Colorado Christian University Student Defense Lawyer

Students at Colorado Christian University call at three points: when a faculty member reports plagiarism or cheating, when the Student Life Office opens a conduct file, and, usually too late, after an academic suspension or a decision that ends a program place. All three share the same two features. The deadlines are measured in hours and business days, and the record that decides the case is built before most students ask for help.

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at Colorado Christian University?

CCU is a private university. That single fact changes everything about the case. A private institution is not a state actor, so there is no Fourteenth Amendment due-process claim and no Goss v. Lopez hearing right. What replaces it is contract. The handbook, the catalog and the published procedures are the promise, and the question a court asks is whether the university did what those documents said it would do. Alongside contract sit the statutes that apply to any school taking federal money: Title IX, Title VI, and Section 504 and the ADA, plus accreditor requirements.

Colorado law on that contract theory is unusually clear and unusually recent. In University of Denver v. Doe, 2024 CO 27 (Colo. May 6, 2024), the Colorado Supreme Court held that a private university’s promise of a thorough, impartial and fair investigation, read together with the specific investigation requirements in its own procedures, was definite enough to be an enforceable contract, and it reversed summary judgment for the university on the contract claim and on the covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The same decision closed the other door: a university does not owe its students an extra-contractual duty to exercise reasonable care in adopting and implementing fair procedures. The court of appeals decision below, Doe v. University of Denver, 2022 COA 57, keeps its contract holding, but its tort-duty holding is no longer good law. Against a private Colorado institution the viable theory is breach of contract, not negligence.

One Colorado statute can still reach a private campus. C.R.S. § 23-5-146 governs sexual-misconduct procedure at state institutions and at participating private institutions. Where it applies, subsection (3)(d)(II) requires proof by a preponderance of the evidence when a student is the respondent, notwithstanding any other evidentiary standard in any other policy, and subsection (3)(d)(IV) allows each party an advisor or other person to be present but bars that person from speaking on behalf of the student. So even in a Title IX or sexual-misconduct case where the statute applies, an attorney may attend and may not argue. Whether it reaches a particular private university turns on participation, a question to put to the institution in writing.

Where do Colorado Christian University cases come from?

CCU enrolls about 9,951 students in Lakewood and online, and it is really two institutions under one name. The College of Undergraduate Studies is a traditional residential campus. The College of Adult and Graduate Studies serves working adults and graduate students, largely online and in accelerated terms. The two publish separate student handbooks with different rules and different appeal chains, and the first mistake many students make is reading the wrong one.

As a faith-based university, CCU asks undergraduates to sign a Lifestyle Covenant, described in the handbook as an agreement committing the student to a biblical standard of relationships, including confronting fellow students engaged in behavior contrary to university standards. Because the theory here is contract rather than the Constitution, a private religious institution can enforce conduct standards that reach off-campus and personal behavior in a way a public college could not. That does not make its decisions unreviewable: the question shifts from whether the rule is fair to whether the university followed the procedure it published.

The accelerated terms are the second structural risk. In a five-week or eight-week course a single integrity finding can cost the whole course, and in a sequenced graduate program a lost course is often a lost term. That is why the sanction is usually more negotiable, and more important, than the finding, and why a written response should argue the sanction as hard as it argues the facts.

Which process are you in, and why does that matter?

The label on the letter picks your deadline, your decision-maker and your protections. A plagiarism or cheating allegation is an academic integrity matter that runs through the faculty member and the academic chain and is appealed as a grade. A behavioral charge is a student conduct case administered by the Student Life Office. A sexual-misconduct allegation runs through the Title IX process. An academic suspension is academic standing, decided on GPA rather than on fault, with its own appeal form and its own limits.

Answering in the wrong track can spend the only chance you get. The integrity route at CCU is unusually fast, so a student who spends a week composing an apology to a professor can miss the appeal window entirely. If the accusation rests on an AI-detection score or a similarity percentage, treat it as an evidence problem about software and not as something to concede.

What should you do first?

Get the handbook that governs you, from the university’s own source, and confirm which of the two it is before you rely on a sentence in it. Print it with the date you retrieved it, because the version that governs you is the one in force when the conduct occurred. Get the syllabus, the assignment instructions and any written instruction the faculty member gave about collaboration or generative AI. Put every deadline in writing, in an email back to the office that set it, so the record shows what you were told and when.

Then preserve the evidence: draft history, document version history, learning-management timestamps, submission receipts, group chats and email threads with the faculty member. Request your file in writing and ask for the report, the underlying evidence and the names of anyone who will speak. Do not sit for a meeting before you know what is actually alleged. A conversation described as pastoral or informal still produces notes, and those notes become the record.

What does Colorado Christian University’s own policy actually say?

What follows is what CCU publishes in its two handbooks. Where the published policy does not answer a question, the entry says so rather than guessing.

• Conduct office: the Student Life Office in the Anschutz Student Center, which publishes the College of Undergraduate Studies student handbook. The handbook names the AVP Student Programs and dean of students as the university’s designee to administer the campus student conduct process.
• Governing policy: the Student Standards of Conduct in the undergraduate handbook and the Standards of Student Conduct in the adult and graduate handbook, together with the Lifestyle Covenant that undergraduates sign. CCU is independent, so no system-wide code applies.
• Academic integrity: an Academic Integrity policy covering plagiarism, cheating and fabrication. In the adult and graduate handbook the plagiarism sanctions escalate by offense: a zero on the assignment, then failure of the course, then failure of the course with suspension from the university, then expulsion after a further offense following readmission.
• Appeal window: for a plagiarism or grade decision the adult and graduate handbook routes the appeal through the final course grade appeal process, which begins within 72 hours of the grade posting, with the faculty member responding within three business days, an appeal to the academic dean within three business days, a dean’s response within seven business days, and a final appeal to the Provost within three business days, whose decision is final. For a conduct decision, no campus-specific day-count located; ask the Student Life Office in writing for the deadline as soon as you receive the decision.
• Standard of proof: the undergraduate handbook defines preponderance of evidence as evidence more credible and convincing than that offered by the other party, or showing that the fact to be proven is more probable than not.
• Advisor: no advisor rule located in either handbook. Colorado gives no statutory right to counsel, and at a private university nothing outside the handbook supplies one, so ask in writing whether an advisor may attend and whether that advisor may be an attorney.
• Academic standing: the College of Adult and Graduate Studies student handbook carries the probation, continued probation and suspension terms and a suspension appeal, which is submitted through an enrollment counselor and counts as one of the two lifetime appeals a CCU student is allowed. A student returning after an absence of 366 days or longer must meet current admission and degree requirements. No campus-specific day-count located for that suspension appeal.
• Disability accommodations: Disability and Accessibility Services, named in the adult and graduate handbook, with accommodations for undergraduates administered through the Life Directions Center. If an unmet accommodation sits behind the decision, that is a Section 504 and ADA question as well as a contract one.

Both handbooks are PDFs revised between years. Download and date the copy that governs your case now, because a later revision will not show what the university promised at the time.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

A federal claim arising at Colorado Christian University — Title IX, Title VI, or Section 504 and the ADA — is filed in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, where I am admitted to the bar. Colorado is a single federal district covering the whole state, so no pro hac vice motion and no sponsoring local attorney is needed. There is no Fourteenth Amendment claim here, because a private university is not a state actor, and the contract claim is a state-law claim governed by University of Denver v. Doe. The work looks like this.

• Reading the governing policy against the charge or decision letter
• Preparing your account, your documents and your questions
• Testing whether the school followed its own published procedure
• Scrutinising software-based evidence, including AI-detection and similarity reports
• Helping with the written response and the appeal, where policy allows
• Serving as your advisor where the process permits one
• Negotiating sanction terms, notations and disclosure language

What a lawyer can do turns on the handbook rather than on the lawyer. Some tracks allow an advisor who may be an attorney, some allow a silent advisor, and some exclude outside people entirely; CCU publishes no advisor rule I could locate, so that has to be asked. What does not change is the written record, the timing, and the appeal and any later review, where promise is measured against performance. If you want the file read, that is the Full Read + Game Plan, and other campuses sit on the Colorado student defense page.

Other Colorado universities

Every school writes its own dismissal, appeal and conduct rules, and the filing deadlines are rarely the same from one campus to the next. These pages set out the procedure at other Colorado universities:

• Colorado Mesa University
• Colorado State University
• Colorado State University Global
• Concordia University St. Paul Denver
• Metropolitan State University of Denver
• Naropa University

Common questions about Colorado Christian University student cases

Does the Fourteenth Amendment protect me at Colorado Christian University?

No. CCU is private, so it is not a state actor and there is no constitutional due-process claim against it. Your protections come from the handbook, the catalog and the published procedures, which Colorado treats as an enforceable contract where their language is definite enough. That is the holding of University of Denver v. Doe, 2024 CO 27. The same case confirms there is no separate negligence duty to adopt fair procedures, so the argument is always that the university did not do what it promised.

How fast do I have to appeal a plagiarism decision at CCU?

Faster than most students expect. In the adult and graduate program a plagiarism sanction is appealed through the final course grade appeal process, which starts within 72 hours of the grade posting. The faculty member then has three business days, an appeal to the academic dean must follow within three business days, the dean has seven business days, and a final appeal goes to the Provost within three business days. The Provost’s decision is final. Missing the first 72 hours can end the appeal before it starts.

Can CCU discipline me for conduct in my personal life?

It can, within the limits of what it published. Undergraduates sign a Lifestyle Covenant committing to a biblical standard of relationships, and because the relationship is contractual rather than constitutional, a religious university may enforce standards that reach off-campus and personal conduct in ways a public college could not. What it may not do is depart from its own written procedure. The defense is usually procedural: what the standard actually says, what process was promised, and what the university in fact did.

This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order.

This page is informational and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the institution named on it.

Attorney advertising. Zachary Gaynor is licensed to practice law in Florida and is admitted to the bars of the United States District Courts for the Southern, Middle, and Northern Districts of Florida, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, the United States District Courts for the Northern and Southern Districts of Illinois, the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska, the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico, and the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Federal court admission is not a license to practice the law of the state in which the court sits; he is not licensed in Colorado and does not advise on Colorado state law.