’ ‘How many people have access to this really sensitive experience and this sensitive information?’” Newton said. “So there’s pluses and minuses. If we completely remove faculty and students and staff from it, that doesn’t necessarily work, but we can be responsive to the privacy critique by being really clear about what we actually need.”
Other major changes that this policy proposes is reducing the appeal window from 10 calendar days to three business days which potentially reduces the window for appeal, depending on the timing of college breaks. The new policy would also provide faculty, staff and students with “statistical information about incidents of misconduct, as well as outcomes associated with different types of misconduct and appeals” – information that was previously not made public.
The new policy would also give students the opportunity to opt in to restorative practice resolution when the offense doesn’t involve violence, narcotics or safety. To do so, a student would have to accept responsibility for the violation and would work in tandem with the restorative practice advisors to find “a mutually agreeable resolution of a complaint without a full and formal disciplinary process,” according to the proposal.
Restorative practice resolutions are not formal findings and cannot result in notice, suspension or dismissal according to the policy.
Controversy over the Legislation
Faculty and students have expressed varied feelings regarding the new proposal.
Moore, the only student on campus to have experienced the SCC live trial model, was not invited to share his opinion at any point in the development of the legislation or at the faculty meetings where it was discussed – he wasn’t even told anything was potentially changing.
“I think it’s crazy that I wasn’t notified about any changes,” Moore said. When he read the proposal that The Student shared with him his main concern was that there was no explicit policy guaranteeing accountability and representation.
“They make a commitment to having one student, one staff, one faculty [in the sanctioning panel], but they’re not really making a commitment to aspects like gender or race or religion,” Moore said. “And I feel like that’s something that should definitely be in there. Especially with my experience with how intricate these situations can get, it’s important that all demographics are represented so that it’s fair.”
Moore wants these processes to be more transparent citing what he believes to be discrepancies in policy enforcement. Last year as he was exiting commons Moore got hit by an egg thrown from a car. As the person drove off they yelled something homophobic out the window at him.
“I was given charges for a toy gun, but when a situation like somebody driving up to you and throwing an egg at you and yelling homophobic stuff at you, when that happens, nothing happens because of that,” Moore said.
Because of these experiences, Moore wants more checks and balances to make sure the people running the processes are applying protocol consistently.
Professor of Dance Brian Evans was the advisor to Moore in his case and wants more information before making a vote.
“In general, I am disillusioned by the experience and feel the faculty (myself included) do not know enough about what occurred last year to approach such a significant change to the existing policy holistically,” Evans told The Student via email statement. “I obviously come at this from the perspective of the college (at best) utterly failing to protect a student and (at worst) choosing to harm and falsely malign them with no remorse after the student conduct process found there was no cause to have put Seneca and his family through such a traumatic process.”
Restorative Practices Advisor Risa Horiuchi ‘25 spoke at the faculty meeting in support of the new legislation.
“It is a given that our country’s justice system is racist and broken, so why, as an independent educational institution dedicated to uplifting and educating our students, are we reproducing it?” Horiuchi said in her testimony to the faculty.
Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio was on the panel that heard Moore’s case and has been outspoken about her opposition to removing live hearings.
“I want students to have a voice and be heard. I think closed processes, such as the proposed investigative model, may curtail rather than allow the voices of respondents to be heard,” Maurizio said via email statement. “I want respondents to have the option to speak and defend themselves at hearings, if they so desire. Almost all if not all of our peers in NESCAC allow this possibility.”
The Student independently verified that all schools in the NESCAC athletics conference do allow for some sort of live hearing for differing levels of offenses.
However, Newton worries about equity in a live hearing. “Hearings privilege people who are really good on their feet, who like public speaking, who enjoy conflict, like very direct face to face conflict, and feel comfortable in that space,” Newton said. “And for people who don’t, for whatever reason, it’s a tough environment.”
In addition, Newton says Bates’ current system has a lot of room for error. “We want it to be a process that, regardless of the inputs, is generating a fair outcome,” Newton said. “The way to do that is to make sure that we’re relying on trained people. Students certainly know about normative behavior on campus, but evaluating credibility, evidence, how bias plays out in an investigation, those are things that people with expertise from the outside can be really helpful.”
Horiuchi adds that she thinks the proposal’s emphasis on restorative justice is a step in the right direction.
They build a strong community. It’s a tiny school. No one wants to be avoiding people unnecessarily or to have strained relationships with people when they could be using school resources to work that out,” Horiuchi said.
She adds, “Everyone wants the best for the students, and that’s why there’s so much passion around this topic and around this legislation, because everyone wants the system to work and to be as effective and safe as it possibly can be. And, I hope everyone knows that it has been traumatizing for Black students in the past.”
While Moore is critical of the proposal, he doesn’t fully support the live hearing model either. “I would prefer not criminalizing students,” he said. At the end of the day, he thinks more student voices should be heard in this policy.
“Bias is definitely still prevalent,” Moore said. “And the best way in my opinion to lessen that is to open the disciplinary process up to more eyes. I feel like they should get the opinions of more students about this before trying to make this final.”
For Moore this isn’t hypothetical, it’s about fairness.
“I’m just speaking from personal experience, not anybody else’s situations, but I just know right now I’m kind of fed up because I don’t think I’ve gotten the justice for my situations,” Moore said. “And I know other students haven’t as well, and that’s a problem.”
