Talking Stick - May/June 2018 - 52

HISTORICAL
FOUNDATIONS
The earliest American campuses were
inspired by English colleges where
faculty and students lived together
in residential settings that focused
on learning in and out of the classroom. Philosophically, this view - that
residence halls should be both a living
and a learning environment - is a
core component of today's college and
university housing, and behavior that
negatively affects students' ability to
live comfortably in their residence is
taken seriously.
In 1862 the Land-Grant College
Act was passed and began to separate
colleges from their religious connections and influence. These new institutions began revising the previously accepted rules and regulations, including
those associated with residential living.
In the 1880s, universities chose to concern themselves less with the behaviors
of students in their homes or their
social lives and to instead focus on

classroom learning. However, entering
the 1900s, this trend began to change
again, spurred by campuses that
believed residence halls were integral
in providing extracurricular campus activities for their residents. In addition,
administrators began to recognize the
need to formalize how they addressed
issues related to student behavior on
campus. A seminal text - The Student
Personnel Point of View, published in
1937 by the American Council on
Education - clarified that the role of
student personnel staff was to serve as
educational officers who helped administer "student discipline to the end that
the individual will be strengthened and
the welfare of the group preserved."
Beyond establishing student affairs as
a profession, this report marked the
first time that student personnel staff,
like housing officers, were recognized
for their professional competence and
their educational efforts. In 1949, the
American Council on Education issued
an updated report, charging student
personnel workers with understand-

ing the "treatment of discipline as an
educational function."
An important shift in how colleges and universities disciplined their
young charges occurred in 1961, when
the case of Dixon v. Alabama effectively ended the doctrine that higher
education institutions acted in loco
parentis when disciplining students.
The case grew out of an incident
where Alabama State College students
who had protested a segregated lunch
counter were expelled outright from
their school without a hearing. Six
students filed suit, and, after initially
losing their trial, they then won on
appeal. As Philip Lee notes in his
article about the case, "Instead of allowing state universities to discipline
their students without regard to their
constitutional rights as they were
permitted to do under the in loco parentis era, the Fifth Circuit mandated
that state universities had to abide by
constitutional restrictions. Specifically,
it held that state universities must provide notice and some opportunity to

A restorative philosophy of conduct
is based on the concept of restorative
justice, a process by which offenders
acknowledge the harm they've done and
then attempt to repair the harm so that
justice and balance are restored within
the larger community.

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Talking Stick - May/June 2018

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