BERKELEY — Along with the embarrassing revelations, UC Berkeley’s sexual harassment scandal has exposed what a growing chorus of critics call a double standard: While university staffers were routinely fired or forced to resign, tenured faculty members who committed similar transgressions received lighter sanctions and were allowed to keep their jobs.

Before a public outcry that led to UC President Janet Napolitano’s intervention, the university’s most elite members who violated the campus’ sexual misconduct policy were initially disciplined through secretive agreements with academic administrators rather than the formal faculty conduct process.

“The faculty are very much untouchable,” said Jenna Kingkade, a UC Berkeley law student and president of the Graduate Assembly. “It’s a function of the hierarchy on this campus.”

The controversy not only sullied UC Berkeley’s reputation, it has also prompted UC’s 10-campus system to re-examine the rules governing how professors are disciplined for sexual misconduct. Within days, Napolitano is expected to respond to recommendations from a committee she convened last fall after an outcry over what critics called preferential treatment of a world-renowned astronomer.

Professor Geoff Marcy was merely given a warning after a UC Berkeley investigation found he had sexually harassed four students from 2001 to 2010. He later resigned, but only after public backlash and condemnation from his own colleagues. In March, a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Berkeley law school dean Sujit Choudhry by his former executive assistant revealed the dean kept his administrative position in an agreement reached with Provost Claude Steele.

Choudhry was given a one-year, 10 percent pay cut and was ordered to write his assistant, Tyann Sorrell, an apology for subjecting her to unwanted kisses and smothering hugs. He later stepped down as dean but remains on the faculty.

In recent months, furious and increasingly doubtful of their administration’s commitment to protect them, graduate students — especially vulnerable to harassment because they work so closely with professors holding great influence over their careers — have been trying to get answers.

Instead, Kingkade said, “We have gotten the runaround.”

They want to know what standards are used to apply sanctions outlined by campus policy, from censure to dismissal; how the process works; and what victims should expect if they make a complaint about a faculty member.

Designed to protect academic freedom, the decades-old conduct process required for a professor’s firing can take up to a year, culminating in a triallike hearing before the tenure committee — with attorneys, evidence and witnesses — according to the university. The cases cover the gamut, from research fraud to plagiarism to not showing up to teach.

Tenure protections are standard at most universities. But if the faculty conduct process at UC is poorly understood, especially as it applies to sexual harassment cases, that could be because it is so seldom used. For all of the cases resolved in the past five years, according to new data from the university, the Academic Senate’s Privilege and Tenure Committee has held just one hearing — and not for a sexual misconduct case. The university does not comment on pending cases.

Instead, discipline for sexual misconduct cases involving faculty has been negotiated in an agreement between a professor and top academic administrators: usually, the provost or vice provost.

In Choudhry’s case, even though the provost and chancellor had full authority to remove him from his role as law dean, they simply chose not to.

“The provost is probably the guy who hired the dean,” said Brian Leiter, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “He probably had become friendly with him. However, he made a big error in judgment. If the dean of your law school doesn’t have the sense not to be hugging and kissing staff when it makes them uncomfortable and he doesn’t notice, he’s in the wrong job.”

One initiative for a campus disciplinary review panel at Berkeley is promising, said Robert Powell, chairman of the Academic Senate. It would mean “having more eyes and more thoughtful people looking at what’s appropriate” when sanctions are negotiated in misconduct cases, he said.

Indeed, many faculty members also are calling for changes; the Academic Senate on Thursday held a special meeting on sexual harassment. “There is a range of views,” Powell said. “Most of them are very critical of the way the administration has handled things.”

After initially defending the agreement with Marcy as a “strong action” by the university, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks in October acknowledged it was done to avoid a formal conduct proceeding, which he described as “lengthy and uncertain,” with a higher standard of proof than is used in the campus harassment investigations.

“We recognize and share the frustration that many have expressed,” Dirks wrote in a message to the campus, pledging to help “reform the university’s disciplinary processes, criteria and standards so that in the future we have different and better options for discipline of faculty.”

One expert who has been following the developments at UC Berkeley says the problem doesn’t appear to be the disciplinary process itself but rather the school’s failure to use it.

“I do hope that they begin to adjudicate these cases consistently, regardless of how elite or influential the academic involved,” said Anita Levy, associate secretary in the American Association of University Professors’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance.

Still, Levy argues the university should not weaken the conduct process to make it easier to fire professors accused of sexual harassment. “When someone is in danger of losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their reputation,” Levy said, “it behooves us to move cautiously and not set up a kangaroo court.”

But others, fed up by the scandal, say recent decisions show that professors enjoy too much protection. Cory Hernandez, who coordinates sexual violence and harassment policy for UC Berkeley’s Graduate Assembly, hopes the rocky year brings sweeping change.

“It might be we need a bright-line rule: that if you violate our sexual misconduct policy,” he said, “you are automatically stripped of tenure.”

Follow Katy Murphy at Twitter.com/katymurphy.