Denigrating Procedure

In the past 18 months, the administration of President Richard Brodhead has pursued what could most charitably be described as an erratic policy regarding the enforcement of community standards and Duke policies.

For instance, the administration has consistently refused to enforce the provisions of the Faculty Handbook, which includes the following mandate:

Members of the faculty expect Duke students to meet high standards of performance and behavior. It is only appropriate, therefore, that the faculty adheres to comparably high standards in dealing with students . . . Students are fellow members of the university community, deserving of respect and consideration in their dealings with the faculty.

As Peter Wood, or Grant Farred, or Karla Holloway engaged in their serial, unfounded denunciations of Duke students, the administration responded with silence.

As allegations of in-class harassment by faculty members reached Duke administrators last spring, the administration appears to have conducted no investigation.

The message: on issues of race, class, and gender, those professors on the appropriate side of the divide need not conform to the Handbook’s provisions.

The administration, meanwhile, has been at best inconsistent regarding the student code of conduct. “Harassment of any individual for any reason is not acceptable at Duke University,” the code declares.

In spring 2006, senior Dinushika Mohottige was the only person to admit publicly that she publicly distributed the vigilante posters with the lacrosse players’ photos.

Surely such action would constitute harassment, and therefore be deemed “not acceptable” at Duke.

Yet not only was Mohottige not held to the standard, she was asked three weeks after her vigilante action to join Brodhead at a panel combating the “culture of crassness“ on campus.

The message: on issues of race, class, and gender, those students on the appropriate side of the divide need not conform to the community standard’s provisions.

Yet while noticeably lax in enforcing some provisions of the community standard, the administration has been almost draconian in enforcing others. Two sensational recent columns by Elliot Wolf make the point.

Wolf took aim at the inherently arbitrary nature of the standard. He noted,

Currently, “students may be held accountable for any violation of university policy that may or may not be included in [the bulletin],” whether the violation occurred “on or off-campus,” or for “any conduct adjudged unsatisfactory or detrimental to the university community,” or for “attempting or intending to commit any violation of laws and/or university policies” or for “failure to comply with directions, requests or orders of any university representative or body.”

Adapting Judicial Affairs’ new standard of “probable cause,” all that is required to initiate disciplinary action is information indicating something that someone may have done, tried to do or meant to do may have been against some university policy, written or unwritten, may be in contravention of someone’s request, order or directive or may be otherwise “detrimental to the University community.”

Even more remarkable, Wolf documents numerous statements in which key Duke administrators downplay or dismiss the importance of procedural fairness.

Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta: “However the evidence is obtained is immaterial. However we learn of a behavior, we respond to the behavior.”

Moneta: “We will not ignore information because some other agency obtained it illegally. Our interest as an educational institution is education.”

Judicial affairs director Stephen Bryan, on the allegations of DPD mistreatment of Duke students, as most clearly enumerated in the Chronicle: “Given that a lot of these students are under the influence of alcohol, there’s a propensity to question whether they have an accurate perception of what happened.”

It should be noted, for the record, that neither Bryan nor any other Duke administrator challenged the Chronicle assertions when they occurred. That--after all the DPD abuses that have come to light in the past year--a senior Duke administrator would publicly side with the DPD against his own students is remarkable.

Bill Thomas had a powerful retort to the peculiar claims of Moneta and Bryan. “For the administration to take the position that students are not being mistreated,” he noted, “I think they have their head in the sand . . . Given the events of the last year and a half, one would certainly think that Duke University would have a great appreciation for due process.”

Instead, key administrators appear to believe that due process is a positively harmful development, best to be ignored. The Moneta statements in particular are nothing short of mindboggling.

Wolf also pointed out that the unholy alliance between the Durham Police and the judicial affairs office has reached such a point where students can be convicted solely on the written report of a police officer who does not testify before the (Duke) judicial board. That’s one way of ensuring that Sgt. Mark Gottlieb is never cross examined. Apparently, the Bryan/Moneta policy is to simply assume that DPD officers always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

(All of Wolf’s relevant documents are here.)

The basic message:

Duke has written procedures that it follows—except when it doesn’t.

Students are expected to conform to the community standard—except when they aren’t.

And professors are supposed to adhere to the terms of the Faculty Handbook—except when they don’t feel like doing so.

What message does the Duke administration send when it declares (a) that faculty won’t be held to the same standards as students; and (b) how evidence is collected is irrelevant to the findings of internal disciplinary proceedings?