Editorial Q&A: Precedent and privacy

Opinion editor Maggie Zellner sat down with Margaret Anderson, chair of the Undergraduate Honor Court, to talk some more about sanctioning.

Daily Tar Heel: I’m curious about how sanctions differ between cases, even when students are convicted of the same violation. How does this work?

Margaret Anderson: I can’t give you hypothetical examples, because we don’t operate on precedent. And I can’t give past examples because we need to maintain confidentiality.

But the basic idea is that if two students receive the same sanction for the same violation, and the sanction will affect one student very differently than the other student, that’s not fair.

DTH: So is the underlying assumption that precedent isn’t the best way to achieve equitable outcomes?

MA: It’s not that we don’t think precedent is the best way to get there, but we simply can’t operate on precedent, because we can’t distribute the outcomes of the cases to the general public, even if that “general public” were just the Court members. We can’t violate students’ privacy rights. I don’t even know all the outcomes of all the cases that have run this year.

DTH: So how do the students who sit on the court get a frame of reference? How do you train them without using hypotheticals?

MA: We give them mock cases. They also shadow several actual Honor Court hearings as a component of their training.

DTH: Can you give me a mock case? Or paraphrase it for me?

MA: Well, I can put it this way: For some students, a semester off is almost a break. It’s not a walk in the park by any means; everyone has to reapply to the University, and it means a permanent disciplinary record. But it’s manageable.

For other students, for whatever reasons — health reasons, family reasons, financial reasons — that same sanction of a one-semester suspension could mean that they would never be able to come back to the University.

DTH: And clearly that’s not the intended outcome of a suspension. You don’t want to, say, have an international student lose their visa because of a one-semester suspension?

MA: Right. If we meant for them never to come back to the University, we would impose a different sanction.