Two basic kinds of incidents may require review and, in some cases, discipline. There are, first, complaints by an individual student against a questionable form of academic treatment or involvement by a faculty member, and second, behavior or uses of language that appear to step beyond the established bounds of academic decorum and appear to threaten or arbitrarily dismiss either a collective group in our midst or seriously undermine basic understandings and recognized standards of conduct within our community.
Responsibility in the discipline of a faculty member will always be a decanal matter (with the ultimate right of review vested in the Provost, as Dean of all faculties), although we allow for situations in which the Dean would seek faculty advice and input. At the same time, we value the regular channels of communication and review that might lead to such action. Prior channels for receiving a complaint check the reliability and gauge the gravity of a given charge and, in many cases, supply a forum of mediation and resolution at initial stages in the process of articulation.
All complaints deserve serious attention as a basic protection of the values we stand for. Every review must take into account and balance basic understandings of academic freedom and academic obligation. With these high standards of review in place, we also reaffirm our belief that the peculiar nature and advanced stage of the education that we supply require that the School address its disciplinary problems within its own sphere of review processes. The sharp give-and-take of the Socratic method in study of the law and the adversarial procedures allowed in professional engagement might be misconstrued in any other context.
The following enumeration of our current guidelines should be understood with these preliminary thoughts in mind: