Amplify the student voice in the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline

Over the past few weeks, undergraduate students have been receiving email advertisements to apply to the Honor Committee and the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline (COD), which are responsible for adjudicating violations of academic and community standards according to Rights, Rules, and Responsibilities. The Honor Committee is responsible for infractions regarding in-class exams, while the COD legislates academic cases outside the classroom as well as behavioral violations that could result in suspension, expulsion, or the withholding of degrees.

The Honor Committee and COD both play important roles in administering campus discipline. But there’s a crucial difference in the makeup of the two bodies — the Honor Committee is composed entirely of students, while the COD currently has more faculty than student members.

While RRR stipulates that the COD must comprise at least seven faculty members and deans and eight students, its current majority is faculty members/deans, who number 13, compared to nine students. To ensure the student voice is duly represented, the COD should mandate a student majority at all times. Short of overhauling the COD to be student-run like the Honor Committee, this is arguably one of the most straightforward, equitable, and realistic ways to ensure both disciplinary committees progress towards the same high standard of respect and advocacy for the students they judge. Especially given the Honor Code’s documented devastating and lasting consequences on students, exploring these reforms becomes especially critical.

The Honor Committee’s student makeup gives them a distinct understanding of empathy in what is often a stressful process. Nadia Makuc ’26, chair of the Honor Committee, told me in an interview that this student-run nature allows the committee to uniquely empathize with students under investigation. According to Makuc, one question asked during Honor Committee applicant interviews is “‘what’s the difference between you and a student in question,’ with the understatement that the answer is not that much.”

“The benefit of having a student-run committee is that [we] very much can put ourselves in those students’ shoes,” said Makuc.

Student perspectives are not only important to effectively adjudicating student violations but also in championing improvements of academic life overall. Makuc recalled one example of when the Honor Committee informed deans from the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS) that students often did not have clocks in exam rooms, which, she said, was “jaw-dropping” to them — leading to a reform that ensured clocks in classrooms. The student voice understands nuances of the undergraduate experience that faculty or deans may not.

The COD also has an issue with its voting structure. The Honor Committee states that six out of seven members of the Honor Committee must agree to find a student responsible for a violation. The COD, in contrast, requires a more lenient majority vote to convict students, reflecting a comparatively insufficient rigor in determining student guilt. With its current makeup, the COD can find a student guilty without a single one of their undergraduate peers agreeing with the conviction. If the structure of the COD isn’t changed, increasing the required majority and/or weighting student votes more heavily would at least afford students more voting power.

In the vast majority of cases, students don’t cheat out of malicious intent. Rather, it’s out of factors like stress and pressure. Thus, having a student-centered disciplinary process that understands these root issues will allow for a more empathetic, fair adjudication of an inherently difficult process. An unnecessarily punitive model also increases the inherent stigma around University discipline, cyclically alienating the University’s disciplinary system from the students it’s supposed to bring justice to.

The jurisdiction of the COD makes these reforms especially important. While it’s unclear how many cases COD adjudicates per year, especially compared to the Honor Committee, Makuc speculates that because many courses don’t incorporate in-class exams, “the role of the Committee has maybe especially been dwarfed by the COD.” Certainly, there are far more everyday assignments and problem sets than in-class exams. Whether a student violated an academic integrity clause while taking a midterm in Friend Center or working on a physics take-home in their dorm room should not alter the leniency, structure, and process by which their case is adjudicated. But this is the current reality. Amplifying the student voice in the COD would improve the consistency, integrity, and humaneness of the disciplinary system, not to mention the most important: the well-being of Princeton students.

Defending the importance of the student voice in disciplinary processes becomes even more critical considering Trump’s attack on disciplinary due processes in higher education. Letters from the federal government to Harvard and Columbia demanded that they revise their disciplinary processes to more efficiently enforce severe punishments — i.e. expulsion and multi-year suspension — targeted towards student protestors. This entails curtailing jurisdiction from faculty and student bodies to the administrative, purportedly to uphold “consistency and impartiality.” But this destructive erasure of student perspectives would accomplish the opposite. True justice starts with ensuring student voices are equally heard on every disciplinary committee.

Ava Chen is a first-year contributing Opinion writer intending to study English or Computer Science. She is from Wellesley, Mass. and can be reached at ac5214[at]princeton.edu.