by KEN HECHTMAN

“Justice no longer exists at Concordia,” says former student advocate Jean Marc Bouchard, “and I quit because I wasn’t going to help anyone pretend that it does.”

On September 23, Bouchard resigned his post, and the university lost one of its most experienced student advocates over the issue of the “Treatment of Student Disciplinary Matters in Exceptional Cases” (TSDMEC) resolution, more familiar to students as “summary expulsion.” The new policy, passed September 18, gives the school the power to bypass the usual disciplinary procedures in order to expel students.

Bouchard knows more about Concordia University’s in-house justice system than just about anyone, having represented over 300 students in his career, including half the disciplinary cases heard in the last three years. His letter of resignation, CC’d to 24 senior members of the Concordia administration and student unions, counts off the violations in the policy: “Presumption of innocence [is denied], the right to have decisions made free from bias is denied, the right to be judged by your peers is denied, appeal from a judgement rendered by a single individual is denied.”

The resolution is a tough one, and its tone is set in its first section. It “applies notwithstanding any other… code, calendar, policy, rule or regulation.” In theory, this means that just about any situation, however trivial, can be handled through this policy—although, in practice, most won’t be.

To Concordia communication rep Dennis Murphy, tough love is something the university needs—at least for now. “A cooling-off period is necessary to allow the time and space to come back to rational discourse,” he says, of the recent riots on campus that have incited the administration to crack down.

Clause for concern

However, according to Bouchard, “every guarantee listed in the [Concordia] Code of Rights and Responsibilities is now a privilege, not a right.”

Section 5 (Prohibited Acts) of the resolution sets the scope of the rector’s disciplinary powers. It starts off nicely: clauses A through E of the section are cut-and-pasted from Rights and Responsibilities (R&R), meaning discrimination, harassment, sexual harassment, violence or the threat of it and property damage are prohibited. “This should surprise no one,” Bouchard notes. “The code works. We’ve had assaults, we’ve had death threats, we dealt with them through R&R and the system works. But with clause F you don’t need clauses A to E. You don’t need anything else.”

Clause F is a blanket prohibition of “other acts of a serious nature that prevent members of the University from pursuing their work and studies in a safe and civil environment.”

Some fear that means the rector can make anything at all a summary expulsion offence. Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) members claim, for instance, that in a September 21 meeting, Rector Frederick Lowy granted them permission to protest against his Middle East speech ban, but told them that if they broke it, they’d be expelled under clause F.

Bouchard is also concerned that Sections 13–24, dealing with reviews of such decisions, “show complexity and attention to detail that suggest this type of regulation has been under discussion for some time.” One campus activist calls the resolution, “Concordia’s Bill C-36—the wish list that sat in a file cabinet and waited for the right moment to be voted through.”

No more expulsion debacles

The new resolution will avoid the embarrassment the Concordia administration faced over last year’s attempted expulsion of Laith Marouf and Tom Keefer, at the time two CSU council representatives. In that case, Lowy had expelled them without going through the school’s disciplinary procedures. The Board of Governors then overturned the rector’s ruling. The CSU, not wanting to depend on the Governors’ goodwill in the future, had the expulsions invalidated with a Quebec Superior Court order. But with the new policy, the Board has validated any similar expulsions in advance.

In its ruling, the court upheld CSU lawyer Giuseppe Sciortino’s argument that “the University, like any administrative body in Quebec, has an obligation under common-law jurisprudence to allow the other party to be heard before imposing permanent consequences and in any case their decisions must not be unreasonable.”

It cost the CSU $35,000 to get that decision, which looked like a waste then. It looks like a good investment now. Marouf, still with the CSU, says their phone’s been ringing off the hook with lawyers offering to take the first high-profile civil liberties summary expulsion case pro bono.

The full text of the resolution can be read at www.concordia.ca/about/administration/resolutions/resolution2.shtml. :