University Police
University officials hope expanding the Code of Student Conduct would increase student responsibility off the campus, they told city council members at Tuesday’s meeting.
Members of the city and university community see amending the code as a path toward alleviating tense neighborhood relations and providing students with a way to report off-campus misconduct. City officials said the University Senate bill represents a positive step toward reining in student behavior off the campus.
“We want to educate students that when you’re a student at Maryland, you don’t leave that title when you cross the street,” Andrea Goodwin, Office of Student Conduct director, told the College Park City Council last week. “We’re trying to teach students how to be better citizens, better neighbors.”
If the bill passes the Senate Executive Committee today and the full senate later this month — and also receives university President Wallace Loh’s signature — University Police would be able to enforce student conduct policies within the bill’s planned jurisdiction extension. That would allow the force to patrol in residential areas around the city, Goodwin said.
The proposal is a long time coming, said District 3 Councilman Robert Day.
“When I ran for this office, this was one of things I brought up to many people,” Day said. “You don’t understand how many colleagues sitting here said it would never happen.”
Goodwin is one of roughly 30 members of the city’s Neighborhood Stabilization and Quality of Life Workgroup, which is addressing issues such as noise violations, neighborhood relations, rent stabilization and diversity of housing. Extending the code to the city could aid the growing “substantial partnership” between the city and university, Goodwin said.
District 1 Councilman Patrick Wojahn, one of the leading members of the work group, agreed university penalties could serve as a crime deterrent.
“The vandalism and making lots of noise, these are things covered by the Code of Student Conduct,” Wojahn said. “In some ways, it could have a greater impact than the fines the city imposes for violating the noise ordinance. It could have an impact on students’ futures.”
However, several city officials expressed concerns about how residents would report incidents such as excessive noise or vandalism from house parties to the university.
“We need landlords to provide names of tenants,” District 3 Councilwoman Stephanie Stullich said. “That’s an issue that will come back to us.”
If the proposal becomes policy, university and city officials said, it will be necessary to educate students on the consequences of misconduct off the campus.
“The training has to include the residents,” Day added. “They need to understand what info to collect and how to report it.”
Although some students might worry the extension of university-sanctioned regulations could negatively impact student life off the campus, Goodwin said the change should ultimately help students, providing resources to victims of hazing, violence or sexual assault.
“There are benefits,” Goodwin said. “If you’re a victim of another student’s misconduct [off the campus], right now it’s very difficult for us to intervene within the university.”
Some students worry the university could use the policy to increase enforcement of issues like underage drinking, said Student Government Association President Samantha Zwerling. However, she said the initiative also provides students with a much-needed safety net.
“In the cases of sexual assault, it’s going to be very important,” Zwerling said, adding, “[The Office of Student Conduct is] not going to be going after petty issues.”
The change would simply provide an “additional course of action” for police officers on patrol around the city, said University Police spokesman Maj. Marc Limansky, as students living in rented homes may react differently to university sanctions than to previous avenues of discipline.
“It will be interesting to see how it all plays out,” he said.
Although the university is one of the last schools in the University System of Maryland to extend a student conduct code into the surrounding area, Goodwin said the new plans are not about “keeping up with other institutions.”
“It’s changing now because the time is right,” she said. “It’s no longer a time where we can say that all of our students are only students when they are on the property of the University of Maryland campus.”
