DPS, CRB present policy revisions for campus arrests

By Stephanie Wright asst. news editor

The Syracuse University Community Review Board heard two policy revision proposals from the SU Department of Public Safety during its Wednesday night meeting. Both proposals could change DPS officers’ procedures for arrests and exculpatory evidence.

The first proposal would prohibit DPS officers from arresting SU students, staff and faculty in any classroom or other setting for academic instruction, except for in certain outlined circumstances. The proposal comes nearly a year after DPS officers arrested a SU student inside the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

The exceptions for the rule included instances where there is probable cause to believe the suspect committed a violent felony offense, is believed to be armed with a weapon, has made threats of violence to themself or others and when DPS officers are in “hot pursuit” of a suspect.

The CRB added recommendations to the classroom arrest policy that prioritized “minimal impacts” to the learning environment, according to the recommendation. The recommendations outlined that in cases with - from page 1 chatgpt

Howard said. “Collectively we’re acting pretty much the same now as we collectively did with the introduction of the internet, and of Wikipedia…. And we’re doing the same thing now. We will work it out and calm down. But right now everybody’s writing about how to catch people using ChatGPT.”

She explained the AI isn’t able to generate a piece of scholarship on its own in the first place. It uses patchwriting, which Howard said takes the language of an original piece, substitutes some synonyms and moves words around to generate a new text. She said the bot will say something that seems sensible, but the writing won’t be very good.

Chris Forster, a professor in the English department with a focus in digital humanities, used GPT 3.5 for assignments in his fall “Literature and its Media” course. He said that what people can learn about the data set that an AI is trained on is more valuable than the wall of text an AI can produce.

“Rather than it being a way to get to write your papers for you, or to provide an intellectual interlocutor, I think these things like the image generators or chat GPT give people a …way of interacting with these sorts of large data models that are also going to be shaping things that are a lot less obvious, right?” he said. “Companies are going to be using these for things … like determining credit ratings, trying to figure out investment risk.”

In learning about the data that bots pull from, Forster identified the value of disciplines in the humanities. He pointed to the process of interpreting the language produced by GPT 3.5, which he said looks like a close reading in an English Lit class.

“It’s trying to think really carefully about, ‘what is the structure of this article? How does it progress narratively? What are the sort of from page 1 inclusive

Michele Krak, an OnCampus coordinator, said the program is a fitting environment for growth as students transition into adulthood. She said OnCampus students socialize with SU students frequently and participate in activities on and off campus.

“Students are introduced to a college setting with age-appropriate peers to explore academics in a setting that allows for exploration of interests with mentored support,” Krak said. “Students 18-21 years of age have the opportunity to be actively engaged with rigorous content in a college setting and still have support from a mentor.”

InclusiveU offers a “Peer2Peer” program, which pairs non-matriculated InclusiveU students, including students from the OnCampus program, with current SU students who serve as “peer partners.” Peer partners accompany InclusiveU students to engage in activities on campus from playing games to working out at the gym to just getting lunch. InclusiveU works to emphasize the social aspects of college just like it does the academic aspects, Shults said.

“College is an opportunity to participate in not only academics but also essential social experiences and connections with other stu- out imminent threat and danger, classroom arrests should be a last resort option, and that a DPS supervisor should be present at them.

Additionally, the CRB recommended that a DPS supervisor communicate with the academic instructor or Student Services prior to an arrest. Additionally, in cases of staff or faculty arrest, DPS should contact the applicable supervisor or dean.

For all DPS responses to threats of selfharm, the CRB recommended that DPS coordinate with Counseling Services, which would bar cases of imminent threat. The CRB’s recommendations were not applicable to “crimes in progress or imminent danger to the health and safety of the college community,” according to the proposal.

During last year’s arrest of a student at the Whitman School, DPS officers immediately responded to multiple threats of physical assaults and determined it was necessary to physically remove the suspect from their classroom, according to an SU news release following the arrest. The suspect expressed difficulty breathing while restrained during the arrest. One of the officers, who restrained the suspect, said at the time that he found a knife on the suspect.

The second proposal from DPS to the CRB implications and connotations of some words?” Forster said. “Do I understand what sort of texts have shaped it?”

In her “Rhetorics and Robots” course at SU, Krista Kennedy — a professor in the writing and rhetoric department who studies rhetorics of technology and algorithmic rhetorics — said she’s interested in how much agency and control a human has when writing with a bot like ChatGPT. She said the next time she teaches a class like professional writing, she wants to assign students a format like a cover letter, and have them write one with ChatGPT and one on their own to compare.

In his literature course, Forster asked his students to do something similar when the class read “Dracula”— after crafting a prompt to feed to the AI, students turned in an entirely botwritten paper alongside a reflection. He said one of the most interesting conclusions from the assignment was how much power the way the prompt was crafted can have on the end result.

He said that in the class and in his own experimentation, giving ChatGPT a sophisticated prompt produced a more sophisticated response. He said students who just instructed it to “write an essay on Dracula” ended up with text that sounded like a high school essay on the book, adding that plagiarism hasn’t been a significant concern for him because the bot can’t complete insight of its own.

“In a field like English literature or film studies, to some strong degree our bread and butter is close analysis. If you spent any time playing with ChatGPT as it currently exists, it’s just not very good at that,” Forster said. “It’s very good at sounding smart. It’s just not very good at being smart.”

Howard said she’s actively using ChatGPT to help her write a book about teaching with the service. She said that rather than worrying about whether writing with AI is cheating or plagiarism, people in academia should be figuring out dents,” Shults said. “We are not offering a special program for students, and they are fully integrated into everything here at the university. Students select their courses and the ways they want to engage with the college campus to make this an experience that is meaningful for them.” ensures that any DPS officer or official involved in a criminal case will identify and provide potential exculpatory evidence to the prosecution as early as possible at the beginning of a trial. CRB gave no additional recommendations on the proposal. how to go about crediting a bot as a collaborator.

OnCampus offers students a number of opportunities to obtain life skills and enter adulthood while being involved on campus. Shults said past students from the program have earned university recognition as Remembrance Scholars, executive board members in on-campus organizations and most recently as Unsung Heroes.

Falanga said he’s determined to make the most of his time here at SU and to experience college to the fullest.

“I want to study hard, believe in myself and make it through my own journey,” Falanga said.

Ultimately, Shults said, the program creates accessibility that might not otherwise be there for students who participate in OnCampus. As they transition into adulthood, she said they have a unique opportunity to really experience the school and community aspects of college life.

“Our goal is to give students with intellectual disabilities the same opportunity other young adults have — to experience a college campus, learn and grow — so they can be prepared for a more independent adult life,” Shults said.

She also emphasized the importance of deciding how to ethically acknowledge having collaborated with a bot. Finding ways that are not just based on 19th century ideas of plagiarism – but on what applies to the present day – is a more pressing concern than whether students are using patchwriting to produce simple text, Howard said.

“If students are using ChatGPT to answer assignments, and the instructor can’t tell that it’s not a student in their class who wrote it, there’s the problem,” Howard said. “The problem is in the assignment if we’re asking students to do stuff so basic that ChatGPT can do it instead. There’s where the real fear is, (where) everybody realizes they’ve got to change what they’re doing. You don’t want to have to completely teach differently, but that’s what we’re gonna have to do.”

Margaret Usdansky, the founding director for SU’s Center for Learning and Student Success, said SU doesn’t have plans for any significant adjustments of its academic integrity policy or evaluating student work made using ChatGPT.

Usdansky said because the university’s academic integrity policy can be made to apply to AI-written work, the current plan is suited to new technologies like ChatGPT.

“For now, the policy is broad enough and talks clearly enough about instructors’ ability to set course-specific expectations, and about the assumption that the work you turn in is your own, unless it’s clear from the assignment that it can draw on other sources,” Usdansky said. “And that isn’t going to change overnight because ChatGPT exists, right?”

In its resource document on ChatGPT, SU did provide recommendations for professors concerned about cheating and plagiarism in their courses, including AI detection softwares like GPT2 Output Detector and GPTZero.

Among other recommendations, the document also includes alternatives to assignments

Brianna Sclafani, a student at SU’s College of Law and member of the CRB, encouraged students, faculty and staff to submit feedback by emailing the CRB at CRB@syr.edu. spwright@syr.edu @StephanieWri that students could use ChatGPT to complete, like concept maps or other visualizations which replace traditional writing-focused assignments, including podcasts, videos, speeches, interviews, drawings, storyboards and performances.

Bei Yu, iSchool professor and director of SU’s Information Science and Technology Ph.D. program, said that as far as academic integrity goes, ChatGPT is one of many incoming technologies that will dramatically change the way people live their lives. She said that when thinking about the role AI should play in education, it’s important to consider the understanding of the technology as a skillset that students will need as they enter the workforce.

“At many different levels for a university, educational institution or for higher education as a profession in general, we need to be forwardthinking, we need to be proactive instead of reactive,” Yu said.

For Forster, the ultimate goal of incorporating ChatGPT into courses and exploring how the technology works is to expose students to it at the earliest possible moment, so they can be prepared to navigate it in their lives and careers. But when it comes to producing work that matters, he said he doesn’t see any utility.

He gave the example of modernist art, referring to the premise that because pieces in the genre sometimes look meaningless, the art has to convince the viewer to take it seriously. Student work should do the same.

“What I’m looking for when I read an essay is not just does it sound like a human, but is it a human?” Forster said. “With ChatGPT … people seem to ignore that as a reader of something, I care about what produced it and inspired it. Was there a person who actually had this thought and actually meant and intended it with conviction?” jlseal@syr.edu @JanaLoSeal