Inside Iowa State: Iowa State University

December 13, 2002

Senate approves class disruption policy

The Faculty Senate approved a policy to deal with classroom disruptions during its Dec. 10 meeting.

The policy provides for temporary or permanent suspension of disruptive students. Under the policy, instructors would need to ask the department chair or program director (or next level of administration if the instructor is an administrator) to have a student suspended. Upon approval, the student would be suspended while an investigation was conducted.

Conditions might be set for students who are allowed to return to class after the investigation. If a student is permanently suspended from the class, the chair will notify the appropriate university officials. Students can appeal the decision through the academic grievance process.

The senate debated a provision in the policy that would record permanent suspension from a class as a drop that would count toward the total number of drops a student may have during his or her college career.

Some senators pointed out a student who already had the total number of allowable drops would receive an "F" for the course, while another who had not used all the allowable drops would have the suspension recorded as a drop. That system would result in inequitable treatment of students, some said.

"Why not allow us to give them an 'F' and throw them out of class?" asked Dan Bullen, mechanical engineering.

But Carla Fehr, philosophy, said "I don't think faculty should punish. I think that should be done by someone else."

Others questioned whether students would use disruptive behavior in class as a way to receive a drop for a course after the deadline had passed for dropping courses in the normal manner.

In the end, the senators decided that students who are permanently suspended from a course for disruptive behavior should receive an "administrative drop," which does not count toward the total number of drops a student may have.