By Beacon Editorial Board
Last week's coverage of the controversy surrounding the University's Sexual Misconduct Policy highlights a clear problem with many of the policies in the student handbook: They're much too vague.
It could be argued that the generality of such policies allows the administration to address more of the needs of the University community. Unfortunately, however, the vagueness of these policies also enables the administration to apply them to a number of activities for which students may have no idea they could be penalized.
Specificity need not require a larger handbook. Certain policies could be written in much fewer words if they were more precise. The Sexual Misconduct Policy, for example, could be summed up with: "Students who have sex (or whatever specific activities the University equates with sexual intimacy) could be expelled."
Second, these policies must include more specific consequences for specific actions. We're not asking for a detailed rubric that could allow a student to quickly determine an exact penalty, but it would be better than assuming that you could be expelled from an accusation of having sex outside of marriage.
Finally, the University should tell students about any significant changes made to the student handbook. Along with the Sexual Misconduct policy, a 36-item "Code of Conduct" slipped into the 2006-07 handbook without any official notification to students. Why were students not informed of this change? Was the administration hoping we wouldn't notice?
If the UP administration believes strongly enough in these stipulations to make them official policy, it should have no reservations in transparently presenting them to students.
