Dean Love Issues A Conduct Proposal
On March 9, 2026, Dean of Students Marla Love sent an email to the community proposing modifications to the conduct system. Love issued the proposal in her capacity as Chair of the Standing Student Codes and Procedures Review Committee. Love’s email promises to collect community responses through April 20 and then make a recommendation to Vice President for Student and Campus Life, Ryan Lombardi. In December 2020, Lombardi was delegated responsibility for the Code “in ongoing collaborative consultation with the elected Assemblies of the University.”
According to Love, the Review Committee considered the input it received to date and developed a specific set of wording changes to both the Student Code and the Procedures. The Committee did not consider the results of a December 2025 Undergraduate Referendum, which called for separating the judicial process from the central administration and returning to a common code of conduct equally applicable to students, faculty, and staff. Yet, Love is opening up a new comment period through April 20:
“Your perspectives are vital to ensuring the Student Code of Conduct and Procedures continue to reflect our shared values, support student success, and promote a respectful and inclusive campus environment.”
The Committee is not offering a point-by-point response to the many specific changes recommended in resolutions adopted by the elected shared governance bodies or in the “listening sessions” that were conducted with members of the Student Assembly, Graduate and Professional Assembly, Employee Assembly, University Assembly, or Faculty Senate.
The actual work of the Committee is unclear. At the listening sessions, Committee representatives emphasized that they had a “non-voting role” and that they were merely gathering ideas to be submitted to Vice President Lombardi It is not clear how specific proposals for changes were accepted or rejected when compiling the current proposed documents.
Love’s email links to a webpage specifying next steps, which leaves the shared governance bodies free to comment on the proposal, but states that a set of changes will be selected by Vice President Lombardi for President Kotlikoff’s approval, and then he will inform the Board of Trustees. The University Council’s position in the past, including when the Code was last amended in December 2020, was that the Trustees are responsible for adopting and amending the Rules for the Maintenance of Public Order and that responsibility cannot be delegated to anyone else. Yet the webpage claims that Lombardi will just “provide notice to the Board of Trustees.”
The revisions approved by President Kotlikoff will take effect on July 1.
Critics of the Committee claimed that it was staffed with the individuals who steered the current conduct systems. As a result, they may not be in a position to evaluate whether the system “continue[s] to reflect our shared values, support student success, and promote a respectful and inclusive campus environment.”
Among the input from the shared governance bodies was the need for a “holistic review” of the conduct process. Currently, student conduct is divided into separate procedures for the Student Code, bias harassment (including anti-semitism), sexual harassment, misconduct in the dorms, student athlete misconduct, misconduct by students in ROTC, and students in Greek Life. Although there are provisions for student “groups,” they have fewer rights, including being judged by a “preponderance of the evidence” standard rather than a “clear and convincing evidence” standard.
Prof. David A Bateman, Government, President of the Cornell Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, is worried about divorcing the community from the conduct process:
“The report recommends mostly cosmetic changes. If anything, these deepen the tendency in the existing code towards punitiveness rather than genuine restoration or education. While making gestures towards greater procedural protections for students, they maintain the broken system in which central administration is able to issue suspensions at will and then decide by itself on the reasonableness of those suspensions. Alongside the disregard of referenda and student and faculty resolutions, the likely effect of this process will be to further divorce the community from the disciplinary process and its transformation into a cudgel. It is unclear whether the ultimate audience for these changes is the White House. But these proposals and this process further the suppression of the vibrancy of university life and of free expression on campus. Faculty, students, and staff who want a different, more hopeful future for the university should insist on re-establishing the genuine independence of disciplinary proceedings from central administration direction, and for a new process that actually represents and is responsive to the University’s constituencies.”
Prof. Kate L. Bronfenbrenner, ILR, said: “Given the serious flaws in the code of conduct policies and procedures, it is troubling that the university’s proposed changes are all semantic rather than substantive.”
