Article content continued

Mayor Holder wants Western to impose 'extremely clear, extremely strong academic sanctions'

FOCO draws students from across the province; high school students have been reported to be in attendance as well. There is no way the Western University student code of conduct could apply to these alien partiers. However, for the students who do attend Western — is it right to be subject to a code of conduct, when they are not attending the party in any official capacity with the university?

Western students wouldn’t be the first to be expected to uphold their university’s code of conduct off-campus. Increasingly, Canadian universities are attempting to vastly expand the scope of their codes of conduct to include private, off-campus behaviour.

In 2008, twin brothers Keith and Steven Pridgen were reprimanded under the University of Calgary’s student code for creating a Facebook group about their legal studies professor, a group entitled “I no longer fear Hell, I took a course with Aruna Mitra.” The university found the Pridgen brothers to be guilty of “non-academic misconduct,” placed them on probation for six months and accused them of defaming Mitra. Steven Pridgen had called Mitra “lazy,” and Keith Pridgen wrote a celebratory post after finding out Mitra wouldn’t be teaching again at the university. In the end, an Alberta judge ruled that the university had violated the Pridgens’ Charter right to free expression, notably declaring that “the University is not a Charter-free zone.”

And more recent in our collective memory is the case of Masuma Khan, a student executive at Dalhousie University who in late 2017 was accused of discrimination for posting anti-white remarks on her personal Facebook page. The posts prompted the university to open a disciplinary investigation, though Dalhousie ultimately bowed to public pressure and reversed this decision.