IDA Run — Eastern Illinois University Student Conduct Code
IDA Run — Eastern Illinois University Student Conduct Code
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Status note: a run under the Institutional Document Audit (IDA) v0.1. Commitments are named rather than numbered, matching the practice of the distinctions. The NIU and SIU passes of the same date predate the instrument and are working material; this is the first run under it.
Step 0 — Halt, Text Fixation, and Input Restatement
Eastern Illinois University Student Conduct Code, effective Fall 2025, issued by the Dean of Students Office. One published version; no divergence between copies.
The document’s own statement of purpose: the institution may discipline students to secure compliance with obligations higher than the civil law imposes, as a teaching method or to remove the student from the academic community.
Step 1 — Applicability Filter
Roughly thirty provisions returned. The weapons list, board composition, notice, hearing format, evidence rules, appeal grounds, recording and implementation are marked Not Applicable, which is the expected shape for a document of this kind.
Constitutive. Attendance is optional and voluntary, and by attending the student assumes the obligations. The obligations are higher than those imposed on citizens generally. The five standards, each stated as a description of what Eastern students do rather than as a prohibition. Incapacitation defined as impairment of the faculties where physical or mental control is markedly diminished.
Attributive. Complicity, defined once and then repeated under all five standards. Students who anticipate or observe a violation are expected to remove themselves from association or participation. Guests’ conduct charged to the student host. Organizational and individual accountability running in both directions. The bias aggravator, turning on intentional selection of the target. Jurisdiction extending to conduct indicating that the student may pose a danger to the academic community.
Corrective. Teaching method or removal. Conduct Supervision, to assure continued understanding of and compliance with the Code. Housing Probation, requiring clear evidence that the student is capable of conformance. Mandated assessment or treatment at the student’s expense where drugs or alcohol were a factor. Records destroyed after seven years; transcript notations removable on request after the period of separation.
Locative. Conduct having a direct and substantial disruptive influence on the life or educational endeavors of any person. Harassment as uninvited contact serving no purpose beyond alarm, annoyance or distress. Intimidation defined by the attempt rather than the success. Hazing, notwithstanding the willingness of the participant. The consent definition. Threats to the health or safety of the student himself. Conduct adversely affecting the university’s reputation with its constituents.
Step 2 — Commitment Test
Substance dualism — Not Operative. The student appears as a body in places and as a record over time. Incapacitation is the nearest thing to a claim about the faculties, and it is stated physiologically. Nothing asserts a rational substance distinct from the causal order; nothing denies one. The silence is honest rather than evasive.
Libertarian free will — Operative, with one Contrary provision. Operative in complicity, which requires condoning, supporting or encouraging rather than mere presence or awareness; in the bias aggravator, which turns on the student having intentionally selected his target; and in making incapacitation itself a violation rather than a mitigation of one.
Contrary in Housing Probation, which requires the student to show clear evidence that he is capable of conformance. Capability is there treated as a variable to be demonstrated rather than as a standing possession of a rational agent. This is the trichotomy seam — the middle zone between controlled and not controlled — appearing in a sanction rather than in a principle.
Ethical intuitionism — Not Operative. The standards are sourced to the mission of the university, its traditions and values. The phrase egregious or flagrant presumes that a reader will recognize the cases without a criterion, which is intuitionist machinery operating without the commitment that would license it.
Foundationalism — Inconsistent. The code does something neither comparison document does: it subsumes. Violations are listed beneath a standard and are violations of that standard, which is derivational grammar rather than a flat enumeration.
But the standards are not derived from anything and are not ordered among themselves; Standard IV absorbs any university policy whatever, which is what a residual clause does in place of a ground; and Standard V(c) makes egregious violation of the Code a violation of the Code, which is circular. The document adopts the form of dependency and breaks the relation at one joint.
Correspondence — Operative on fact, Not Operative on value. The factual apparatus is sound: preponderance of the evidence, findings in writing, no recommendation of sanctions based solely on the student’s failure to answer questions or appear, false testimony at a hearing as its own violation, falsification of records as another.
Nothing on the value side answers to anything beyond institutional standards. Whether conduct is wrong is settled by its being unacceptable in this community, and acceptability is not a correspondence relation.
Moral realism — Contrary, with two counterweights. Conduct is unacceptable in our community; the standards advance the mission of the university, its traditions and values. Against that stand two provisions: hazing binds notwithstanding the willingness of the participant, and lack of verbal or physical resistance, or submission resulting from force or threat of force, does not constitute consent. Both insist that a wrong survives the apparent agreement of the person wronged, which no purely institutional account of value can support.
Step 3 — Split Findings
Libertarian free will. Operative at complicity, at the bias aggravator, and at incapacitation as violation. Contrary at Housing Probation. Both recorded; no single verdict forced.
Moral realism. Contrary at the five standards and at the statement of purpose. Counterweighted at hazing and at consent. The counterweights are the sharper finding, because they are the provisions where the document says something its own foundation cannot underwrite.
Step 4 — Integration
The code grounds its authority in consent. Attendance is optional and voluntary, and by attending the student assumes obligations he would not otherwise bear. That premise opens the document and is stated before anything else.
Then, twice, the code says that willingness does not settle whether a wrong occurred. The hazed student’s participation is expressly not withstanding. Submission is expressly not consent.
Both cannot be foundational. If obligation rests on agreement, the hazed student’s agreement dissolves the wrong; the code says it does not. So the two provisions where this document comes closest to moral realism are the two that contradict the ground it stands on. That is the sharpest tension the run surfaced, and it sits at the foundation rather than between two sanctions.
The account of correction is unusually explicit and unusually narrow: a teaching method, or removal from the academic community. There is no third branch. Mandated assessment and treatment sits across both and belongs cleanly to neither.
Step 5 — Declaration
These findings concern the document’s account of the agent. They are not a judgment on Eastern Illinois University, on its administration, on the fairness of its process, or on the persons who administer it.
That bears stating here more than elsewhere. Eastern Illinois University is Grant C. Sterling’s institution. The code was taken as an ordinary third target at the lowest rung, alongside two comparable regional public university codes, and the findings above are of the same kind and severity as those two working passes returned.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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