Public Portion Minutes 4/14

By admin Published April 15, 2013 Public Minutes

Honor Council Minutes from 4/14/2013

Members Present: Tamar Hoffman, Janela Harris, Brian Guggenheimer, Austin Boyle, Ryan Baxter-King, Erin Berlew, Henrik Born, Jon Sweitzer-Lamme, Ann Wolski, Emily Brown, Jon Laks

Members Absent: William Bannard, Andrew Szczurek, Damon Motz-Storey, Max Findley, Allie Kandel, Joost Ziff

Public Portion Guests: Nathalia, Suzanna, Jeremy, Melissa

Mo si.
Tamar: thanks those of you who are here. Some info: Co-Chair elections are this week, Co-Sec elections the following week.
Ryan: can you run for one while holding the other?
Tamar: yes, because there are some people who are preparing to run for Co-Sec, and it wouldn’t be fair to just cancel that election
Brian: i disagree, but i don’t think you’re the person to argue this with
Suzanna: can we talk more about the possibility of releasing more statistics regarding trials and everything to the community?
Tamar: yes. one issue with releasing information like trends is that one chair’s term doesn’t constitute a patterns, so it’s hard to even have hoco members who really know about trends and everything like that. the only other thing i can say is that we’re listening to these concerns and trying to work on it
Suzanna: do you know about students’ desire to see this information
Tamar: we released the number of cases last semester because we thought it was important, and after that some people have asked for more, but I don’t know
Jon Wm: the very first abstracts were not based on student demand
Nathalia: do you guys advertise about public portion? and if not, how do you plan to rectify the fact that people don’t know about their only opportunity to comment on honor council goings on?
Tamar: We advertise at the beginning of every semester on the consensus and the Go! boards. I still update on the Go! boards periodically. We had a push this semester but it was interrupted because we didn’t have meetings for a while.
Ryan: it’s also a community responsibility to know and come if they care
Suzanna?: even people like hcos could publicize the fact that students do have a chance to see everything the council does.
Tamar: the issue isn’t that people don’t use the correct avenues, because hcos are told about this, but letting people know can only go so far. more communication all around would be better, and i do wish i knew how to get people emore engages
Brian: i didn’t know about public portion until joining council, but i joined first semester freshman year, so…. i think hcos could do more
Tamar: there are lots of things hcos could/should do, and some get done and some dont. and this is one of those things. also, the hco program isn’t under honor council, which is good, because council shouldn’t run all code things, but communication between hcoc and council would be beneficial
Nathalia: does honor council choose students’ council members?
Tamar: no.
Jon Wm: Honor council is sort of parallel and sort of subordinate to students’ council
Tamar: students’ council and honor council members are all elected by student council elections
Jeremy: we were talking a while ago about reshaping public portion meetings, has any work been done toward that?
Tamar: we’re thinking of it for next year, but there’s no more time this year
Suzanna?: how much continuity is there between council?
Tamar: chairs and secretary terms alternate, and other rep positions as well, so constitutionally half of council should carry over, but in practice this doesn’t always happen
But what about the concerns from one year to the next?
Tamar: we try to let people know when they arrive, and some members are involved after their terms, but some aren’t. there’s no streamlined way to keep them involved
Jon Wm: also, as librarian, institutional memory is my job, and i’ll be leaving a list of concerns for the next semester
Brian: co-chairs also write reports to the incoming chairs.
Nathalia: is it possible to see minutes?
Janela: we didn’t have minutes to post for a while, and we’ve been lazy, but we should and will post them.
Brian: you could also email code and ask for them
Nathalia: i feel like honor council is visible and invisible at the same time, and i think that’s why students are unhappy with council and the code, because they feel like council is involved in everything but no one knows what they actually do. so, i think we should have more transparency
Tamar: Do you mean Honor Code or Honor Council? Something that stands out to me in what you just said is that you’re kind of conflating Council and the Code, when really the Code belongs to every student. I think Honor Council has a much smaller purview than the Honor Code does.
Suzanna: I think the social part of the Honor Code is the biggest problem with transparency. I personally don’t know when to confront someone because I don’t think there have been many social abstracts coming out. I think there is no metter for something that should come out of Honor Council.
Nathalia: At We Speak, one of the things I heard was that the Honor Code leads to passive aggressiveness. I feel that when they talk about the HC instead of confronting someone it becomes more of a passive-aggressiveness.
Jeremy; What do you mean by passive-aggressiveness?
Erin: I think an example is that instead of telling your roommate you are bothered by something they are doing you tell somebody else first.
Suzanna: I think the way confrontation is used is a problem. There is a general viewpoint that people feel like the social part of the HC isn’t working for them. There aren’t the nuances as to why.
Tamar: social concerns are not mandated to come to council, so there are fewer social abstracts because we just see fewer social cases. you could check past abstracts, though, is you want to see examples. You could also ask anonymous/hypothetical questions, if you have a question and want to play it safe. things that are brought to council are not necessarily taken to trial
Jon Wm: would it be helpful to ask people to write social abstracts of cases that didn’t necessarily go to trial? because that could be really helpful.
Ryan: i like that
Brian: Did you mean cases that came to Honor Council and didn’t go to trial, or cases that were resolved without being brought to Council?
Jon Wm: like asking my ex-roommate if i could write an abstract of a situation between us tht might be helpful for people to read
Melissa: what about go! boards?
Tamar: We wouldn’t want people to be able to trace stories, though
Jon Wm: we could ask for general “my experience has been…” rather than specific stories
Ryan: also, little stories could help allay concerns about how grave council matters can be
Janela: What if instead of the Go! Boards we somehow publicly asked people to send stories of their experiences with confrontation and the code to code@hc and we could look at them and pseudomize them and then publicize them the same way that ratification comments are done.
Tamar: My concern is that this is a very personal thing. Sometimes they want an outside mediator. I think that by releasing this sort of document people will think there are set guidelines that they have to follow instead of following their gut.
Ryan: You can have a discussion question about mediators attached to leave the discussion open.
Jeremy: I disagree, Tamar. i think any personal anecdote is going to be personal, and it doesn’t make sense to assume that people will have to do what everyone else did
Tamar: i just think that if it comes from council, people will see it as set guidelines
Janela; There is a big difference between publicizing procedures and making public something that somebody sent us. People argue with jury’s decisions during abstract discussions.
Ryan: I think this would also help with the perception of HC not reaching out to the community.
Allie: I think that the whole forum would be inappropriate because the whole point is that HC isn’t the end all be all. That makes it seem like we’re overseeing it.
Jeremy: I don’t think this makes it seem that HC is trying to run these confrontations. I think the idea is that Hoco as a body is publicizing information that specifically doesn’t relate to Hoco because that will help people understand.
Jon: there’s a difference between facilitation and ownership
Allie: just setting it up is too much like ownership
Jeremy: people would take it more seriously
Ryan: what if council said “we’re not taking ownership”
Allie: that would be better, but i don’t think it would be used
Erin: What if it were part of a larger thing? What if it included other information?
Ryan: i don’t think it needs to be constantly updated, either, we just need a set of scenarios
Janela: I disagree that this would be HoCo taking ownership and it’s outside Hoco’s purview. I think that a confrontation that didn’t come to HoCo is not part of our business.
Allie: i see council as the place to repair broken trust, so if you have two friends having problems, if there’s no breach of trust, it doesn’t need to come to us
Ryan: this is different because it’s academic, but in mockingbird council received something and bounced it back, so maybe this would be similar
Tamar: i like the abstract idea more than the forum idea, but i don’t actually see any need at all. I don’t like the forum because this is too small of a campus
Ann and Emily enter.
Suzanna: just to clarify: there’s an option of handling an issue on your own, a mediator from council, and taking something to council. are those the only three?
Tamar: yes.
Brian: and even if something is the third, council could decide it should be on of the first two
Suzanna: how many people use mediators?
Janela: We can’t tell you that.
Brian: it’s not immensely popular.
Tamar: it’s not as used now as it has been in the past.
Suzanna: i just didn’t know it was an option until recently.
Tamar: maybe publicizing it as an option would help with these overall issues, and would make people feel more comfortable bringing things to council
Nathalia: do people need to agree to be brought to council?
Tamar: only if you’re hoping for a mediation, because that needs to be voluntary
Jeremy: could we see abstracts of mediations?
Tamar: only if there’s a suspicion of violation
Jon: Anything that HoCo comes to a suspicion of violation of becomes an abstract right?
Tamar: not necessarily. abstracts make procedures feel more official than casual, and if a mediation is intended to be a smaller deal, that might dissuade people from agreeing to write one.
Emily: abstracts are also intended to repair a breach with the community, but with mediation there’s no overreaching breach
Jeremy: the code says that council is responsible fro cases with a breach of trust with the community, but also administrative responsibilities like defining confrontation
Tamar: what would you like to see coming out of that?
Jeremy: I liked Jon’s suggestion of mini-abstracts
Tamar: good to hear
Ryan: critical mass for private portion is 13?
Tamar: yes, and we’re working on it.
Jeremy: on the difference between code and council: you all think there’s a big difference, but a lot of people on campus don’t see it that way, and the code is only on their mind during plenary, so council and the code are the same thing. what if anything is council doing to fix this?
Tamar: honestly, nothing. i wish we were, but we’re not addressing it.
Emily: what do you mean?
Jon Wm: people see the code as the property of council
Melissa: if you guys could come up with ways that the community could learn about the code, confrontation, and general ways to let people know about the basics, that would be great
Tamar: should i compose guidelines for how to confront in social situations? i say this more as a cp than a council chair, and it won’t be the final word, but i can send something out if it would be helpful. remember that elections are coming up.
Mo si.

These minutes reflect the interpretations of Janela Harris and Brian Guggenheimer, Co-Secretaries. They are neither reviewed nor approved by the rest of Honor Council. Questions/comments? Email hccosecs@hc!

Tags: Community Outreach Confrontation