The Death of the Student Judiciary: The Inside Story of the Idea’s Rise and Fall
Rebellion was in the air in the fall semester of 2008. As Student Senate elections approached, students eager to display their disapproval of the Wabash College administration ran on combative platforms—proposing, in various different forms, a “student judiciary” to counter the power of the Dean of Students in disciplinary decision-making.
“Here’s what I would advocate if elected to the student senate,” wrote Andrew Forrester ’11 during the campaign, “A Gentleman’s Rule Panel, comprised of students who would be responsible for taking action when a fellow student violates the Gentleman’s Rule.” As for the makeup of the panel, Forrester claimed that it would be comprised of “a select group of students – some appointed by the administration and others elected by the student senate.”
Billy Evans ’11 similarly proposed a “Judiciary Committee,” which would be comprised of “Students, Faculty, and Admin.,” to be used as “a learning process and for handing out rulings on whether students break the rule, or an appeals process from a judgment that has been handed out by the Deans.”
As part of his “5 point plan to reestablish student autonomy at Wabash College,” Anthony Tellez ’10 proposed “[t]he establishment of a Judicial Branch appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.” This new branch of student government, he claimed, would “be responsible for judging actions taken by students that are declared as ungentlemanly.” The reasoning behind such a panel, he claimed, was to allow “students to police themselves with recommendations from the Dean and define cases of when the Gentleman’s Rule is being broken,” adding the qualification that the panel “would cover minor issues and not take over the complete role of the Dean.”
Following the elections, and a full semester of committees looking into the proposals, we now have the final result: the Dean’s Presidents Council, a small group of club presidents that meets with Dean of Students Michael Raters on a regular basis to discuss various complexities with regards to the Dean’s decision-making. “It’s a discussion,” says Dean Raters of the Council. “It’s not an appellate court. It’s not a trial-level court. It’s a discussion. It’s a council. It’s a two-way council.”
So how, after all of the upheaval and rebellion on the part of students, did we end up with a “discussion” instead of a judiciary? This is the story of the Wabash College student judiciary – its conception, and its ultimate death.
The Breakdown of Trust
Delta Tau Delta freshman Johnny Dupree Smith died of acute alcohol poisoning early on the morning of October 5, 2008. Many, if not most, students at Wabash received the news of his passing as early as breakfast. Everyone was talking about the freshman Delt who had passed away after Homecoming—everyone, that is, except the Wabash College administration, who at least publicly kept quiet on the matter. The media apparently heard the news as well. By dusk, the Channel 8 News van was parked on the corner of Wabash and Grant. Some students received phone calls from media outlets, asking for confirmation of a death. The College was notified of these calls, and a brief “!everyone” email from President Patrick White concerning the death was sent to the Wabash community later that night.
Even in the first hours following Johnny Smith’s death, the seeds of distrust between Wabash students and their administration had been thoroughly sown. In the following weeks, the divisions would grow even deeper. Following a mandatory Chapel Talk, in which President White expressed his disappointment with the ungentlemanly, but still unidentified, actions which had been discovered in the Delt house leading up to Smith’s death, the decision was made to close the fraternity down entirely.
“I think that it’s not unfair to say that there was a breakdown in communication in a lot of ways,” says Dr. Rick Warner, who served as Associate Dean of Students at the time. Not only were the students—the Delts included—taken aback by the sudden closing, the faculty were also not notified until about four hours after the decision was made. “The ball was dropped,” Dr. Warner says with regards to communication with the faculty. As faculty members dealt with shocked and angry Delt students in their classes, without any knowledge of what was taking place, the divisions with the administration grew even deeper.
By the time Monon Bell season rolled around, the name of Dean Raters frequently replaced that of DePauw in the traditional “DePauw Swallows” chant. The Senior Council hosted a special “town hall” with Deans Raters and Warner, in which it became clear to students that they were not going to learn any details about why the administration was taking the actions it was taking. “I know what I know, and I can’t not know it,” was the most definitive information Dean Raters was willing to provide about the Delt closing. Both the students and Dean Raters were impassioned and raised their voices at the forum, and little common ground was found.
The breakdown of trust that semester was a two-way collapse. “Trust and confidence had been shaken,” says Dean Raters of those times. “Most of that discussion was from the students towards the administration, towards the Dean’s Office. I think that by the end of the semester, it was obvious that—I wouldn’t say ‘trust’ necessarily—I’d say confidence from me to students had been shaken. I still am really surprised and disappointed in what I found by some of the behaviors in our students, decision-making by our students, and the reactions by our students to things.”
Wabash was experiencing, as Dr. Warner puts it, a “cultural crisis.” It was within this context that discussions about a student judiciary began to take place.
The Raters Committee
In late October, Dean Raters called a “Gentleman’s Rule Summit” to begin to address the issues raised by Johnny Smith’s death and the tumultuous weeks that followed. The summit was an invitation-only event which consisted of administrators, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, and students. Two separate committees were formed as a result of this summit. The first was the Health and Safety Committee, chaired by Dean Warner, to look into issues of safety with regards especially to alcohol. The second was the Judicial Committee, comprised of faculty, staff, parents, alumni, and students handpicked by Dean Raters.
The Raters Committee looked into three options: 1) creating a judicial branch of student government that would work as an appeals board, 2) creating an advisory board that would offer its advice to the Dean’s office in disciplinary decision making, or 3) keeping the system the way it is.
Details about the individual choices were never fully worked out. But broadly speaking, the appeals board was meant to function as a venue for students who were unhappy with the disciplinary decisions made by the Dean of Students. They would have the option to take their case before the Student Judiciary, which would then have the ability to consider and debate the decision, and express its approval or disapproval to the administration. The Dean of Students would then make the final decision.
The second option—the advisory board—would function as a supplement to the Dean of Student’s decision-making process. The student to be disciplined, in certain circumstances, would be able to first go before the student judiciary, which would be given information on the particular case. The Judiciary would then make a recommendation to send to the Dean of Students, who would make the final decision.
According to Dean Raters, the committee very quickly ran into complexities with the first two options. “A lot of questions came into play that we spent a lot of time on,” he says, “the most significant being, ‘So who will be on this board?’” The committee discussed the possibilities of creating an “honor board” of prominent Wabash students, an elected board, or an appointed board. “So there was a lot of discussion about the organization of such a thing,” says Dean Raters, “regardless of which way it went.”
Eventually, the Raters Committee began to tend toward the advisory board model. This was a cause of concern for some students, but Jacob Moore ’11, who was involved with both the Raters Committee and the separate committee created by the Student Senate, claims that he favored the Raters approach. “I think personally—and I know that a fair amount of people disagree with this—that Dean Raters’ committee would work better because an appeal to a decision that has already been made, in my opinion–it’s a little bit harder to have something change,” he says. Providing student input before punishments are made, he claims, creates a greater opportunity to influence the decision. With the appellate board, the Dean would still make a decision completely independent of student opinion, and “99.999 percent of the time, that punishment is going to stick.”
The Nossett Committee
Following the disbandment of Delta Tau Delta, members of the fraternity were asked by the administration to resign from their leadership roles in clubs on campus. As rumors of forced resignations began to spread across campus, the Student Senate decided to respond. Invoking the Student Organization Leadership Act (SOLA), the Student Senate condemned the administration for tampering in student affairs. Also that night, they began work on a Student Judiciary panel.
“It was written the night of…the meeting where some of the Delts were asked to give up their roles and responsibilities in clubs on campus,” Class Representative Cody Stipes ’11 recalls, “That’s where the legislation came from originally.” At the next Student Senate session, former Phoenix Editor-in-Chief and then Senator Sean Clerget ’09 proposed a resolution calling for the assembly of an exploratory committee in the spring semester to look into creating a student judiciary. It was passed overwhelmingly.
Campaigning for the student government elections began shortly thereafter. Many candidates publicly advocated a Student Judiciary as a part of their campaigns, with the notable exception of Mark Thomas ’10, the representative who would ultimately be elected Student Body President. “Instead of creating more committees and councils,” Thomas wrote in his campaign platform, “I will use my power within Senior Council to address the issues that are in conflict with the Gentleman’s Rule.”
After becoming Student Body President in January, Thomas nonetheless appointed a committee as prescribed by the earlier resolution. He appointed Michael Nossett ’11 to chair the committee, which was comprised of members of the Student Senate. “Personally, I was at first fully against that idea because I did not want to expand our student government just to [create a new branch],” Thomas now says, “but through the thorough research done by our committee, I soon found myself looking at several possibilities.”
Nossett took a similarly cautious approach while investigating the possibilities of a judicial branch. His first goal with the committee, he claims, was to fix the problem of Wabash’s ambiguous disciplinary process. He wanted to make the process more clear, not necessarily to check the Dean’s authority. “We’re 950 students,” he says, “We’re only here seven to eight semesters, and so you can’t get that much experience. You can’t know everything at 18 to 22. And you shouldn’t be put in a position of authority over your peers. The Dean’s Office is the authority in charge.”
“The only thing that student government can rightfully do,” he says, is write a letter to the Dean in support of the student being disciplined. “In the end of the day, student government can only do so much.”
In the pursuit of creating a clearer disciplinary process, the Nossett Committee proposed a Student Disciplinary Bill of Rights, which included the right to appeal. It was approved nearly unanimously by the Student Senate. Morris Hall Senator Kyle Nagdeman ’10, was a lonely vote against the measure, claiming the bill was redundant and that it paved the way for an unnecessary judiciary. “The student has rights as it is,” he says, “Why have a bill or a law that states the same damn thing that they already know that they have?”
As the investigation went on, many students on the committee began to tend toward the appellate model. Cody Stipes believed it was a much better model than the one being formed by Dean Raters. “Basically, it seemed like the Dean’s committee would be more of a situation where Dean Raters would go to them with limited amounts of material in terms of what the decision he made was. It didn’t seem to me it was enough for anyone to make a full, critical assessment of the situation and then be able to make a decision off of that,” he says. “I felt like it was very limiting to the members involved and that it really wouldn’t do a lot of good, to be honest…I felt [the appellate model] would do more than the Dean’s committee would do because they would be able to gain as much information as the member was willing to share, and then from there make a decision based on the decision that was made by the Dean and say, ‘You know, I just don’t think that was the right decision.’”
The Mock Trials
Initially, the Dean’s Office was unaware of Nossett’s committee. “Shortly after the Gentleman’s Rule Summit, the Student Senate began, independent from us, and quite frankly, unbeknownst to us, a look at similar sorts of elements,” says Dean Raters. Dr. Warner agrees with that assessment of the situation. “I wasn’t aware of the Student Senate piece of this for quite a while,” he says. “They don’t report to the Dean’s Office.”
The Student Senate, however, was very aware of Dean Raters’ committee. Quoted in the April 17 issue of The Bachelor, Sean Clerget claimed that having two separate committees was “counterproductive to the process.”
“It is a clear conflict when the Dean handpicks a group of students to work on an idea that was meant, originally, to check the Dean’s power,” he said. “If the administration really wants student involvement, I urge Dean Raters to bring the different committees together under the leadership of the Senate committee to make a proposal. We need a fair process for students when disciplinary action is taken, and we get off on the wrong foot when the process for creating that process is hijacked.”
After learning of the Student Senate committee and the growing discontent, Dean Warner advocated bringing the groups together. “My own personal style about dealing with things like this is to bring people in,” he told Dean Raters, “so let’s join the two groups.” After thinking it over for a while, Dean Raters agreed.
So late in the semester, the two groups came together and began to hold mock trials. The committees held trials using both versions of the Student Judiciary, and they began to run into trouble with issues of privacy rights, small school politics, and the judiciary’s makeup.
Some students changed their position on the idea following these sessions. “I liked the idea of a Student Judiciary from the beginning,” says Class Representative Andrew Forrester ’11, “but the more that we’ve looked into it, I’ve realized that it’s not as feasible or clear-cut as it is at other schools.”
“I think that we learned what we liked and what we didn’t like if we were going to have one,” says Nossett of the mock trials, “but I don’t think that it convinced anyone that we needed one.”
Dean Raters claims that both committees eventually found common ground. “Going through those hearings, I think, both groups had an eye-opening experience—that situations are more complex than they might appear, that there is a reason that we’ve had the system that we’ve had as long as we’ve had it,” he says. “My sense was that both groups agreed that we weren’t at a place at that point to have a specific, well-designed ‘X,’ and if you don’t have a specific, well-designed ‘X,’ then to tinker with something is not a good idea.” By the end of the semester, the two groups had stopped meeting.
Dean Raters says that he was able to draw good ideas from the efforts. There was “a whole lot of hard work, good thought, really pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box, a lot of creativity,” he says. And from those ideas, he claims, he decided to create a “Dean’s Presidents Council,” which consists of the presidents of the Student Body, the IFC, the IMA, the Sphinx Club, and the MXI. He claims that the council is all about “keeping one’s cool, taking one’s time, dealing with the facts, rather than reacting to opinion.” Dean Raters intends to meet with the council every other week, in a manner similar to his meetings with fraternity presidents.
Our Take
It might seem odd that we are writing an article on the student judiciary issue after its timely demise. The powers that be in the Student Senate recognized that having a student judiciary panel would be problematic, as was earlier detailed. However, it is fitting that we discuss some of the basic reasons why, in hindsight, the concept of a student judiciary panel as it arose out of last year’s events should be doomed to the ash-heap of history.
We do not deny that there are legitimate concerns rising out of the events of last year. As Dr. Warner acknowledged, there were serious lapses of communication between the administration and the student body (and the Wabash community in general). While actions were condemned, no one was informed as to what those depraved actions were. A fraternity house was closed without much prior knowledge on the part of the fraternity brothers. Rumors were allowed to fly across the campus with little done by the administration to provide contrary information. All of these were failures on the part of the administration with regards to the death of Johnny D. Smith and the closing of Delta Tau Delta.
That being said, those problems require a look at how the administration acted – not a student judiciary panel which will stand in judgment over their peers. In relation to the events of last year, it is doubtful that things could have been handled differently had there been a student judiciary panel. Legal matters were undoubtedly in play throughout the situation. Such matters are responsibility of the administration – not the student body or some elite gathering of student judges. While we students are an integral part of Wabash, we must remember that we alone do not make Wabash. The administration – including the Deans – maintains Wabash and her traditions by acting as guardians. Whether we students recognize this or not, this is undeniably true. This does not mean that we need to agree with their every decision. However, this does mean that a certain deference is owed to the administration. Even if we do not agree with the administration’s decision, we should not question their dedication to the College or the students.
It was through such questioning that the recent manifestation of the student judiciary panel came into being. The unspoken premise behind the panel was that the Deans wronged the student body through their punishment of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and so there needed to some basic check on the power of the deans. This is not to say that the members of the Student Senate who supported the concept at its various stages held this premise themselves. However, it is safe to say that much of the general support for the panel was due to this questioning of the intentions of the administration.
To some extent, the concept of the student judiciary panel was based upon some doctrine of the deserved omniscience of the students. Students should know everything that happens at every level at the College, and students can make rational decisions that are inevitably best for the College. Michael Nossett said it best when he said that we as students cannot know everything at the ages of 18-22. We do not know what the best courses of action are. Some of us may be quite mature and seemingly wise beyond our years, but that doesn’t mean that we have the absolute right to have an authoritative say at every level of decision making at Wabash College.
Let us take a quick look at the mission statement of our college: “Wabash College educates men to think critically, act responsibly, lead effectively, and live humanely.” Note the verb; it’s active. Wabash “educates” us. Over our four years here, we learn to do those four things through both personal devotion to the ideals of the Gentleman’s Rule and the careful, occasional prodding of our faculty and administration. We are still works in progress, and are therefore liable to err. While it is one thing to give a peer advice, it is another to lay down a punishment that could have uncertain ramifications and consequences.
The idea of the student judiciary panel has come and gone. May the good Lord have mercy on its soul in the next life and prevent its ugly resurrection here at Wabash. Insofar as the concept of the panel was to create student ownership over our college, it was positive. However, there were dangers that lurked in the background of this. At its heart, it forgot that we are students. We are young and prone to err, and it might behoove us to remember that. This does not mean that we should blindly accept the administration and not occasionally challenge them. However, that should be done with respect and with the recognition of who we are. If we remember the Gentleman’s Rule, and if we remember that we are students, we will find that the student judiciary panel is unnecessary.
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