My Fair Lady Abstract Discussion 4/30/13

Abstract Discussion Minutes from [4/30/13]

Members Present: Ann Wolski, Emily Brown, Tamar Hoffman, Brian Guggenheimer, Janela Harris

Community Members: Sara Jaramillo, Emily Ferguson, Alanna Phillips, Idun Krulegg

1. Abstract Discussion

1. Mo si.
2. Tamar: Let’s talk about the first discussion question. What can juries do if a confronted party does not show up to trial meetings? This was a big issue during this case. Eliza didn’t show up to most of the trial until the summer.
3. Emily: I think the jury’s decision to separate because of her lack of participation made a lot of sense and ultimately worked out.
4. Samara: I think as long as you give the student as many opportunities and then at a certain point the trial has to move on. At that point their lack of participation becomes an action.
5. Janela: I agree that Samara that inaction is definitely an action. I think that I personally would be less accommodating than this jury was in terms of spreading a trial out and rescheduling it so many times. I think taking somebody’s actions as intentional is really important and reading into that would have been appropriate. I also think it’s nice that the jury was so accommodating.
6. Emily: They also had summer break to refresh.
7. Janela: I just don’t think I would have been okay with this coming over. The email they responded to probably said they would be serving the next couple of weeks.
8. Samara: I was on this jury. It was less about accommodating her than being at a loss. She had already dropped the class. It seemed that we didn’t have much to work with until we saw her.
9. Ann: It blows my mind that when you get in trouble. You run away. Maybe it was some kind of denial. This kind of case does make it seem that there should be some kind of stipulation about what to do in this kind of a situation.
10. Tamar: The way I see it is that the Code is a part of the school policy. By that same measure school policy says that you have to follow school policy. I think that when we want to have student self-governance we need to deal with the sticky situations, so it wouldn’t be right to give it to the administration. I am not sure how I stand on this case. I think giving the confronted party an essay over the summer is dangerous.
11. Emily F: I was also on this jury Eliza approached this. I think ultimately this letter is awesome and I think it shows that separation can be really positive. If it had to come to this, I am glad that we went through that. It was long but it was worth it.
12. Tamar: And it wasn’t an easy decision. It was not like the jury just
13. Samara: I think one thing about the timeline is that it wasn’t supposed to go into the summer at all. If the trial chair had responded to the email it wouldn’t have continued at all. Unfortunately that happened and we had to deal with it.
14. Tamar: That also brings up a question about what happens when Council members fall short, because they are human too.
15. Emily B: I am glad that the she held up the decision.
16. Emily F: Some of the jury members talked to her after the summer as well and tried to gage where she was.
17. Samara: Her letter to the community reads so much differently than the essay she wrote.
18. Idun: How much do jurors have to do with actually writing the letter? It seemed that they had a lot of involvement with it.
19. Samara: Part of the resolutions was meeting with jurors to discuss the Code.
20. Tamar: The letter to the community were completely her
21. Janela: I have a question. Tamar was talking about student self-governance. Part of it means taking the good parts and the bad parts. I am wondering about people’s opinion on if the problem is that a student doesn’t believe in student self-governance and they are supposed to be involved in something like a trial, but if the fundamental issue…
22. Emily B: What exactly do you mean?
23. Janela: What if the student sees the trial as something that she doesn’t buy into.
24. Samara: I would say that a Council trial is still very real and supported by the administration. Tell them that they can go and appeal it to the president.
25. Tamar: Just to get everyone on the same page: After a trial, all of the parties involved have 5 days to appeal to the President’s office.
26. Samara: And this was appealed. I don’t know if she had those beliefs, but she also thought it could go further.
27. Ann: She also told the President things she didn’t tell the jury.
28. Tamar: I was the trial chair over the summer. I think that it was really hard, because she had only met with two jurors to go over the essay. She didn’t really have a chance after the summer to reveal the circumstances after she missed circumstantial.
29. Emily B: Nothing stopped her from sending an email to the chair and ask if she could meet again. I know that’s a lot to ask, but if she is going to have another chance she needs to take some initiative.
30. Tamar: I ultimately agree with the outcome of the trial and I am glad that it came out well. Separation is hard because you do not know exactly how it would impact the student.
31. Samara: Did anybody think separation was not warranted?
32. Emily B: No. I think it was absolutely warranted.
33. Brian: I thought that the letter that the jury wrote explained separation really well.
34. Samara: I had doubts until I read the letter she wrote when this abstract came out.
35. Emily F: I am not sure that separation isn’t the right decision even if the outcome didn’t work out this well. I think regardless of how she goes through that time it can still be suited to the case. I think I felt like that time was needed for her to come back independent of how she processes it.
36. Ann: I trust Council and juries to not let someone who doesn’t seem to care that they’ve broken the code just stay and hang out. Not to say that the individual doesn’t matter, but the community also matters, and as a community member, I’d count on a jury to care for the community as a whole, too.
37. Samara: I wasn’t entirely sure that she was in a good enough place to be restored without separation (which I see as a last resort), but looking back, I’ve started to think that maybe she was better than I thought. So, I doubted that separation was good, but hearing this letter, and seeing how far she did actually go, has resolved that.
38. Tamar: the jury decided through this essay resolution to give Eliza another chance to express her thoughts before separation, and I wonder if it would have been fair for a jury to come up with any resolution that wasn’t geared toward getting more info like this initially?
39. Alanna: I think an essay like this was necessary, even if she hadn’t taken it seriously.
40. Emily B: I can see that they didn’t feel like they could make a finite resolution at this point, but I’d have seen the letter as a chance for her to prove me wrong (in thinking that she needed to be separated)
41. Samara: that was how I saw it before, but then I got the letter, and there was some stuff there, but not really enough, so it actually just complicated my feelings but left me in about the same place
42. Idun: I find the idea of “deserving” separation interesting. I see it as something someone either needs or doesn’t need, and I think she’d have needed it even without the letter.
43. Brian: I would have been leaning toward separation even before the letter, but I agree with Emily that looking up PowerPoint slides during an exam is real cheating, and lying during the trial process is also bad, and I’d have taken those signs as indicators that she wasn’t ready to be here. And I wouldn’t have trusted her in a class with me, which is often the judgment I use.
44. Tamar: I wouldn’t have felt comfortable making a decision about it before hearing someone out beforehand. I’d have gone to the administration and others to ask about if there was anything else going on that they could share confidentially, because making a decision without knowing that wouldn’t be fair of the jury
45. Samara: there’s a difference between giving her a chance to tell everyone that she was sick and chasing information like that that may or may not been out there
46. Tamar: I think it would have been easy enough to just ask the deans, and I see it as part of being personally liable for someone’s academic future
47. Emily F: thinking of the CAPS resolution, and its contentiousness, I think that short of separation there aren’t many opportunities to try to address an issue like disrespect or lack of participation. There are plenty of ways to get plagiarism education, but respect is harder to push on someone.
48. Emily B: I understand her reaction to the caps resolution, but I also think that people at Haverford recommend CAPS all the time, and her reaction to it is just one more indicator that she wasn’t ready. Because she couldn’t come around until getting her personal stuff sorted out after all
49. Samara: I don’t think she knew it wasn’t personal, though. And now I might recommend the OAR instead, but at the time caps was just the standard option
50. Ann: CAPS was recommended out of care to her, and the mental health stigma was probably the biggest reason she objected, and that makes me sad
51. Emily F: I just think that, without separation, CAPS might not even have done enough. I do think it was appropriate to recommend, but I don’t think it would have solved anything if she had all the same college stuff going on, and I think separation was most helpful
52. Tamar: some students meet with their dean on a regular basis, as a way to check in and be mindful of the fact that this happened, and they need to work on changing behavior. I don’t know if it would have been good here, but it’s something to consider
53. Tamar: anything else? General no.
54. Moment of silence.

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!