After the Nov. 13, 2022 on-Grounds shooting left three students dead and two others injured, an investigation and ensuing external review into University threat assessment procedures was commissioned by the University to understand how the shooting could have happened and how to prevent another like it from happening in the future.
The first report, conducted by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, was tasked with reviewing University threat assessment leading up to the shooting. It examined the University’s Threat Assessment Team, designed to respond to imminent threats to safety, and identified potential shortcomings. In addition, the report identified flaws with the student self-governance system, saying it might hinder the University’s ability to respond to threats and effectively discipline students.
Student self-governance has long been a major tenet of student life at the University. Between the Honor Committee, Student Council and the University Judiciary Committee, students have the unique opportunity to oversee their own discipline and some rule-making decisions.
While Honor was critiqued occasionally throughout the report, the UJC was the primary focus of the report’s recommendations because it deals with more serious violations of conduct. Specifically, the student-run UJC handles all violations of the University’s Standards of Conduct — regardless of severity.
The primary critique of student self-governance in the report is that Honor and UJC are slow-moving bodies with long case processing times — and that the UJC is not taken seriously by students. The report concludes by recommending that the University administration consider whether it should take additional care to ensure disciplinary matters are handled appropriately.
“The University should consider whether its governance model should be modified to allow for more direct University intervention in threat assessment or other high-risk cases,” the report states.
Legitimacy with students is key for a body that has full disciplinary authority over students. The report also suggested that the Honor Committee’s historic change from a single-sanction system to a multi-sanction system in 2023 could lead the system to be taken less seriously.
“The Honor system has recently undergone changes to eliminate the single sanction (i.e., expulsion) for violations, opting for a more flexible sanctions regime that likewise may reduce the severity with which students view potential violations,” the report states.
The UJC is critiqued several times throughout the 91-page report and is mentioned a total of 10 times on pages 12, 13, 53, 74, 78 and 79. In addition, the phrase “student governance” is mentioned in a critical fashion four separate times.
Additionally, the report states that TAT and other University officials were unwilling to ensure compliance with investigations for especially serious cases because they did not want to encroach on student self-governance.
The report only reviewed University procedures leading up to the shooting and did not make claims about the causality or culpability of the University and self-governance organizations. And while the University commissioned the report, it did not endorse its findings.
Two former UJC chairs spoke to The Cavalier Daily about their experience leading the disciplinary process at the University and broadly disagreed with the Quinn Emanuel report’s statements about the Committee.
The Cavalier Daily made multiple attempts to reach administrators in the Division of Student Affairs who oversee and work closely with the UJC, but the administrators directed all commentary through the University Communications office. Despite the report’s critiques of student self-governance, the University maintains that it has no plans to strip power away from students, according to University Spokesperson Bethanie Glover.
“The University is firmly committed to student self-governance, which has long been a defining feature of the U.Va. experience,” Glover said in a statement to The Cavalier Daily. “The Honor Committee and UJC [manage] student accountability with seriousness and integrity. U.Va. continues to support their work while also evolving the ways we engage with and support students.”
A central claim of the report is that the two disciplinary committees move too slowly to process cases. Page 74 of the report states that case processing for the UJC can take up to a year — a statement which contradicts the UJC’s biannual Statistics Reports.
In the Fall 2024 semester, the Committee’s mean case processing time was around 51 days excluding University breaks — that time was a significant increase from Spring 2024, which had a mean case processing time of about 27 days excluding breaks. The Committee saw a similar case processing time in the Fall 2022 semester as well as the semesters immediately preceding it, when the report examined the UJC’s process.
Harper Jones, former UJC chair and fourth-year College student, said that the claims of the reports regarding the lack of timeliness of UJC cases are false.
“We have to maintain a delicate balance between protecting the rights of students and ensuring that we are upholding due process, and so we can't necessarily resolve a case in a matter of days, but when we do have a case come through our system, we work as quickly as and efficiently as possible to adjudicate that case,” Jones said.
Jones also added that when the UJC receives a case that demonstrates the need for urgency, the Committee can resolve a case more quickly. She said that in 2022, the Committee received two other gun-related cases, with each processed more quickly than a standard case.
“That same term, the Committee heard two other cases involving violations of university weapons policy … in those two instances, the Committee worked incredibly quickly to turn those cases around,” Jones said.
In fact, the Committee almost heard the concealed weapons violation that prefaced the shooting. In October 2022, just weeks before the shooting, defendant Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. was informed that he would be referred to the UJC for non-compliance with the Threat Assessment Team investigation into his concealed weapons charge. These details are not included in the publicly released version of the report, likely because any details pertaining to the defendant himself were redacted to comply with federal privacy laws.
But the UJC never ultimately received that case due to a breakdown in communication, according to Jones, something she said that the report does not make totally clear.
Lisa Kopelnik, another former UJC chair and fourth-year College student, echoed Jones’ sentiment that more serious cases are processed more quickly. Kopelnik referred to the option for the University administration to issue an interim suspension for particularly serious cases, preempting a UJC investigation. An interim suspension means a student is barred from remaining at the University while their UJC trial plays out.
“There are situations that are more unsafe or where there was a more serious violation of the Standards of Conduct. The Judiciary Committee can hear those cases quicker, and it has before,” Kopelnik said. “It's also important to remember that the administration has the ability to issue an interim suspension, and they do that.”
Glover confirmed that while the UJC is delegated the authority to handle all violations of the University’s Standards of Conduct, the University can issue an interim suspension while the UJC hears a case.
But the report did not only critique the length of the disciplinary process — it also questioned the UJC’s legitimacy with students.
“These student-run bodies can be slow-moving and there is a sense that the UJC may not be taken seriously by the student body as a tool to ensure discipline and safety,” the report states.
Jones took issue with this claim, saying that Quinn Emanuel did not interview any students in the generation of this report.
“The report didn't talk to any students, including students who had gone through our process … we have multiple students who have cases before the Committee … and who, in the end, offer really productive reflections on the result of their sanctions,” Jones said.
The UJC can issue a variety of sanctions, ranging from a reflective essay to expulsion. Kopelnik said that while the Committee is never proud of issuing a sanction as serious as expulsion, as it did during her term, it shows the seriousness of the UJC to the community.
“We've issued those very serious sanctions that I think the community has taken seriously,” Kopelnik said. “All you need to do is read through other people responding to the sanctions that we've issued over the years. And I think the community takes this body seriously.”
In the Fall 2024 semester, essays, including reflective essays, were the most common sanction issued by the UJC. Each had an average length of over 3,000 words, according to the Statistics Report.
In response to its critiques, one of the report’s recommendations is that the University consider taking more authority from students in handling threat assessment.
“The University should consider whether its governance model should be modified to allow for more direct University intervention in threat assessment or other high-risk cases,” the report states.
According to Jones and Kopelnik, it is unclear whether modifying the governance model would change how much power the University has to handle threat assessment — both former chairs made clear the idea that the UJC is not intended to respond to or investigate immediate threats.
“We're not ever hearing immediately threatening cases,” Kopelnik said. “We're hearing cases in which there could have been serious violations of standards of conduct.”
Jones agreed, saying the report does not make that distinction as clear.
“The Committee is not responsible for threat assessment and for emergency response, and I think there was some conflation in the report between case processing and emergency response,” Jones said. “Threat assessment and emergency response exists within a separate sphere of the university, and the Committee is responsible for adjudicating cases after those processes have occurred on a much more accelerated timeline.”
The Quinn Emanuel report did not only focus on the Committee either — it focused primarily on the TAT and the ways it could be improved, such as hiring more full-time employees.
To address the recommendations in the report, the University created the Policy, Accountability and Critical Events unit within Student Affairs. Jones said PACE has not taken any power from students, only changed the way the University interacts with the UJC by centralizing pre-existing administrative resources into one office.
Kopelnik agreed, saying she thinks that the University’s commitment to student self-governance is even stronger, and the University has stood firm in its commitment.
“I think that the University has doubled down on a commitment to student self-governance,” Kopelnik said. “I think you can see that in the people that are leading this University, who really, in my opinion, commit to students being able to have agency over these different organizations that are critical to student life.”
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