My heart sinks whenever I speak to a student who says “I thought that something was wrong (e.g. with marking), but I didn’t want to offend the lecturers by suggesting it.”. Sometimes the implication is worse—”I don’t want to bias lecturers against me in future classes by being seen to be a troublemaker.”, or “I didn’t want to challenge the accusation of plagiarism, even though I had a good explanation, because I don’t want the lecturers to mark me down on future assessments.”.
My impression is that universities are, on the whole, not like this. Indeed, the idea that we have time to pursue grudges like this, even if we had the inclination (and we don’t), seems risible from where I sit. Nonetheless, we have a genuine problem here; one of “justice being seen to be done” as well as justice being done.
Universities try to deal with complaints, plagiarism cases, problems with marking, etc. by having a clear, unbiased system—as much as there is a model at all, it is the judicial system. But, some students don’t see it like that. However much we emphasise that the process is neutral, there is always a fear of those exhortations being seen as a smokescreen to hide an even deeper bias. The same, of course, is true in the broader world—disadvantaged groups believe (in some cases correctly) that the justice system is set up against them, and no amount of exhortation that it is a neutral system will help.
What can we do? Firstly, I wonder if we need to explain more. In particular, we need to explain that things are different from school, that students are treated as adults at university, and that a university review process consists in a neutral part of the university making a fair judgement between the part of the university that is making the accusation and the student. Students entering the university system have only the school system to base their idea of an educational disciplinary/judicial system on, and that is a very different model. Certainly when I was at school, it was a rather whimsical system, which could have consequences for other aspects of school life. In particular, something which wound me up at the time was the reluctance of teachers to treat issues as substantive; if someone hit you over the head, and you put your hands up to stop them, then you were both seen as “fighting” and had to do detention. Universities are not like this, and perhaps we need to emphasise this difference more.
A second thing is to recruit student unions to play a greater role in the process. I’ve been on dozens of student disciplinary and appeal panels over the years, and the number of students who exercise their right to bring someone with them is tiny. If I were in their shoes, I’d damn well want a hard-headed union representative sat next to me. Speaking as someone who wants the best for everyone in these situations, I’d like them to be as nonconfrontational as possible; but, I wonder if making them slightly more adversarial would give a stronger reassurance that they were working fairly.
Thirdly, I wonder about the role of openness in these systems. One way that national judicial systems increase confidence in their workings is by transacting their business in public; only the rarest of trials are redacted. There is clearly a delicate issue around student and staff privacy here. Nonetheless, I wonder if there is some way in which suitably anonymised cases could be made public; or, whether we might regard the tradeoff of a little loss of privacy to be worth it in the name of justice being seen to be done. Certainly, the cases that go as far as the Office of the Independent Adjudicator are largely public.