Both the City University of New York and Cooper Union are currently considering sweeping changes to their codes of student conduct, changes which — if recently circulated drafts are implemented — would dramatically curtail students’ expressive rights at those institutions.
Actually, that’s not quite right. Yes, changes to student conduct rules are being contemplated at the two universities, and yes, the changes under consideration would curtail students’ freedom to speak, organize, and agitate, but it’s not CUNY and Cooper as institutions that are contemplating the changes. It’s their trustees.
This distinction is relevant for two reasons. First, because many students and faculty at both Cooper and CUNY have spoken out against the proposals, and if shared governance were more robust at either institution the discussions would be proceeding in a very different way. And second because the idea of non-students establishing and enforcing conduct rules for students was once much more controversial than it is now.There are still some campuses in the United States at which some student disciplinary charges are considered by student judiciaries of one kind or another, and some where students have a say in what the disciplinary rules of the campus will be, but such bodies are uncommon and usually quite circumscribed in their ability to act freely.
It wasn’t always that way.
Take a look, for instance, at this quote from Peter Cooper, founder of Cooper Union, excerpted from a letter that he wrote to the college’s trustees in 1859:
“Desiring, as I do, that the students of this institution may become pre-eminent examples in the practice of all the virtues, I have determined to give them an opportunity to distinguish themselves for their good
