Is it Legal in Your State, Too?

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of ACUPA or Purdue University.

As of September 1, it is legal to place bets on sports, including NCAA Division I sports, in Indiana, where I live. Billboards, TV ads, and online ads entice gamblers to join in the fun at a casino or to place a bet on a smartphone app. This flurry of excitement for sports betting comes as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down a federal law from 1992 that banned states from legalizing sports betting. Only four states—Delaware, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon—that already had legal betting on their books were exempt from the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992.

Indiana is not alone. Since the ruling, 15 states have legalized sports betting in some form or another (for a total of 19 states). The Action Network provides a tracker for all 50 states, if you are curious to see where each state stands on the issue.

What does this have to do with higher education policy? Well, Purdue University has NCAA Division I sports teams. And while the NCAA already prohibits student-athletes, athletics department staff, and conference office staff from engaging in sports betting, our board of trustees saw the potential for conflicts of interest if members of our university community who are not covered by the NCAA’s rule decided to use inside information for personal gain or to influence a game. This concern was shared by members of our faculty senate. So, Purdue’s board resolved to prohibit all faculty, staff, students, and independent contractors of the university from placing, accepting, or soliciting sports bets on any Purdue team, student-athlete, coach, statistical occurrence, contest, or event.

My job, in anticipation of the board’s resolution, was to research and draft a policy that could pass as soon as the board took action. In September, my University Policy Committee (UPC) saw a confidential draft of the policy and was asked to comment on it. The committee members weren’t too surprised by the draft, because the day before I sent it out, a press release went out that was picked up by local, state, and, eventually, national news. That draft was also shared with our Executive Policy Review Group (EPRG) in September. As soon as the board passed its resolution on October 10, I updated a few things in the policy, with help from legal counsel, and sent the draft back out to the UPC—this time asking committee members to share with their colleagues. They had only two days to send back comments to me so the EPRG could vote on it electronically and I could make it effective on October 18, the Friday before the next football game. It was a whirlwind month and a half, but it all seems to have worked out, and the focus now is on education.

The most common question we have received is how the policy will be enforced. Are we going to have undercover employees hang out at casinos looking for offenders? Are we going to expel a student for placing a five-dollar bet? The answer is that we will enforce it as we do any other policy that speaks to our values, ethics, and integrity, by weighing the facts and making decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Have you had to address this issue at your institution? If so, what choices did you make about the scope and breadth of the policy? If you’re curious to see what Purdue did, feel free to view the policy online.

Romantic Relationships in the Classroom

**The views expressed in this blog are my personal views and do not represent the official position of Metropolitan State University of Denver or ACUPA.**

Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth…

—Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

“Wait till the semester ends isn’t really realistic,” said one MSU Denver faculty member during a recent discussion on amorous relationships between employees and students. MSU Denver’s Policy Advisory Council, a group that provides recommendations to the President and Board of Trustees on university-wide policies, is currently pondering such questions as, “Should a college regulate consensual relationships?” and “Does love belong in the classroom?”

Arguments against allowing relationships include unfair power differentials between employees and students and concerns about actual or perceived bias in grading or other program benefits. Also, what if a relationship begins as consensual and then turns sour? How are other students and faculty impacted by the relationship?

The Policy Advisory Council is looking at how amorous relationship policies fit in with more general policies, including quid pro quo sexual harassment, conflict of interest and employee benefits policies. For instance, MSU Denver recently revised its tuition benefits policy to allow employees’ spouses and dependents to take MSU Denver courses tuition-free. An employee’s son or daughter could potentially take a course from a parent. Is the conflict of interest less if an employee has a personal relationship with a student but is not involved romantically? Trying to untangle the web of affectionate relationships seems nearly impossible when one begins to list common power differentials (tenured versus tenure-track or adjunct faculty, etc.).

Beyond Sex for Grades

Some acknowledgment that love lies at the core of many mentor-protégé relationships would help to ease anxiety over regulating affairs of the heart. Take, for example, the romance of philosopher Hannah Arendt and her (married) professor, Martin Heidegger. Their relationship is said to have been an inspiration for Heidegger’s influential, philosophical work, Being and Time.

In his first letter to Arendt from February 1925, Heidegger wrote:

Everything should be simple and clear and pure between us. Only then will we be worthy of having been allowed to meet. You are my pupil and I your teacher, but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us. I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and it shall grow with you. We never know what we can become for others through our Being.

How humans are shaped by both physical and metaphysical boundaries, including the presence of other individuals, is also a theme in Arendt’s philosophy. Would these contributions to philosophy have been made without the philosophers’ experience of pushing against metaphysical and ethical boundaries? Does a blanket policy prohibiting romantic relationships ignore that love is often a motivating factor for learning and intellectual growth?

Part 2: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

In my last post, I introduced the topic of web accessibility in relation to how we create, edit, and display policy for digital consumption. Regardless of how your institution chooses to display its policies online—whether by PDF, HTML (web layout), Word document, etc.—the content within needs to be presented in a way that conforms to accessibility standards to ensure that all users have equal access to its information. In this article, I’ll dive a little deeper into the basics of web accessibility by discussing some of the most common mistakes users make when creating web content or documents intended for web display.

The following is a summary of the three most common accessibility mistakes I see in institutional policy documents and web content: styles, links, and tables. For each item, I'll include examples of common mistakes and the rationale behind the corrections, to help you better understand the standard as it pertains to policy administration. However, this list is by no means a comprehensive guide to full accessibility compliance. For the full list of accessibility standards, you should refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

Mistake 1: Incorrect Use of Styles

Using heading and paragraph styles incorrectly (or not at all) is perhaps the most common mistake I see when viewing digital content and documents. In a future post, I plan to delve deeper into how to best utilize styles in your document templates to quickly and effortlessly generate fully accessible documents, but for now, I’ll just cover the basics: If you're not using styles in your documents, you should be; and if you are using styles, make sure you're using them correctly.

Proper utilization of text styles (heading, paragraph, emphasis, etc.) is critical for accessible content. Screen readers have to be given instructions to know which content is most important and how it should be organized. When you use styles, you provide screen readers with this information and help visually impaired users navigate through your content more quickly. Using custom formatting in documents without styles (manually changing color, size, font, etc.) causes screen readers to read out cumbersome formatting text to their users, interrupting the flow of information. Using styles incorrectly (usually due to a preference in design over the correct style) causes confusion when screen readers improperly organize the document accordingly.

To avoid this mistake, use descriptive heading and paragraph styles (e.g., Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Paragraph, etc.) to designate content organization and hierarchy. Select an appropriate style based on its descriptive name and the content it is defining rather than on its appearance, and don’t skip levels (e.g., using Heading 1 then Heading 3). Styles can always be edited to suit aesthetic preferences or institutional standards.

Mistake 2: The Ambiguous Link

Another accessibility error I see often is non-descriptive link text, or the absence of link text entirely. Hyperlinks should contain a short description of where they are leading, not just “Click here” or the URL of the webpage.

To avoid this mistake, use descriptive link text to provide added context. See the links in my opening paragraphs above for examples of descriptive and relevant hyperlink text. Link text that describes what you are linking to helps readers scan and anticipate where they will go when clicking a link. Link text like “Click here” provides little context to where the link is actually going.

Mistake 3: The Misappropriated Table

This mistake, I am ashamed to admit, is one that my own institution had been unknowingly and egregiously committing in our policy templates and documents for years: using tables as a way to format and control design elements, rather than as a way to logically organize and present tabular information. Complex or misused tables can be difficult for readers to follow and comprehend, especially for screen reader users who have to remember the headers.

To avoid this mistake, format and use simple tables with column and row headers. Split up nested tables into simple tables, and don’t use tables to control design elements or layout. Check to ensure content can be tabbed through in proper reading order and provide alt text for all tables and images.

Other Considerations

Accessibility standards in web content are fairly new phenomena and are constantly evolving to meet the needs of new technologies and diverse groups and individuals. Many higher education institutions and universities that have been around since far before the advent of the digital world, mine included, have been scrambling to bring decades of content up to current times.

This list contains just a few of the most common accessibility issues to watch out for as you create and edit documents for digital consumption. Have you noticed any of the above mistakes or others in your own institution's policies and documents? What are some of the most common accessibility issues your institution has faced?

For more information about web accessibility, see my previous post on the Policy Matters blog: An Introduction to Web Accessibility. For the most comprehensive and current guide on web accessibility, refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

Where do Your Procedures Live?

Throughout my years working in policy, I have found that there is one area of little agreement and great discussion—whether or not policies should contain procedures. While there may be something to be said for making a clear distinction between these two instruments of administration, they are inextricably linked to each other: most agree that a policy is not worth much if readers are not told how to “follow it,” i.e., not given procedures or constraints for compliance.

At Cornell, we decided right from the beginning that four criteria would be common to every university policy: (1) possessing broad application across the university; (2) requiring senior-level approval; (3) increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance with law or regulation, or protecting from audit; and (4) containing constraints or procedures for compliance. With that in mind, we began our policy journey, before the existence of the Internet, believing that a university policy must contain even the most granular procedures, to protect the university from any potential claims of ignorance, upon an individual’s non-compliance with policy. This, of course, yielded outlandishly long policy documents, such as our 300-plus-page “Accounting System” policy (which was, thankfully, retired many years ago).

With the advent of the Internet and in the years since, hypertext links have become ubiquitous and expected, and no employee can function without the ability to bounce around from website to website, virtually from office to office, gathering whatever information is needed to complete the task at hand. But where does that leave the policy developers, when considering what procedures to include with a policy, on behalf of the institution? And who takes the responsibility to issue, maintain, and update these various items as needed? I imagine the answers would be wildly varied, and I doubt there is a single institution that would any longer champion the “tomes of yore.”

Cornell’s solution has been a gradual reduction in the number and complexity of procedures contained in official university policies, opting for a more distributed approach, to the point now where most “how to” instructions are housed on sites within their respective administrative areas. But our policies still are required to contain at least a short overview of procedures, with information on how to obtain the minutest of procedural details, on an office website or through other means. We accomplish this balance of completeness with brevity during the policy’s development, or during an existing policy’s periodic review. The balance here, and likely at your institution, depends upon the relative resources available, the complexity and length of the procedures, and an assessment, through judgment, discovery, and analytics, as to the most logical place for the user to look.

Perhaps your institution has a different solution, maybe even to the point that your policy function is not responsible for the maintenance of any procedures at all. However, it is a worthy exercise for institutions to consider these aspects of policy management. I’ll close my post with a battery of questions, designed to elicit opinions and spur discussion. There are no wrong answers.

• Do your policies contain procedures for compliance? If not, do they point clearly to the location of the procedures?
• Who owns procedures, and who is responsible for updating them?
• Does your policy process include the development of procedures?
• What resources are available to your policy initiative, and is it realistic to expect procedures to be developed through the same system? …and for the central policy library to be the place to house procedures?
• If procedures are housed outside of your institution’s policy initiative, how does your institution ensure that procedures are kept up-to-date and linked to policies?
• Do you have separate templates for your policies and your procedures? If not, would this be an effective way to develop policies at your institution? If so, would it be effective to combine them into one template?
• If your institution’s policies contain any procedures, are minor changes to procedural elements of your policies required to pass through your entire policy process?

Citing Sources and Formatting Quotes in Policies

Like most readers of this blog, I regularly provide feedback on policy drafts that are being created on my campus in the required official template.  We also have a style guide that describes how to handle specific situations when writing a policy, such as how to list a reference to another policy manual.  My office has only been managing the policy process on campus for a couple of years, so I can’t say I’ve seen it all, but my formatting feedback usually ends up being, nonetheless, fairly routine: Don’t capitalize this term, put that in bold, etc.  Even so, one policy writer recently asked a question that we found a bit tricky to respond to. 

Like many policy templates, ours allows for a definitions section and, in that section, the writer wanted to use direct quotes taken from the professional publications in her specialty area.  The definitions were useful and it would have been difficult to paraphrase them. Even if they were reworded, the credit for the ideas still belonged with the organization that developed them.  The writer felt strongly about citing her sources, to her credit, and, as we have academic honesty and research ethics policies that we hold our students and faculty to, we believed our policies should conform to a similar standard.

No one disagreed with this in principle, but making it work within our template was not as simple as it might seem.  Our template contains a “related regulations, statutes, policies, and procedures” section where writers can provide links to anything they’ve referred to in the policy (example is below).

Related Regulations, Statutes, Policies, and Procedures

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)  
Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 (Title IX)
Georgia Mandatory Reporting Law O.C.G.A. §19-7-5

This section didn’t seem like a good fit for this particular use mainly because the works being quoted were not regulations, statutes, policies, or procedures.  We also discussed whether in-text citations, such as those described in a standard academic format like APA or Chicago style, were appropriate but that just didn’t feel right either. An additional complication is that the tool we use to publish our policies won’t accommodate footnotes or endnotes, so any citation style that used them was impossible. Readers of policy interact with those documents differently than do readers of academic work and we wanted to keep things as clear as possible. 

The final result was that we used quotation marks in the definition and created a new section at the end, in place of the “related regulations…” section.  An example is below:

Open access: Literature that is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”

Related References

Source of definition of open access

This may not be our final solution, but the process of developing it caused some robust discussion about how readers interact with scholarly versus administrative documents, as well as how to give credit in a way that doesn’t confuse the reader and conforms to academic honesty principles, if not the exact details of citation structures

Do you allow policy writers on your campus to directly quote sources?  If so, how do you handle it in your policies?