Transparent Trials

A case brought to the Washington State Supreme Court regarding the privacy of faculty disciplinary hearings at colleges will likely result in far-reaching ramifications for schools across the country. The suit involves Professor Perry F. Mills at Western Washington University, who claims that his academic suspension after a closed faculty hearing would not have occurred had the hearing been open. Mills argues that the secrecy of the proceedings promotes perjury and precludes witnesses with conflicting evidence from coming forward. On the other hand, the school argues that it maintains the right to set its own procedures and that confidentiality is crucial to protecting student testifiers. Although a reasonable balance must be struck, schools conducting faculty hearings must permit students, faculty, and other interested parties to submit evidence and understand the state of faculty disciplinary trials, even if all details remain unknown.

Providing more information about cases will no doubt prove a delicate task for colleges; although it is essential for all facts to make it into the case as the hearing unfolds, schools must shy away from releasing excess details about the situation in order to protect those on trial. As shown by the Mills case, there are sensitive issues regarding institutional rights, student protection, and behind-closed-doors honesty that require a certain degree of college prerogative to balance. However, on a systemic level, the current structure is far too clandestine and affords insufficient space for transparent, external input.

It is important to note that universities have an institutional interest in conducting closed hearings—they yearn to be seen as reliable providers of research. The public nature of open cases may compromise this credibility, and thus colleges prefer to minimize the number of investigations made known to the community. At the same time, schools also take pains to thoroughly examine their own cases to ensure that they, not others, discover their researchers’ mistakes. These two tendencies combine to give universities good reason to have trials that are not completely open but also not entirely closed.

Merely publishing a transcript after a case is not a remedy to currently closed trials; it leaves the situation vulnerable to chaotic complications, should errors be discovered with the trial after the decision. Instead, people must be able to present evidence at the time of the original trial.

Moreover, in the interest of time and clarity, hearings should appear on a public docket as proceedings unfurl. This would cast off the stigma associated with ambiguous court documentation. Most other forms of legal review use a similar method, and faculty hearings should be no different.

That being said, research hearings require exceptional guidelines because the process is more straightforward and universities can usually discern relevant testifiers with relative ease. As a practical matter, students who did not work for the researchers in question have far less to contribute to these hearings, thus necessitating a lesser degree of openness in the interest of confidentiality.

Changes to more open faculty hearings would empower students to bring forward their concerns once they embrace their role in these affairs. It is comforting for students to know that they are allowed to participate in such campus-wide decisions. Indeed, these issues bear a timely relevance to the Harvard community in particular, and we urge the College to implement the above suggestions. It is high time for Harvard and other universities to lift the veil on faculty hearings and engage input from the student community.