Last Wednesday UC Berkeley Junior Laura Zelko finally got her day in court. Or “court.”
Sort of.
Zelko has been charged with five violations of the Berkeley code of conduct for her involvement in last November’s student protests. She’s the second such student to have received a hearing, and the first to choose to have her hearing conducted in public. (According to the Berkeley Daily Cal, seventeen students’ conduct cases remain unresolved.)
Zelko’s panel, composed of two professors, two students, and an assistant dean, met for eleven hours on Wednesday, but were unable to conclude their work. They will meet again sometime after November 8 to continue their deliberations.
Three members of the Berkeley community livetweeted the hearing, which saw confusion as to which version of the Berkeley code was being deployed and disagreement about whether it could legitimately proceed at all. University regulations mandate that such hearings be held within 45 days of the alleged conduct violation, but that provision was suspended last spring. Zelko asked that the charges against her be dropped due to the delay in bringing action against her, but the committee chose to proceed.
studentactivism.net 
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November 2, 2010 at 10:46 am
reclaimuc
actually the 45-day “timeline” was suspended in august 2009 by associate dean of students christina gonzales. the code of conduct that was in place at the time stated that the timeline “may be extended in unusual circumstances as determined by the dean of students.” aside from the fact that there’s a significant difference between “extending in unusual circumstances” and “suspending entirely,” the timeline was improperly suspended because the it was done not by the dean, as per the code of conduct, but by the associate dean. the university clearly recognizes that what it did violates the code, because when the code was rewritten in early 2010 four key words were added to that sentence: “… or his/her designee.” they literally went back and ex post facto rewrote the code to account for what they’d done six months before.