LOVELL: MU students respond to conduct process

Continued from page 2 said the university said it was illegitimate. Grass said this blatantly violated the student’s First Amendment rights, and he decided to pick up the case.

“You really have to try to find something that’s almost exactly on point, where the same thing was done to someone else and it was found to be illegal,” Grass said. “In the case of what we did, what they did here, I thought it was so blatant that we would get past that, just because there were so obviously just, ‘I don’t like what they said, so we’re going to punish them for it.’”

It was found to be illegal not in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, but in the Seventh Circuit court, which serves Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

“It was so blatant. And it’s amazing, but I think you have to look at the student disciplinary system, which does not care about the rights of the students at all,” Grass said.

Grass said that similar to Marquette, UWM’s system is not a “courtroom model,” where the person has a chance to defend themselves and their legal rights.

“They feel that that model is not appropriate for the setting, that there’s almost no rights that the students should really have and you shouldn’t give them any rights really beyond the very minimum,” Grass said. “What you really want to do is correct the problem.”

He said the UWM system presumes that the students are guilty, but this same idea is often perpetuated nationwide.

“We say ‘How do we bring this person back into the fold and how do we restore them to the community? How do you know what do they need to do to make it right?,’”

Grass said.

Grass said students can only go back to being a full member of the university community after completing the necessary consequences, whether it’s doing community service or writing a letter.

He also said he feels like the rights of the students are barely part of the constitution anymore.

In the UWM case, Grass said it was a disadvantage for students to have an attorney in the University of Wisconsin system, so when Siddique had his hearing, Grass said he didn’t go.

“It’s supposed to be an educational experience for you, not a disciplinary experience. It’s so weird,”

Grass said.

While he is unsure how student disciplinary hearings actually work at Marquette, he believes they are similar.

“You get your chancellor usually from another university where they’ve acted as chancellor or president, so it’s all kind of one big homogenized field now. Everything is kind of the same everywhere,” Grass said. “I think that’s going to be particularly true between UWM and Marquette because here, they’re in the same city, you’ve got some of the same personnel and they’re obviously … they’re going to talk to each other.”

Grass said he thinks it’s very natural for the two universities to become similar even though one is public and one is private.

“When you start looking at the situation at UW-Milwaukee and the current situation at Marquette, you’re going to find that indeed there might be some of the same people, but I also would agree that there’s a larger cultural issue of not empowering students to take any roles of leadership where they might actually be able to think for themselves and truly represent the students as opposed to really just being an arm of administration,” Grass said. Changes, negotiations

In the settlement negotiations, Grass said that the legal counsel said they would make some of the requested changes, such as allowing the student government to have a stronger say in decision-making and having clearer boundaries between the student government and university administration.

“We didn’t achieve the change we set out to,” Scott said. “The student government at UWM is still founded upon administrative interference, but it’s bittersweet to receive an apology from an assistant attorney general on behalf of UWM and the UW System for what we were put through in our attempt to stand up for the rights of students. They claimed as we settled that our actions led to changes at the university, but we never were told what change happened.”

Grass said he tried to contact the legal counsel at UWM and ask what changes have been made. He said he never got a response.

“Maybe they’ve listened to us a little bit, but I don’t see a whole lot of evidence of that,” Grass said. In the course of this whole thing, we came out with like a list of like 50 things that we wanted to change, and to my knowledge, haven’t really done any of them.”

Grass said there are lots of structural things where the students, just due to turnover, have given up a lot of authority and empowerment that they had, whether it was just based on precedent or statutes.

He said students used to be a lot more involved in the leadership and administration of their universities.

“When we go into court and we try to explain student shared governance, we have to kind of get past this feeling,” Grass said. “They’re like, ‘No, this isn’t student council.’ They’re not organizing a dance. These are people that are supposed to be running the school.”

Marquette University student demonstrators were also supposed to be running the school.

Marquette administration declined to comment on the pending student conduct cases, as they are still ongoing. However, the Marquette community has shared hopes for change in the future.

Pladek said he hopes to see a real commitment from university leadership to understanding the causes for the legitimate anger of students of color on campus.

“Our BIPOC students have been agitating for meaningful chance since at least 2014, and every time change happens, it’s because the students themselves pushed hard for it,” Pladek said in an email. “They shouldn’t have to do this work for Marquette. They have a right to be frustrated. University administrators need to acknowledge that.”