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Researchers are only beginning to explore the lived experiences of conduct
practitioners, particularly as they navigate the tension and dissonance of
using an educational lens to support students while being required to maintain
procedural fairness under the scrutiny of students, their attorneys, senior
administrators, and even the media.
(16.1%) indicated that they had been sued or otherwise involved in a lawsuit. These
results are curious when compared to those of Glassman and Lewis (2022b), who
examined full-time student conduct administrators, 131 out of 235 (55.7%) of whom
reported serving in a director-level position and 118 (50.2%) of whom reported being
sued or otherwise involved in a lawsuit. In evaluating the two studies in tandem, one
may infer that the likelihood of being sued is correlated with a higher level of responsibility
within one's department.
Further findings about the differences between entry- and mid-level residence life
staff and directors imply that the former populations have less exposure to the legalistic
or contentious aspects of student conduct work, thereby decreasing the likelihood
of developing critogenic harms as a result of their work. For directors, it seems that
litigation is a significantly more pressing issue than it is for entry- and mid-level staff
and that they are concerned about the possibilities of litigation as a matter of the practice
itself, not just as a result of their own errors. This resonates with findings from
Glassman and Lewis (2022b) on the work of full-time conduct administrators, as well
as from Charles and colleagues (1985), who reported that physicians who are sued
often believe the lawsuit to be unjustified.
Because more than half of the survey respondents reported living somewhere on
campus, one might expect that this group experiences impacts on their well-being at
greater rates than do those who live off campus because they are almost always immersed
in the community of students whose behavior they must adjudicate. However,
independent samples t-tests between these two populations revealed that, for the most
part, they experience judicialization in the same way; generally, they believe that their
personal relationships have been somewhat impacted by job stress, they relive conversations
with students to assess whether they made errors, and they frequently vent
about work to loved ones. One unexpected finding was the statistically significant results
demonstrating that off-campus staff report that the possibility of litigation makes
it difficult for them to sleep at night, they think about leaving student conduct because
of the federal oversight of their work, and, perhaps most interesting, they have experienced
an increase in physical ailments as a result of their work in student conduct.
Connecting these findings to the literature, one could infer that there is a relationship
between a residence life staff member's position level and where they live. Because being
a live-in staff member is typically an entry- or mid-level position that is tasked with
community building (Meyer & Redington, 2018), they may only be assigned conduct
Volume 49, No. 3 * 2023 79
journal_vol49no3

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