Board of trustees allocates $100,000 for 2 new positions
USC is pumping more money to Student Conduct, as it hopes to relieve pressure on a system that’s been stretched thin.
To bolster the university’s judicial system, the board of trustees allocated $100,000 for two new Student Conduct staff positions in June.
That’s because the office has been handling an increasing number of cases each year in a number of areas, according to Stacey Bradley, Student Affairs’ associate vice president for administration.
Over the last two years, it saw a 64 percent increase in academic integrity cases, and, over the last four years, a jump of 297 percent in referrals to the Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT), bringing the total to 123 cases last fall, according to Bradley.
BIT cases represent “the most significant health and safety risks,” Bradley wrote, but at present, it takes between one and two weeks for administrators to meet with those students.
The total number of cases has increased as well.
Last fall, 1,864 students were referred for conduct violations, up 11 percent from the year prior, according to Bradley.
That, said Alisa Cooney, the director of student conduct, has placed USC’s judicial system “at its limits.”
To deal with it, officers are handling about six cases each per day; even Cooney, who focuses more on managing the staff, handles three or four a day, she said.
Now, they can’t manage many more.
Each case takes about an hour to resolve, and some, “like that [student] at The Woodlands,” Cooney said, are more complex and take longer to deal with.
Plus, they’re on the verge of a new influx of cases, as the office starts to handle game day ejections this fall.
So far, one of the two new positions has been filled; a job description for the other hasn’t been set yet, Cooney said, as she and her bosses haven’t decided where to focus their attention.
But the one that has been filled, Cooney said, will focus primarily on violations that happen in on-campus housing.
Many of those, she said, are relatively minor citations, like visitation policy violations, and aren’t handled very efficiently.
“Someone in Patterson Hall would spend three hours a day hearing visitation cases, but you don’t need to have that individual conversation 16 times,” Cooney said.
Instead, she said, the new position will look to handle those cases more efficiently and will consider other ways to handle cases, like giving students an information-only citation if they attend a short class.
“This person’s going to take a systems approach on a lot of Housing issues that may not need to take as much time from the conduct administrators as they’re using,” Cooney said.
That, she said, should help reduce the backlog of cases that builds up throughout Housing and especially around Bates House and Bates West, which have a particularly high number of citations, Cooney said.
But the office is likely to expand more in the future, as enrollment — and the number of citations — grows.
The money to hire them is likely to come from a number of sources, and USC doesn’t want to rely on increased revenue from the new fines, Bradley said. Instead, they hope the number of violations will fall.
If it does though, it’s likely to hire people who can manage more complex cases and more appeals, which they expect will follow the recently announced increased sanctions for alcohol and drug violations, according to Bradley.
“They may need a more experienced staff,” Bradley said.