SIU Edwardsville: Student Discipline, Dismissal & Federal Court

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at SIUE?

SIUE enrolled 12,813 students in autumn 2025, which makes it the largest campus in the Southern District of Illinois. It is also the most procedurally layered: general misconduct, academic dishonesty and grievances run under three separate university codes, each with its own clock, and the professional schools sit on top of all of them with policies of their own. Answering “which code am I in” is not a formality at SIUE. It changes the deadline, the decision-maker, and whether your lawyer is allowed in the room at all.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is a public institution, so two bodies of law apply on top of its own handbook. The first is constitutional due process: the school is a state actor, and Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975), requires notice of the charge and a meaningful chance to respond. The second is the deference courts give genuine academic judgment — Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78 (1978), and Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214 (1985), under which an academic decision stands unless it is such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms that no professional judgment was actually exercised.

Illinois adds a structural point that catches people out. Review of a public institution’s decision does not run through the Illinois Administrative Review Law: that statute applies only where the law creating the body adopts it by express reference, and the public university enabling acts do not. The vehicle is a common-law writ of certiorari in the circuit court — Dusthimer v. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 368 Ill. App. 3d 159 (2006) — on which the court asks whether the body proceeded legally and whether the evidence supports what it did, not whether it was right. Money damages are further away still: public institutions are arms of the State under the State Lawsuit Immunity Act, 745 ILCS 5/1, and the Court of Claims Act, 705 ILCS 505/8, sends contract and tort claims against them to the Illinois Court of Claims. The remedy worth having early is the injunction — under Leetaru v. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2015 IL 117485, a student may go to circuit court for prospective relief where the institution’s agents acted in violation of law or in excess of authority, but the bar is a fundamental disregard of core rules, not a technical slip, and it is a remedy for a proceeding that is still running.

A federal claim arising at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois — Madison County sits in that district under 28 U.S.C. § 93(c), and the court holds sessions at East St. Louis, Benton, Alton and Cairo. I was admitted to the bar of that court on 28 August 2026 on my Florida license, under its Local Rule 83.1(a), which opens general admission to any attorney licensed in any state. That means a Title IX, Section 504, ADA or due process suit for a SIUE student is one I file and try under my own name, with no pro hac vice motion and no sponsoring attorney. It also means something most districts do not offer: Local Rule 83.1 states that parties represented by counsel who do not reside in the district are not required to retain local counsel, though the court keeps the power to order it for good cause in a particular case.

Three codes, and how to tell which one you are in

• Student Conduct Code (policy 3C1) — general misconduct. Appeal to the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs within five business days of the date of the written decision. Notice of a hearing must come at least five business days in advance, with the names of the panel. The Student Conduct Administrator notifies the parties of the decision within ten business days of receiving the panel’s recommendation. A written response to the allegations is due within three business days of your first meeting; investigation runs roughly twenty business days; the evidence-review window is typically two to five business days; a petition to reopen must arrive within five business days. Respondents who chose a No Contest Resolution may not appeal at all.
• Student Academic Code (policy 3C2) — academic dishonesty. Charges must be filed within twenty working days of the occurrence or its discovery. The Provost notifies you within five days; the hearing falls between five and twenty days from the Chair’s receipt of the complaint; witness lists are due five days before; the Panel reports within ten days; the Provost decides within ten days; and either party may appeal to the Chancellor within five days of receiving that decision. The Chancellor decides within thirty days and may extend once by up to thirty more.
• Student Grievance Code (policy 3C3) — grievances, including academic ones, which are appealed to the Provost. Filing runs within sixty working days of the occurrence or its discovery, then five-day steps throughout.

Codes 3C2 and 3C3 define their unit precisely: “Days: Regular work days in the normal work week, Monday through Friday, exclusive of University holidays, days of administrative closure, and term breaks.” That last exclusion is generous and often missed — a clock that would otherwise expire over spring break does not.

Standard of proof, and the attorney rule that differs by code

All three codes apply preponderance of the evidence. Under 3C1 a student is responsible only if the information establishes “that it is more likely than not that the student violated the Code as charged”; under 3C2, “the person bringing or prosecuting a charge has the burden of proof by the preponderance of evidence.”

The advisor rules are not the same across the three, and the difference is worth knowing before you retain anyone.

Under 3C1, you may bring one advisor at any stage, at your own expense, who “may provide support to the student and may quietly confer with them, provided that it is not disruptive to the process.” But: “An advisor may not question witnesses, nor answer questions on behalf of the student.” Whether that advisor may be an attorney is not addressed — the word “attorney” does not appear anywhere in 3C1. It is neither permitted nor forbidden in terms.

Under 3C2 and 3C3, by contrast, an attorney is expressly contemplated. A student is entitled “to be accompanied to a hearing by either an advisor (non-attorney) or an attorney for the purpose of receiving advice or assistance; advisors or attorneys shall not participate directly in a hearing, except as such participation is required by operative law or regulations in a specific instance. Consultation with advisors or attorneys during the hearing will be at the consent of the Chair.” Both sides must also be told, in writing and at least five days before the hearing, whether the other is bringing an advisor or an attorney. So in an academic-dishonesty case at SIUE your lawyer may sit with you and advise; in a general-conduct case the code simply does not say.

Academic standing and suspension

Policy 1I1 runs undergraduates through Academic Warning, then Academic Probation, then Academic Suspension, with good standing set at a 2.00 cumulative. “Suspended students will be ineligible to attend SIUE for at least one term (fall, spring, or summer).” A second or subsequent suspension goes to the Suspension Appeals Committee, and the policy is explicit that “a student must file an appeal before any action can be taken” — nothing happens automatically. SIUE sets fixed dates for that appeal rather than a day count: October 1 for a spring return, March 1 for summer and July 1 for fall.

The professional schools, where the real deadlines live

SIUE says so itself, in 3C1: “the professional schools at SIUE, as well as various professional programs, including the School of Dental Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Pharmacy, Department of Social Work, Art Therapy Counseling Program, and teacher education programs have additional conduct policies, including standards of professional conduct, that apply to their students.”

School of Pharmacy publishes the most complete appeal chain on the campus, and every step is in working days. Probation follows a cumulative pharmacy GPA below 2.00, any grade of “F,” “WF” or “No Credit,” or “a cumulative total of more than 8 credit hours of ‘D’ grades.” On suspension or dismissal: the appeal goes to the Dean within ten working days of notification; the Dean forwards it to the Academic Standards and Progression Committee within ten working days; the Committee hears it “no later than 30 working days” after submission, with the student entitled to be present and to address it; the Committee reports findings of fact, conclusions and recommendations within ten working days; the Dean decides within ten working days; and the student then has five working days to appeal the Dean’s decision to the Provost. Grade appeals on APPE and IPPE rotations run on ten-working-day decisions at two levels. The program also publishes Technical Standards for Admission and Continued Enrollment across observation, communication, motor, intellectual and behavioral/social categories. Whether an advisor or attorney may attend a pharmacy appeal hearing is not published.

School of Dental Medicine, in Alton — also Madison County, also the Southern District — is accredited by the Commission on Dental Accreditation. Its student handbook and its progression, promotion and dismissal policy are not published on the public site; what is published is the Minimum Technical Standards Policy for Admissions and Matriculation, covering motor skills, sensory/observation, communication, cognitive and behavioral categories, and a policy on the illicit use of controlled substances. For a dental student that means the governing published rules are the university-level 3C1, 3C2 and 3C3 plus the technical standards — and it means the first request to make, in writing, is for the current program handbook itself.

School of Nursing is accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, with the nurse anesthesia DNP additionally accredited by the COA through 2030. Its current student handbook is not published either: the most recent publicly posted versions are a decade old, and they should not be treated as governing. Ask for the current one in writing and note the date you asked.

What a student defense lawyer can do here

Most of the value is early and quiet. It is reading SIUE’s policy against what the school actually did and finding the gap; writing the response or the appeal so it argues the grounds the policy recognizes rather than the ones that feel most unfair; preserving the federal issues — Title IX, Section 504 and the ADA, FERPA — so they are in the record if the case ever leaves campus; and identifying comparators, because a sanction far outside what similar cases drew is one of the few arguments that reliably moves a decision-maker.

At SIUE the highest-value early step is unglamorous: get the school to state, in writing, which code it is proceeding under and which program policy it says applies. The five-business-day conduct appeal and the five-day academic appeal to the Chancellor are short enough that a week spent guessing is a week you do not have — and where the governing program handbook is not published, as at Dental Medicine and Nursing, asking for it in writing both gets you the rules and creates a dated record that you asked.

What a lawyer cannot do is turn a campus hearing into a trial. The rules of evidence do not apply, there is no discovery, and the school decides its own case at first instance. That is exactly why the written record built during the campus process is the whole ballgame: by the time a court looks at it, the record is closed.

The one Illinois statute that gives you procedure

Illinois has no general statute setting notice periods, hearing formats, standards of proof or appeal rights for college students. The Illinois School Code, 105 ILCS 5, has a detailed suspension and expulsion scheme, and it applies to elementary and secondary schools, not here. The exception is the Preventing Sexual Violence in Higher Education Act, 110 ILCS 155, and it is a real one. It reaches every higher education institution in the state — public universities, community colleges, and private not-for-profit and for-profit institutions alike — and it requires timely written notice of the allegations to all parties, an investigation that is adequate, reliable and impartial, written notice of the outcome, and appeal rights. It requires the school to make confidential advisors available, trained to a statutory standard and kept separate from the people deciding the case. Both parties are entitled to an advisor of their choice, and that advisor may be an attorney — although the institution may limit how far an attorney-advisor participates in a hearing, which is why SIUE’s own rule on that, set out above, still governs what your lawyer may do in the room. The standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence, applied the same way to both sides.

What to do first

1. Find the deadline and write it down. Every deadline on this page came from SIUE’s own published document, and the unit matters as much as the number — business days, school days and calendar days produce very different dates from the same starting point. If the notice you were sent gives a different date from the policy, work to whichever is shorter.
2. Download the version of the policy that governed your cohort, not the one on the website today. Schools revise handbooks between catalog years, and the operative document is the one in force when the conduct happened. Save a PDF with the date visible.
3. Ask, in writing, for the evidence. Request the investigation file, the report, the exhibits and the names of anyone who decided. Put the request in email so the date exists.
4. Write nothing to the school about the merits until you know the process. A statement made to be helpful in a meeting becomes the record a court reviews later.
5. Say if you have a disability or requested an accommodation. If accommodations were requested and not provided, or a condition explains the performance, that is a Section 504 and ADA question that belongs in the record now, not on appeal.

One honest caveat about geography. Illinois has three federal districts. I am admitted to two of them: the Northern District, which takes Chicago and the northern counties, and the Southern District. A federal claim arising at a school in Springfield, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana or the Quad Cities falls in the Central District; I am not a member of that bar, and those matters I handle with local counsel in that district or by pro hac vice admission. I say so before a retainer rather than after.

Where I am licensed. I am licensed to practice law in Florida. I am admitted to the bars of the U.S. District Courts for the Southern, Middle and Northern Districts of Florida, the District of Colorado, the Northern and Southern Districts of Illinois, the District of Nebraska, the District of New Mexico, and the Western District of Wisconsin, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Federal court admission is not a license to practice the law of the state in which the court sits. I am not licensed in Illinois and do not advise on Illinois state law or appear in Illinois state court.

What an SIUE instructor can do to you before any charge is filed

Quite a lot, and none of it goes through a hearing. The Student Academic Code (3C2), issued August 16, 2019 and replacing the March 22, 2017 version, lets an instructor impose four penalties alone: a discussion and a chance to fix the problem, a failing grade on one assignment, a failing grade for the course, or removal from a clinical site or field placement. Anything beyond that list, dismissal included, requires a formal charge.

Two consequences follow. When an instructor fails you in the course for misconduct, they must notify the Service Center, and you may not re-enroll in another section that term, drop the course, or switch it to audit. And a challenge to any of those four sanctions belongs in the grievance code, not the academic code’s five-day appeal chain.

Grievances and grade disputes under Code 3C3, and who is shut out of it

The Student Grievance Code (3C3), effective October 13, 2020 and replacing the November 12, 1998 version, is SIUE’s route for grade disputes and other complaints against faculty or staff. File within sixty working days of the event or its discovery; you carry the burden of proof.

First you must try to resolve it with the faculty member, then the chair, then the dean’s office. Note the trap: “The grievance timeline is not stayed during the informal process.” After that, each step is short. The chair, coordinator or director acts as Initial Hearing Officer and has five days to acknowledge the grievance, send it on and set a hearing; the respondent answers within five days; the hearing falls within twenty days of the written charge; the decision issues within five days and takes effect five days after you receive it. An appeal goes to the next highest administrator within five days, who decides within ten. From there you have five days to appeal to a Vice Chancellor, and academic grievances go to the Provost, who decides within ten days and may extend up to thirty.

Two exclusions matter. Discrimination and harassment claims are not grievable under 3C3 and must go to the Office of Equal Opportunity, Access and Title IX Coordination. School of Dental Medicine students are carved out of 3C3 entirely, covered instead by that school’s Student Progress System.

Two different clocks for getting back in

SIUE runs academic reinstatement and disciplinary readmission on separate calendars. Under Policy 1I1, effective December 18, 2024, a first suspension needs no appeal: you sit out one term, meet an advisor before returning and three times during the return semester, and come back classified as “exploratory” on probationary status. A second or later suspension requires the Suspension Appeals Committee: a Provost appointee, the Director of Retention and Student Success and a Faculty Senate appointee serving a three-year term, plus a representative of your major department if you had one. The reinstatement page sets fixed dates rather than a day count: October 1 for spring, March 1 for summer, July 1 for fall. Away three terms or more and you must reapply. The companion policy, 1I2, was rescinded on the same December 2024 date.

A disciplinary suspension works differently. Under the Student Code of Conduct (3C1), issued August 9, 2023, you petition the Dean of Students before November 1 for the following spring or before March 15 for the following fall, then address the Dean for ten minutes or less. An advisor may come but may not participate, and the Dean’s decision on the petition cannot be appealed. If it is granted you carry Conduct Probation until Graduation, cannot register for summer or winter courses first, and may still be refused readmission on academic grounds.

Filing or answering a sex discrimination complaint at SIUE

Reports go to the Equal Opportunity, Access and Title IX Coordination office in Rendleman Hall, Room 3314, by phone at (618) 650-2333, by email or online. The governing document is Policy 2C9 and 3C8, effective May 1, 2025.

The office aims to finish its initial assessment within ten business days and to send the notice of allegations within ten business days after that, with the whole process meant to run no longer than ninety business days from that notice. You get ten business days to inspect the evidence and respond, and the report at least ten business days before the hearing. A live hearing is required before any sanction, and you cannot question the other party yourself: cross-examination “must be conducted by the advisor,” and if you have none the university appoints one at no charge. The standard is preponderance of the evidence, the determination issues within fifteen business days of the hearing, and an appeal is due within five business days, capped at five pages, on three grounds only: procedural irregularity, new evidence, or bias. The Vice Chancellor for Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion decides within twenty-one business days, and filing the appeal stays the sanctions.

Accommodations through ACCESS, and what happens if you are refused

SIUE’s disability office is ACCESS, the Office for Accessible Campus Community and Equitable Student Support, formerly Disability Support Services. You apply through the online Accommodation Request Form and the Accommodate portal. A high school plan is accepted, though ACCESS often asks for more because such documents rarely establish the diagnosis; a provider letter must be on letterhead showing credentials and specialty, and documentation from a family member is not accepted. Test proctoring runs out of the Student Success Center, Room 1270, under a 72-business-hour rule: exams must be booked at least three business days ahead, not the day before.

ACCESS names Policy 2C7 and 3C6, effective May 7, 2025, as its disability grievance procedure: twenty business days for the evaluation, twenty more for the investigation, ten for the determination and five to appeal, with the appeal officer usually deciding within ten. An advisor there, attorney or not, is limited to a “supportive and non-participatory role.”

Other Illinois colleges

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 Illinois colleges:

• Southeastern Illinois College
• Southwestern Illinois College
• Wabash Valley College
• John A. Logan College
• Kaskaskia College
• Lincoln Trail College

Common questions about SIUE student cases

How long do I have to appeal at SIUE?

It depends which code you are in. A general conduct decision under 3C1 must be appealed to the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs within five business days of the date of the written decision. An academic-dishonesty decision under 3C2 is appealed to the Chancellor within five days of receipt — and 3C2 defines “days” as regular Monday-to-Friday work days excluding university holidays, closures and term breaks. If you accepted a No Contest Resolution under 3C1, there is no appeal.

Can I bring a lawyer to an SIUE hearing?

Under the Student Academic Code (3C2) and the Student Grievance Code (3C3), yes — an attorney is expressly permitted to accompany you for advice or assistance, but “shall not participate directly in a hearing,” and consultation during the hearing is at the Chair’s consent. Both sides must disclose five days ahead whether they are bringing one. Under the general Student Conduct Code (3C1), the word attorney does not appear at all: you may bring one advisor, but that advisor may not question witnesses or answer for you.

I am a pharmacy student facing dismissal. What is the clock?

Ten working days from notification to file a written appeal with the Dean of the School of Pharmacy. From there the school is on its own clocks: ten working days for the Dean to refer it, up to thirty working days for the Academic Standards and Progression Committee to hear it, ten for its report, ten for the Dean’s decision — and then five working days for you to take it to the Provost. Every one of those is a working day, not a calendar day.

I am at the dental or nursing school and cannot find the handbook. What now?

That is not you missing it. SIUE does not publish a current student handbook or progression policy for the School of Dental Medicine, and the most recent publicly posted School of Nursing handbooks are roughly a decade old and should not be relied on as current. Request the governing handbook in writing, by email, and keep the request. In the meantime the published rules that do govern are the university codes 3C1, 3C2 and 3C3, and the schools’ published technical standards.

Does the term break really pause the clock?

Under codes 3C2 and 3C3 it does. Those codes define “days” as regular work days in the normal work week, Monday through Friday, “exclusive of University holidays, days of administrative closure, and term breaks.” A five-day appeal window that appears to expire during spring break does not. Confirm the count in writing rather than assuming either way.

My son was suspended for grades a second time. When is the SIUE reinstatement form due?

By a fixed date, not a number of days: SIUE’s registrar sets the Academic Suspension Reinstatement Appeal deadline at October 1 for a spring return, March 1 for summer and July 1 for fall, and the completed form must reach the Suspension Appeals Committee by then. A first suspension does not go to that committee at all, because he can return after one term, meeting an advisor before he comes back and three times during the return semester. If he has been away three terms or more, he has to reapply to the university instead.

My professor failed me for the whole course for cheating. Which SIUE code do I use to fight it?

The Student Grievance Code (3C3), not the Student Academic Code. Under 3C2 an instructor may impose a failing assignment grade, a failing course grade or removal from a field experience without filing any charge, and the code sends a student who contests that sanction to 3C3, which allows sixty working days from the event or its discovery. You must first try to resolve it with the instructor, the chair and the dean’s office, the grievance clock keeps running while you do, and in the meantime you may not drop the course, switch it to audit or move to another section that term.