Ad Board Needs Revamping

Recent events, including a pending Undergraduate Council bill requesting student representation on the Administrative Board, have suggested that Harvard College's main disciplinary body must be more accountable to students. Although we do not agree that students should be members of the Administrative Board for reasons of confidentiality and consistency, we do believe that students should be more involved in the disciplinary process. We propose two changes to accomplish this end: publishing reports of all the Ad Board's cases each year without naming names and making the Student-Faculty Judicial Board (SFJB) a more viable option for students facing the Ad Board.

There are many advantages to making students members of the Administrative Board: more openness about cases, more legitimacy for the board in students' eyes, more input by students in judging their peers. Yet the disadvantages outweigh these admitted advantages. No matter how much student members were sworn to secrecy about sensitive issues such as rape or academic dishonesty, there is a good chance that some details would get out to roommates or friends and thus to the student body as a whole, needlessly embarrassing the people involved.

That said, however, we urge the Ad Board to publish detailed descriptions of its cases each year without attaching names to them, an idea former Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 said he would support. The User's Guide to the Ad Board already offers examples of possible cases and decisions, but students would be far better served by the honest disclosure of many actual cases. They would then know what punishment they would face for particular transgressions and, more importantly, be able to debate the Ad Board's decisions rather than helplessly standing by while a mysterious body makes invisible judgments.

We also urge major changes in the use of the SFJB, a group established by the Faculty in 1987 to hear cases in which there is "no clear precedent or consensus in the community." The board should become not simply a court of choice for cases that have no precedent, but a true option for students who would like the openness of a board on which their peers sit. Instead of having the Ad Board members and the SFJB decide whether a case can go to the SFJB, the student should be guaranteed a hearing if he or she asks for it. Perhaps then the board would improve its record of hearing only one case in nine years.

The question of how the Administrative Board can gain legitimacy in the eyes of students is a crucial one. We hope that Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 will work with the Undergraduate Council to come to a mutually agreeable solution.