Student Government’s judicial branch is beginning a new cycle in the upcoming school year, as new members and leadership are currently setting plans for the future of Student Conduct.
Technician sat down with Jess Hansen, a junior studying aerospace engineering and the new student body chief justice, to talk about experience with the conduct board and outlook for the future.
Tell me about yourself.
I am a junior studying mechanical and aerospace engineering. I’ll be going into my senior year next fall. I’ve been on the board for three years. I joined it first semester of freshman year, and have thoroughly enjoyed that experience. I am an RA with student housing; I work in the Honors Village. Most of the free time I have on campus, I like to spend reading and playing disc golf on Centennial.
How would you describe your past experience as a member of the conduct board?
I joined freshman year and just received the general board training. Every board member goes through an extensive semester of training, and they observe some hearings and they do a couple debrief sessions, and then they’re allowed to serve as part of that decision-making body. So, they’ll sit on the panel, ask questions of the students, listen to students, hear what they’re saying, judge the facts of the case and make a decision on responsible or not responsible, and then if necessary they’ll move into sanctioning and talk about what sanctions a student will have.
So, I did that, and after you’ve done that for a semester or two, then you have the opportunity to move into the hearing assistant role. That role is the one I found the most gratifying and enjoyable because it’s a role where you just serve as a helper to the student who is going through the conduct process. So, you meet with them before the hearing, you answer any questions they have, you explain how things are going to work. It’s generally a role that is designed to make sure students are prepared for the hearing, not confused, explain to them their rights and responsibilities, and go over the charges with them.
It’s just a chance for peer-to-peer, for a student who’s going through a process that’s probably scary and unfamiliar to ask questions and be in a non-judgmental space with somebody who can give them honest factual information about the conduct process. I’ve been serving in that role for the past two semesters now, and then kind of the combination, I just finished up my training for presiding officer. That is the person who facilitates the hearing. It’s a student. They don’t vote unless there’s a tie. So, they don’t vote about responsibility or about sanctions unless there’s a tie, in which case they are the tie-breaking vote. But, they do run the hearing. So, they’re leading the question-asking, they’re facilitating the dialogue between the complainant and the respondent and making sure that’s respectful and factually oriented, and they’re just responsible for everything that happens in the room. That’s a role in the conduct process that has immense responsibility during the actual hearing, and so that’s been my most recent training and I move into that role officially on Monday, and that’s the hallmark of the chief justice, because they do serve as the presiding officer on the majority of cases. So, next year, I’ll be the presiding officer on almost all of them.
As chief justice are there any changes you’re looking to implement in the next year?
That’s the question I love the most. Absolutely.
Right now, because of numerous reasons, the board doesn’t get as many hearings as it used to. So, that leaves our board members with extra time. It used to be, we had hearings every Monday and Thursday, now it’s less. So, we have that free time that we set aside, and I want to essentially help make that an impactful meaningful experience for board members and also I want this group of students to be a meaningful group to have on campus for the wider student population.
So, what that looks like and what I visualize that being for the board is us going out into the community. So, there’s a lot of room for the board to use our peer-to-peer relationships to educate students about the code, about potential repercussions of breaking the code, especially in areas like final exams coming around. There’s a great opportunity for the board to be giving presentations about what does academic integrity look like, why is it important at NC State, why do we care so much, and the same goes for our behavioral issues as well with alcohol, the non-academic cases. There’s so much room for the board to be utilizing peer-to-peer, which is often more effective than a student to a faculty member. So, we would be utilizing that relationship to get out, break down the code, help students understand it better, and hopefully if they understand it better, they’ll find themselves in less struggle. Because, ultimately that’s what we want. We want students to be successful at NC State and be happy here and a contributing positive member of our community.
Are there any challenges you’re expecting to face, and if so, how do you plan on approaching them?
The role itself has its challenges. Especially this upcoming year, the Office of Student Conduct is gonna be looking at some leadership changes as the director, Paul Cousins, director of student community standards, retires after 27 or 28 years, and so we’ll be looking at a new director and what their vision for the board will be — I don’t know. So, that I foresee to be our biggest challenge of navigating a new director-level position while also furthering the interests of the board, and ultimately the student body. The plus-side of that is that does mean we have somebody coming in with fresh new ideas, and at a time when we’re trying to take the board from being a body that is mostly having hearings and things like that, we’re trying to take it from a hearing body to also being this proactive body out in the community.
I’m hoping that with this new leadership we’ll have, it will be the perfect timing for new leadership, new goals for the board. It will be a recipe for success for us all.
Do you have an inspiring figure in your life who made you want to take part in this?
I’ve always looked up to Ruth Bader Ginsburg because she’s a powerhouse woman in the United States Supreme Court. I admire her and the things that she, in her swearing in speech, talked a lot about how diversity can add to a board’s decision-making, how people who come from all walks of life, all different perspectives, whether it’s race, gender, sexual orientation, everything, how when you get them all in a room and you give them a decision to make, they’ll pull from all those experiences and everything that they’ve seen through their unique existence and they’ll come to a better decision than a room full of any homogeneous population would.
She’s somebody who I’ve admired a tremendous amount, both because she’s just, like I said, a powerhouse woman in power, specifically the Supreme Court, but she’s also challenged herself as a woman in power to say what other oppressed groups can be helping pull into this decision making process, and that’s something that I strive to do as well and hope there will be opportunities to do with the board.
Do you want to add anything else?
We’re always looking for new board members. We’ll be doing recruiting in the fall. Group-leaders, student-leaders, community leaders out there who have any need for the board, any questions for the board, or me specifically, I would like to say, I urge you to reach out, because right now, we’re at the perfect time of trying to do new things, find new ways to get out in the community and help our student groups succeed, and just never find themselves in trouble to begin with, and if they see ways we could be doing that better I would love to hear it.
