By Maggie Cassidy, News Staff

A year after efforts to reform the student hearing process at the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution (OSCCR) yielded mediocre results, a committee in the Student Government Association (SGA) is revamping its efforts.
SGA’s OSCCR committee presented to the senate last week a draft of a new ‘Student Disciplinary Bill of Rights,’ which was co-legislated with the Resident Student Association (RSA). RSA is set to vote to approve the draft Wednesday, and the senate is set to vote Thursday.
If approved, the bill will be presented to the OSCCR Code of Conduct Review Committee, said Erin Pritchard, SGA vice president of student affairs and a member of SGA’s OSCCR Committee. It then must be approved by university legal counsel before it can be added to the code, she said.
Pritchard said the new Bill of Rights ‘- a one-page document listing 13 concise ‘rights’ for students summonsed by OSCCR ‘- was developed as a proposed supplement to the school’s Code of Student Conduct, a detailed 16-page document available at the OSCCR website, www.neu.edu/osccr.
The proposed bill is meant to make the Code of Student Conduct clearer for students to understand, Pritchard said. She said most of the rights are ‘current practice.’
‘Students don’t know what their rights are when it comes to the hearing board hearings or administration board hearings,’ Pritchard said. ‘A lot of what we wanted to accomplish with this Bill of Rights is to spell it all out for students.’
The committee includes Derek Miller, an SGA senator who spearheaded reform attempts by creating the Facebook group ‘Respect Our Rights, Northeastern:’ Reform OSCCR!,” in 2007, which as of press time had 511 members.
The group’s description said it aimed to ‘make significant and substantive changes to the Code of Student Conduct itself, as well as achieving an overhaul of the methods of OSCCR proceedings, including Residence Director pre-hearings, judicial hearings and the OSCCR appeals board.’
While the group drew student interest in Fall 2007 as SGA hosted open forums for students to discuss OSCCR protocol, it lost steam in Spring 2008, after two OSCCR-sponsored forums failed to attract many students. The second and larger of the two forums attracted about 30 people, and the first attracted none.
Although the group resulted in some minor alterations to the Code of Student Conduct, the changes were ‘not nearly as many as they had hoped for,’ Pritchard said.
‘There was no preparation done for the meetings’ with the OSCCR Code of Conduct Review Committee, Pritchard said. ‘It was not a waste of time but there was nothing accomplished because there was no work done beforehand.’
This year, SGA distributed and collected about 1,000 student surveys, Pritchard said. They included questions for the student body at-large, as well as a separate section for students who have gone through an OSCCR hearing process and were aimed at identifying students’ needs when it came to OSCCR.
While the results are still being tallied, the drafted Bill of Rights is a response to the surveys, which attempts to clarify the Code of Student Conduct, Miller said.
‘The current draft of the Bill of Rights succinctly summarizes the most relevant and questioned rights as they pertain to a disciplinary hearing,’ he said in an e-mail to The News. ‘It wasn’t easy to distill a one-page document from a 30-plus page Code of [Student] Conduct, but I think the current draft does a more than adequate job.’
OSCCR Director Valerie Randall-Lee did not return requests for a phone interview, but said in a statement through the Office of University Communications and Public Relations that OSCCR ‘routinely seeks feedback and welcomes suggestions from members of the Northeastern community.’