Wheaton’s Student Government Association approved a proposal for the College Hearing Board to leave SGA in a Senate vote on Jan. 27.
CHB, the school’s student-led conduct review body, is tasked with hearing disciplinary cases and upholding Wheaton’s Honor Code.
The proposal, put forward by CHB’s executive board, proposed to move the organization from its status as a board of SGA to an entity under the Dean of Students’ office in order to “strengthen the CHB’s autonomy and clarify its role on campus.”
The move comes after years of discussion about the inefficiencies of the group’s relationship with SGA, including friction caused by mission misalignment, confidentiality, and overcommitment for members.
According to CHB Chair Jordan Peterson ’28, the missions of SGA and CHB did not align. “It’s just for the simple fact of SGA is not like CHB”, he said. “It doesn’t have much of an active role in SGA just because of the nature of our board.”
CHB’s commitment to the confidentiality of its cases also made participation in Senate difficult. “Where other board chairs that sit around Senate can actively participate, actively give updates, actively encourage Senate to participate in their work, a lot of the work—99% of the work—the hearing board does is confidential in nature,” said Zachary Irish, Wheaton’s Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students. “We protect the integrity of our cases. We protect the confidentiality of our students that are going through the process.”
The overcommitment of members was another main concern. According to the proposal, the chair of CHB could spend 10 hours a week between work and meetings for SGA and hearings for the organization. “This workload reflects the seriousness of CHB’s work and unpredictability of caseloads, further emphasizing the need for administrative support,” the proposal said.
Dean Irish noted that SGA’s leadership has done a good job of reducing meeting commitments across the entire organization.
Another part of the decision was to align with the “best practices” of institutions like Wheaton. “Best practice is that every conduct office have a hearing board like this to hear cases where you don’t want a one-person decision,” Irish said, “where you want the community to weigh in on these types of decisions.”
This change was a long time coming. According to Irish, he had discussed this kind of move with previous CHB chairs for years, going back to Diana Blake ’24. “Starting three years ago with Diana Blake and every chair since then, including the current chair, Jordan, when he was elected as chair last spring, we started the conversation right then and there.”
A similar transition by WEB, Wheaton’s events board, away from SGA earlier this year helped inspire CHB to act now. “We really drew inspiration from WEB this year with their move at the beginning of the year,” Peterson said. “It kind of inspired us to be like, hey, we can do this now that WEB has done it, and they have the groundwork. They have the baseline. Let’s see what we can do with ourselves.”
Both Irish and Peterson stressed that the move will not majorly affect the way the organization operates. “Jordan coined the term as basically like ‘under new management,’ and I like it because we’re not changing anything. We’re just reporting to somebody different,” Irish said. “The reality is I’m still the adviser. I was the adviser. The students are still leading this organization. And so, really, nothing is changing other than no longer connected with SGA.”
The main difference will be the selection of CHB’s chair and vice-chair. These positions will now be filled by a selection committee rather than SGA elections. According to Irish, the committee will consist of the CHB advisor, two graduating senior members of the group, one faculty representative, and one non-CHB member of Senate. The committee will consider applicants who have served at least one full semester on the board and are in good academic standing. Applications for CHB chair and vice-chair are currently open.
The organization insists it will still be transparent, accountable, and accessible after this move. Irish highlighted that students can always apply to join the board and that it is fundamentally run by students. “It’s going to be forever student-led,” he said. “I think that is the only way to fully align with the honor code.”