The Goals of Campus Discipline

This essay will be published in the forthcoming book Academic Ethics Today: Problems, Policies, and Prospects for University Life, ed. Steven M. Cahn (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). This collection of thirty-one new essays will focus on ethical questions raised by institutional policies of colleges and universities. As a service to readers, over the next several months the APA Blog will publish four of these essays in their entirety, including articles on the role of adjuncts (Alexandra Bradner), assessing publications for tenure (David Shatz), student discipline (David Hoekema), and the responsibilities of administrators (Karen Hanson). All materials​ are copyrighted by the publisher and reprinted with permission. The entire list of topics and authors can be found online.​ 

Considering the system of student discipline in its broadest application, ranging from physical or sexual assault to stolen textbooks and offensive graffiti, it is helpful to identify three distinct goals that a system of campus discipline seeks to achieve. In both practice and theory they are separable yet closely related. Measures that advance one of the three are likely to contribute to the others as well.

To Prevent Exploitation and Harm

The first goal of a system of student discipline is to prevent exploitation and harm to students. Policies and procedures related to student conduct should protect students so far as is reasonably possible from others who would prey on their vulnerability if given the opportunity. This is the foundation for rules prohibiting many kinds of serious misconduct such as theft, physical violence, sexual assault, verbal harassment and denigration, and sale of mind-altering drugs. Academic dishonesty is also a form of exploitation. A student who copies another’s work not only deprives the source of proper credit for her work but also undermines the essential but fragile system of academic evaluation in the institution. By enacting and enforcing policies against exploitation and harm, the university seeks to protect students against others’ malevolence.

What is the moral ground for a university’s concern with preventing harm? No more and no less than our fundamental obligation to protect others from injury, especially in circumstances in which another is vulnerable to harm that could be averted by one’s words and actions. Every ethical system recognizes this basic duty to prevent harm, whether it then traces the ultimate ground of this obligation to a Kantian conception of autonomy and universalizability, an Aristotelian concept of virtuous habits forming a virtuous character, a theological concept of the respect due to all created persons, or a morality based on the weighing of good and bad consequences.

Those who govern an institution such as a university have the same duty to protect others that applies to them as individuals. But their official capacity to set policies and direct practices on campus greatly enlarges the consequences of their actions and therefore their responsibility to act. Of course, it is impossible to prevent all harmful and hurtful acts committed by members of an academic community or of any other community. But a carefully framed and rigorously enforced policy regarding physical assault, for example, may deter many attacks that would have occurred under circumstances of institutional laxness and inattention.

The primary goal of campus rules of conduct is to prevent students from harming fellow students. The reason is not that students are more prone to misconduct than outsiders. Indeed, they are surely less likely to injure each other intentionally than are a random collection of individuals, since their shared status as students contributes to a sense of common purpose and their shared participation in campus life makes them something more than strangers to each other. Only students, however, are directly answerable to the institutional code of conduct. Campus disciplinary officers can impose potent disincentives to deter students from harming others and a range of sanctions if they do. Their authority over outsiders is far more limited.

Note the overlap, but also a great deal of difference, between what is legitimately prohibited in a campus environment and what is prohibited by law. Actions liable to criminal prosecution—rape, assault, theft, embezzlement—are not the primary focus of a university disciplinary code. When these crimes occur on campus, administrators must cooperate with local authorities in conducting an appropriate investigation. Universities should remind students that living on campus is not living outside the law. Students gain no immunity from criminal law and surrender none of the protections of those charged with breaking the law.

Prevention of crime should be a priority, all the same, in other aspects of the life of a university. Building design, campus lighting and landscaping, student transportation options, and the work of campus safety officers can greatly enhance the safety of students and reduce the incidence of violent crime. This is not the domain of disciplinary codes but an important contribution to their effectiveness.

Students are especially vulnerable to some sorts of harm that fall outside—or just at the borders of—the criminal code. The possibility that one’s work will be stolen and used dishonestly, for example, is an inherent risk in any academic enterprise. Undergraduates, graduate students, and established researchers sometimes succumb to this temptation. Some institutions, including many elite undergraduate colleges and the nation’s military academies, seek to combat plagiarism through promulgation of an honor code to which all students must subscribe. Others disseminate detailed guidelines that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate borrowing in academic research and writing. Studies that I reviewed in writing my book on student conduct indicated that neither system was, in general, more effective than the other. A newly drafted honor code, however, seems to be less effective than one that has long been part of campus culture.

Consider too the issue of acquaintance rape. It is by no means unique to university communities, but the close personal relationships and powerful peer pressures that obtain in college, together with ready availability of alcohol, heighten the danger of such assault. Whenever one person is induced to engage in sexual activity through coercion or threats, a sexual assault has occurred. But campus cultures too often discount the testimony of victims and give too much credence to an assailant’s assertion that the act was entirely consensual.

The rules for responding to allegations of sexual harassment in educational settings have become a contentious issue as three U.S. administrations sought to interpret the requirements of Title IX of the Higher Education Act, which guarantees equal treatment and protection against harassment. In brief, the Department of Education under President Obama issued guidelines for investigating and adjudicating allegations of abuse that were intended to uphold victims’ rights and remove impractical evidence requirements, but under President Trump new guidelines were issued that set a higher standard for evidence of wrongdoing and allowed alleged perpetrators to question anyone testifying against them. Under President Biden, as a major policy review moves forward, the last requirement was revoked in August 2021. Universities will no longer be required to allow the accused to cross-examine the complainant, and more extensive revisions are expected soon.

In many cases of plagiarism and acquaintance rape, no laws have been broken, so victims cannot call on the police or the courts to come to their assistance. Copyright laws are not intended to apply to unpublished work by students. Criminal penalties for rape are severe, but the circumstances of acquaintance rape make it difficult for the victim to prove that an assault has occurred and easy for the guilty to escape punishment. Institutions have a special obligation to address the issues of cheating and sexual assault because there is little likelihood of legal redress for these harms imposed by some students on other students.

The same is true of the prevention of alcohol abuse and illegal drug use. No academic community can hope to be entirely free from such practices, which are widespread on campus and off. But the intense social pressures that bear on students in a campus setting need to be balanced by clear and firm campus rules, backed by effective measures of enforcement and consistent penalties when violated.

The aim of averting harm is inevitably to a certain extent paternalistic. The university no longer claims to be a moral arbiter standing in loco parentis, an institutional chaperone guiding young men and women on the path of virtue. With rare exceptions, no institution today wants to reclaim this role, and in any case, students would not tolerate it. The college’s concern, however, is not limited to protecting students against harm done to them by others. It extends also to protection of students against themselves, antiquated and condescending as that phrase may sound today.

The harm of drug and alcohol abuse is suffered primarily by the individual who engages in such behaviors, not inflicted on others. All the same, it is a serious form of harm and a legitimate concern of a university, not merely because it is likely to be a contributing factor in other graver harms, such as physical injury and, especially in the case of alcohol, sexual assault. Diminished capacity for academic work and for responsible behavior due to such substance abuse is itself a harm to the individual and to others that the institution should seek to prevent.

An institution places itself in a position very similar to that of a parent in saying to students: We seek to protect you from grave harm, even when you bring it upon yourself and would suffer it willingly. The goal of disciplinary rules in this instance is to deter students from acting in a way that amounts to an assault against themselves and a diminishment of their future prospects. In my study of student discipline I suggested, with tongue in cheek, that institutions that want to disavow their role in loco parentis as a vestige of the distant past might adopt a change to the metaphor. Consider the difference between advice given by a parent and that offered by a grandparent, for example, which is likely to be less directive and more empathetic. Or think about how one might intervene to dissuade a niece or nephew from making foolish choices, knowing that one cannot directly tell them how to behave but can expect them to consider one’s counsel seriously. Perhaps today the university should stand in loco avi (in place of a grandfather), then, or in loco avunculi (in place of an uncle). Although not as familiar as the parental variant, these Latin phrases may be more appropriate.

So much for prevention of harm. To acknowledge this first goal and no others, however, would be to confuse the function of the entire system of student discipline with that of a campus security department. Colleges and universities also pursue two additional goals no less important to the life of the institution.

To Promote an Atmosphere of Dialogue and Debate

A second essential goal of student conduct rules is to sustain an environment conducive to free discussion and mutual learning. The campus is not merely a place where students can go about their lives and studies relatively free from fear of assault and exploitation. It is also characterized by free and open exchange of ideas, arguments, and ideologies. A university is a place for vigorous debate of issues important to students and their communities, where ruling orthodoxies confront new evidence and new interpretations. Even one’s most cherished beliefs and ideals are open to challenge and possible revision in a healthy academic environment.

The moral ground of this second purpose is different from that underlying the first, but it too is a principle widely embraced: A healthy community grants its members as broad a range of personal and political freedom as is consistent with respect for the rights and the liberties of others. Although similar ideals of religious and intellectual freedom motivated the founding of the United States, they have frequently been compromised because of the pressures of social conformity. From their inception, universities have held themselves up as beacons for a broader vision of freedom. Yet there is a continual struggle on many campuses between the ideal of free and open discourse and the tendency of institutions to adopt and enforce an official ideological vision.

Cultural critics on the political right make this point frequently and stridently. They allege that universities pay only lip service to academic freedom and open dialogue while imposing a stultifying intellectual orthodoxy. Instructors who venerate Marx and Foucault and scorn Friedman and Hayek, they claim, force-feed students a diet of socialism, secularism, and radical feminism. Conservative voices are silenced or scorned.

Are these allegations accurate? Surveys of the political leanings of college and university faculty do indeed show a tilt to the left but not an absence of voices on the right. In a 2006 survey, 44% of faculty respondents identified as liberal, 46% as moderate, and 9% as conservative. Periodic surveys of undergraduate faculty conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA show, over recent decades, greater numbers calling themselves “liberal” and “far left” than “conservative” and “far right.” In the 1990s, the largest number selected “moderate/middle of the road,” followed by a shift to the left and then, in the most recent surveys, a shift back to the center. One notable finding in 2016–2017 was a substantial increase in those choosing “encouraging students to think and act critically” as an important priority.

Allegations of liberal bias also highlight campus agitation against controversial speakers. In 2016 conservative watchdog groups counted forty-three incidents in which students and faculty demanded “disinvitation” of speakers, most of them identified with the political right. But only half these efforts succeeded. Moreover, according to a nonpolitical organization, by 2018 the number of such incidents had dropped to just nine, five of them successful. The organization also noted that, where twenty-eight faculty members had been dismissed or demoted in 2017 for inappropriate political speech, that number dropped to just eight in 2018, four of them targeted by conservatives and three by liberals.

Conservative perceptions of a liberal stranglehold on campus are unfounded. And yet the right’s critique of campus culture serves as an important reminder that free and open discourse requires active monitoring and vigilant defense. On every campus, some factions seek from time to time to silence others, and the danger that a ruling orthodoxy will stifle dissent is never wholly absent. Claims that a particular party line has gained the ascendency on the nation’s campuses, whether that be an ideology of the left or the right, Marxism or libertarianism, should provoke our skepticism. All the same, the atmosphere of openness and readiness to listen to others who hold sharply different views is a rare and fragile thing, not just on campus but in other communities as well. It needs to be nurtured and defended against social and political pressures that threaten it.

The goal of upholding freedom of thought and expression mandates broad discretion for students—and faculty members—in planning debates, inviting speakers, publishing opinions in campus newspapers, and the like. Some student codes of conduct underscore the importance of these provisions by including a formal “bill of student rights” in their discipline code, setting out the extent of students’ freedom to speak and act.

The goal of facilitating open discourse entails another objective with which it might appear initially to be in conflict: minimizing the incidence of abusive and degrading speech and writing. Conflict does occur between these two objectives, but it need not. If carelessly and vaguely written, a speech code intended to prohibit racial and gender abuse can cast a pall over discussion of controversial issues and deter open expression of unpopular ideas. Disciplinary rules need to target precisely those rare sorts of abusive speech that cast some out of the community of discourse and treat them as less than human. If narrowly worded and carefully framed, hate speech policies contribute to an environment conducive to learning and constructive discourse, barring the door only to those who by their very choice of words would exclude others on the basis of race, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

Upholding an atmosphere conducive to free and honest discourse has implications in what might appear to be an unrelated realm, that of on-campus housing. Clear rules, consistently applied, concerning alcohol use and overnight guests in residence halls contribute to an ethos in which students’ social and academic lives are closely integrated, each supporting and advancing the other. Absence of such rules, on the other hand, or their effective absence owing to lax or inconsistent enforcement, makes residence halls essentially useless for purposes of study, especially in evening hours. On far more campuses than the admissions brochures and student life administrators acknowledge, drinking and partying and hooking up in dorm rooms effectively opens a wide gulf between the academic enterprise and the social community in which students live. Not only does it impede academic study, it also inhibits thoughtful political and intellectual discourse.

What sorts of regulations are appropriate in student housing? The traditions and the character of a particular institution make it difficult to generalize, as does the architecture of student housing. A building with a separate wing for study, well away from social gathering spaces, poses fewer challenges than a complex of small rooms. The parietal rules of earlier generations rested on moral dogmas that students might have rejected if asked. But we need not invoke an outmoded moralism to justify promoting a healthy environment for learning.

In effect, student life staff today are invoking old means to new ends. No campus administrators claim the prerogative of acting in loco parentis to prohibit drinking and cohabitation today. But if they do not set some rules for student life—acting in loco avunculi, like a concerned but not controlling uncle—then students must live in what are merely and literally “dormitories,” places for sleeping and partying but not for studying or serious conversation. To leave students to behave as they will without restriction in on-campus housing is not merely to set aside the moralistic ambitions of an earlier era but to compromise the obligation of the university to maintain an atmosphere for students in which study and learning can flourish.

An interesting trend has emerged recently in campus housing: more and more campuses offer options for “substance-free housing,” residence halls whose residents promise not to use tobacco, alcohol, or recreational drugs. One source lists forty institutions offering this option, implicitly acknowledging that discipline codes alone do not guarantee an environment conducive to study, and no doubt there are many more. I have not found any studies assessing the effectiveness of offering such options—how many students choose them and how well they comply with the rules. On online forums, some students say they are glad to be in environments free from wild parties, but others say the wildest parties on their campuses tend to happen in the supposedly substance-free halls. Clearly much depends both on student compliance and on institutional oversight.

To Nurture a Sense of Community

A third essential goal of student conduct regulation is to instill a sense of mutual responsibility and moral community in students. This third aim is both more comprehensive and more controversial than the first two. Some would reject it as extending beyond the proper function of a modern university, which should stick to academics and not meddle in the private affairs and personal relationships of its students. But to neglect this third purpose would be an abdication of a critical responsibility of the college and university.

Formation of character was once upheld as a central, if not the primary, purpose of higher education. This tradition is honored rhetorically in the preamble to many a college catalog, where the language of character, citizenship, and moral community is laid on with a trowel. Yet today few colleges, and even fewer universities, take their own lofty rhetoric seriously in planning their programs, hiring new faculty, or shaping general education requirements.

A typical college of the eighteenth or nineteenth century made the behavior of students its business and sought to inculcate moral virtue, which a majority of institutions grounded in religious orthodoxy of one sort or another. In the 1860s, to cite one example, the student conduct code at Harvard was forty pages long. Many college presidents of that era taught a required course in ethics for graduating seniors.

A typical college or university of the twenty-first century proclaims its lofty goals of training responsible and engaged citizens and promoting a sense of moral and social accountability only in the first few pages of the catalog and in fundraising appeals to alumni, while its actions carry another message entirely. I do not intend to suggest that moral growth does not occur in universities, of course. Every issue of every alumni magazine highlights glowing testimonials to the inspiring example of instructors who opened students’ eyes to the pressing problems of the nation and the world, leading them into careers in public health or community development. Faculty and their employers can take pride in such stories.

But these stories may not reflect the operating principles of the institution. Indeed, they may result from the readiness of some faculty and administrators to defy an institutional culture of individualism and careerism. At many institutions the core message that can be discerned, in faint letters behind the inflated rhetoric of marketing brochures, might be summarized thus: “We hire excellent scholars for the faculty, we maintain a fine library and provide access to a world of online resources, we cherish our sports teams’ trophies, we fill the flower beds each year for parents’ weekend, and we sincerely hope that our students will turn out all right.”

Whether graduating seniors are paragons of virtue or cynical opportunists is a matter largely beyond the control of the institution and its faculty. Moral character has been largely shaped before students begin university studies, after all. Even in college, other factors—family, peer judgment, mass media, and personal reflection—are likely to exercise a more profound influence on students’ ethical commitments and sensibilities than will any acts or policies of the institution. For most students, a few faculty members will stand out, even a decade after graduation, as models of both intellectual and ethical integrity, and I do not mean to understate the effectiveness of faculty-student interaction both in and out of the classroom. But matters such as these cannot be effectively mandated by institutional rules or policies. The goal of producing ethical and engaged citizens is simply not realistically attainable by any institution, whatever the preamble to the college catalog may boast.

All the same, the university can and should seek to create a campus atmosphere of respect, openness, critical discourse, and mutual recognition of both rights and responsibilities. Students learn quickly, as much from unspoken signals as from handbooks and speeches, the limits of acceptable behavior. An instructor who overlooks rampant cheating on the first test of the semester cannot expect better behavior on the next one. An institution that takes no effective steps to prevent and punish alcohol abuse tells its students by its inaction that, notwithstanding the lofty ideals in the catalog, they are students at a party school. Conversely, if cribbing and excessive drinking meet firm and consistent discipline, students learn that they will be held responsible for their academic work and for their actions. And the behavior of administrators and faculty members speaks louder than the conduct code.

When students regularly observe their instructors engaging in spirited and open-minded debates with each other and with students over important moral and social issues of the day, they learn that the institution expects more than transmission and acquisition of knowledge. When a controversy over campus policies or governance is resolved through consultation and cooperation among students, staff, and faculty, students’ moral education is advanced, not by a required senior class, or a student handbook, or a presidential dictum ending the debate, but by seeing how the campus community functions. Even in cases where resolution is not reached and controversy continues, the character of a diverse campus community is evident in its modes of discourse.

Modern societies regard moral choices as fundamentally individual decisions. While this ideology has made indispensable contributions to the establishment and protection of a broad range of personal and political liberties, it is grossly inadequate as a description of our moral life and action. We make our choices in social and cultural contexts. Morality is both learned and exercised, above all, in relation to others. This is why a collaborative response to the challenges that confront a campus community is so vitally important: the community itself is the context in which morality arises, is articulated, and is put into practice.

Consider a hypothetical example. Suppose a crisis erupts when members of a fraternity taunt and harass transgender students. Their behavior elicits protests by student groups that serve as advocates for LGBTQ+ students, and then those protests provoke counterprotests from other fraternities. What should be done? Should the students responsible for the initial incidents of harassment be punished? Or should students work out their differences without interference from student life staff?

To allow such behavior to pass without comment suggests that the university either approves or tolerates behavior that falls far below a minimum standard of mutual respect. To do and say nothing is in effect to accept the fraternity members’ judgment that trans students are not deserving members of the student body. But disciplinary action alone, punishing the individuals involved without addressing what lies behind offensive behaviors, is also inadequate.

In a campus community that promotes mutual respect and open dialogue, such an incident might yield a process of deliberation and consultation leading to action more wide-ranging and more lasting than sanctions for a few individuals. In discussions that bring diverse viewpoints into conversation with each other, transgender students and their allies would gain a wider audience for their concerns, not just about isolated incidents of harassment but also about difficulties they face in classrooms, residence halls, and locker rooms. Leaders and members of fraternities would be challenged to identify aspects of their past behavior and rhetoric that made misbehavior more likely and to undertake changes in the future. Everyone who attends to this discussion on campus would learn more about the experience of those who face abuse because of others’ insecurities and fears.

A process in which all voices are heard, and then paths for future cooperation are mapped out, serves as a concrete demonstration that the campus community can face and resolve its problems. The goals of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and regard for the vulnerable may come into conflict. Balancing them requires patience and wisdom. When students participate in or observe a process that airs differences and finds common ground, they do not simply learn to respect differences and stop shouting insults. They learn what it means to be a member of a moral community.

I do not mean to suggest that every incident of petty harassment warrants such a full-court response. Context is crucial. An isolated incident on a campus where LGBTQ+ students feel fully a part of the community may offer no reason for alarm or for a public response. At the other extreme, if a pattern of repeated and damaging attacks on a campus minority becomes evident on campus, what is needed is a prompt and firm disciplinary response, prompting measures such as suspension and restitution, not an extended dialogue between offenders and victims. In incidents that fall between these extremes, however, what is initially no more than an unpleasant incident can be the catalyst for a vivid demonstration of how a healthy moral community on campus resolves problems.

Unique in American society, the community of learning that exists on campus—both intellectual and moral—is threatened from within and without. The suspicions of legislatures and anxious parents, the economic and political agendas of private and public donors, and the social-media carping of uninformed critics all seek to limit campus freedoms. No less grave a threat to the health of the campus community are the temptations that draw faculty and students themselves into a narrow vision of higher education, lapsing into individualism, careerism, and social and political apathy.

Nurturing an effective community conducive to moral growth is a vital third goal of student discipline systems, in addition to the prevention of harm and the facilitation of free and open dialogue. It is a worthwhile exercise on any campus to assess the effectiveness of rules, enforcement provisions, and daily practices in advancing each of these three objectives.