USUSA to restructure hearing board legislature
Following the hearing board meetings of both USUSA Logan Vice President Po’okela Yamakoshi-Sing and Athletics & Campus Recreation Executive Director Ben Burdette, Student Advocate Vice President Colin Hastings is working on rewriting the legislature surrounding the hearing board.
Hastings scheduled a meeting with members of USUSA leadership to gather feedback on the structure of the board. This meeting was held on Jan. 16 in an open-house format that allowed leadership members to drop in and share their perspectives. Three USUSA student body officers were in attendance.
Since that meeting, Hastings has scheduled two additional meetings during which he was expected to present drafts of the proposed legislation. Both meetings were canceled and rescheduled on the day they were set to occur.
In this proposed legislation, in accordance with what was shared at the first meeting, students could expect to see, among other changes, an increase in training of board members, revision of the appeals process, clarification of timelines and notification requirements and a reduction of number of hearing board members from 12 to nine — an action that would require an amendment to the USUSA Constitution.
Hastings said the biggest change he would like to make is moving from what he described as a trial-like format to something more like a true hearing board.
“My idea is that we should be moving from a trial format because we had the defense and the offense and they came up and presented their evidence. I think that’s really messy. I think it also makes it so we have to pit officers against each other,” Hastings said.
Hastings additionally said he felt the move from trial format to hearing board would allow for shorter hearing times — a concern shared by each of the three student body officers in attendance. By having members of the newly revised board gather evidence, rather than have complainants and respondents calling up witnesses in their hearings, the time spent inside these hearings could greatly decrease.
Currently, 12 people serve on the board with at least two of them required to be from an Utah State University Statewide campus. Hastings is proposing to lower this number to nine.
According to the USUSA Constitution, the Logan and Statewide Executive Councils are responsible for nominating and choosing board members — the same people who will decide whether they should stay in office if a problem should arise.
“My proposition would be to lower the amount of students on the board so it would be an easier job of vetting them. How many people that were nominated did you know personally, well enough to go on and say, ‘Yeah, they would do a good job?’” Hastings said.
An additional issue Hastings pointed out from the board bylaws surrounds the timeline of when the respondent had to be notified there was a complaint against them.
“Currently, if I get an email saying, ‘Here’s a wrongdoing,’ I have 24 hours to get a screening panel, and then at some point within the next 10 days of student days or weekdays, I have to get a trial together. There’s nothing in there that says when I have to alert the person the complaint is against,” Hastings said.
Modifications brought up by additional attendees, particularly USUSA Chief of Staff Grace Wheeler, surrounded the involvement of officers in the board.
“The student advocate should be a little more removed. I don’t think any officer in USUSA should be the one collecting evidence. I think that’s what became very messy,” Wheeler said.
Hastings riffed off this statement, discussing ways the student advocate vice president could become less involved in the entire hearing board process.
“If we’re training them more, then maybe we don’t need me to be that connecting piece,” Hastings said.
In the current structure, the student advocate serves in a secretarial capacity, doing administrative tasks like sending emails, scheduling and organizing details of hearings.
The next step in this process will be for Hastings to present a draft of his proposed legislation to USUSA leadership for review and additional comments.