Q: I am a student member of a college disciplinary group that adjudicates allegations of student misconduct. The boards consist of two students and one administrator. During deliberations, when the accused are not present, administrators have made nasty comments about them, prejudicing the cases. I complained to higher-ups, but they did not act. Although I’m pledged to confidentiality, may I talk to a newspaper or the accused students about this?
– Anonymous, New York
A: Much depends on the height of the higher-ups you spoke to. Before even considering going public, you must exhaust all avenues of appeal, rising through the ranks of the discipline board, the deans to which it reports, the mega-deans who oversee them.
(In some aerie, you will encounter the tribes of lawyers who have an interest in the rights of the accused – if only to shield the university from litigation.) University bureaucracies ascend further into the stratosphere than students might realize. And remember, the purpose of the confidentiality requirement is to protect not just the process but also the accused.
If you are entirely stymied in your climb, you may go public or approach an accused student. Your confidentiality vow was implicitly contingent on a series of promises from the discipline board – most significant, that it would respond to inequities. If higher-ups fail to do so, other options are appropriate. Before taking so drastic a step, talk to a lawyer about the peril you would face.
There is a less-dramatic alternative.Your grievance concerns not so much the wrong done to a single student as a pattern of abuse in the system. You can lobby for reform, editorialize and rally support from fellow students by describing transgressions in general terms while protecting the privacy of the accused and upholding your oath.
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Q: My cousin went to the Jersey Shore with her longtime boyfriend. While he was out, she picked up his notebook to leave him a note and spotted a record of his phone messages, revealing a number of calls from another woman, M. When her boyfriend returned, my cousin said she had received a strange call from M. “Must have been a wrong number,” he said. Her boyfriend grabbed his cellphone and announced he was going to the beach. He and my cousin are no longer speaking. She says her lie about the phone call was justified as a way to confirm his bigger lie – cheating on her. Was it?
– Robert Shycon, Northampton, Mass.
A: It was not. Your cousin would have done better simply to ask her boyfriend directly, “Why do you have so many phone calls from M.?” Or, “When we break up, should we still be friends?”
Instead she offers a glib bit of self-justification and nimbly vaults over her prowling through his notebook. It’s sad that these two are no longer a couple. His catting around provides the ideal target for her cunning surveillance. There are circumstances when a lie is not merely acceptable but required – for example, when there is no other way to save another person from serious harm – but this isn’t one of them. Even beyond a general regard for honesty, particular relationships impose particular obligations.
Once you’ve seen someone naked, that intimacy compels greater candor, and the emotional risks that accompany it, than you would offer a stranger.
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