Title: Why This New Director Wants To Demystify the Office of Student Conduct

Kernysha Rowe remembers her first years in the U.S. well. 

After immigrating from Birmingham, England, she entered fifth grade in Jacksonville, Florida, with a thick accent and a different educational background. Navigating the U.S. classroom was challenging: the classroom culture, spelling, cultural references — even the concept of homework was different.  

“You had to learn on the go,” she said. “Those roadmaps weren’t there for me. So being able to do that and replicate that for others has always been inspiring.”

Though difficult, her experiences fueled her pursuit of higher education and passion to provide college students with the know-how to succeed. Since graduating from Florida International University, Rowe has earned three graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. from Morgan State University. 

She’s worked at seven universities in student affairs — including as a graduate assistant at Georgetown in 2010. She ultimately chose to specialize in student conduct — a role she’s worked to make more transparent, accessible and collaborative for students and community members.  

In August, Rowe joined Georgetown as the new director of the Office of Student Conduct, an office that upholds Georgetown’s community standards and oversees non-academic misconduct. Rowe hopes to demystify the office and make it a space for discourse and dialogue.

“We want to be in collaboration with students,” she said. “We are here in community together, and we have to be able to have difficult conversations, and we have to be able to care for one another the way that our mission says.” 

Rowe most recently served as the assistant dean of students, student conduct and inclusion support at American University. While there, she created the blueprint for the university’s restorative justice process within the division for student affairs, a process in which, when appropriate, students are invited to engage in dialogue with one another to address conflict, with a focus on accountability and building healthy relationships.

She created a training curriculum for the process and oversaw over a hundred restorative justice conduct cases. Over time, she said, the process helped shift perceptions of the conduct office from a place where “you get in trouble” to one that “helped me talk through the issue.”

At Georgetown, Rowe and her team will implement and administer Georgetown’s revised Code of Student Conduct, which all main campus students are required to uphold. The code, which is updated every year, incorporates restorative justice principles through a new Educational Conference process. The process invites students to meet with a member of Rowe’s office and potentially with other students involved, discuss the incident, learn about the process and review possible options to resolve the matter. 

Rowe also wants to make her office a resource and support for all community members. She knows how education can change someone’s life firsthand.

“Education opens doors. It opened the door for me to come to America with my mother being a teacher. Higher education opened all of the doors that I have right now. And that’s why I choose to stay in higher education, because I know the ripple impact of being in an institution where you can help others,” she said.

Learn more about Rowe and what drew her into the field of conduct in this Q&A.

What made you want to pursue higher education as a career?

Rowe: I had always worked full-time in undergrad. I was in the marching band. I was involved in a couple of clubs. But I was naive in thinking, I have a degree. I should be able to apply for a job. What I didn’t understand until maybe [age] 25 is that when I was in school, I should have had a mentor. I should have had internship experiences. I should have done more extracurriculars that allowed me an entryway into those fields. I wouldn’t have known that because no one in my family has gone to college in America.

That informs [why] I wanted to work in higher education, because there are students like myself, immigrants, who don’t have the social capital, who just don’t know. I wanted to focus on shaping what the campus life experience looks like for students. I wanted to be able to be the knowledge, the resource, the encouragement, the visibility, the representation so that they know it’s not just going to school. It’s more than getting As.

How did you get interested in student conduct specifically?

Rowe: Every job I’ve had since my first professional role, I’ve had conduct as 10%, 15% of my role. Georgia State was the first time I did not have a direct role in conduct. But that’s when I really started to get serious about this work. You only know about the process if you’re involved in the process. Or you see people on campus and then you don’t see people on campus, but you hear about the rumor. Hearing about these whispers, you’re curious about fairness. Are they being treated fairly? If I as a staff member can’t locate policies or procedures, how can a student then locate procedures? It’s way more challenging for a 19-year-old to navigate that.

So thinking about the identities that I share and how marginalized identities are at predominantly white institutions, I thought about how that can look. Are there disparate things that are happening to folks that don’t understand their story, their journey? Are you only expelling because they did this thing but didn’t consider their other experiences before they engaged in this particular incident? There’s a whole story behind that person.

I wanted to be that person in that department making those decisions. That’s where I wanted to have an impact on students’ lives. Students see you on their worst day, not on ‘I just won president for student government!’ They see you when they are not at their best. But how can you still help them when they’re not at their best?

What do you want to change about the way the Office of Student Conduct is often perceived? What do you want students to know?

Rowe: We’re compared to what you see in court, the criminal court system. But we are not judges. I’m an administrator. I care about the community. I care about the student. I want them to make the best decision with the information that they have and to consider how their actions impact themselves in the community. Because essentially that’s how our policy gets written. That’s how we strengthen this Student Conduct Code. We’ve created a policy to ensure that troubling behavior doesn’t put others in danger, doesn’t jeopardize our ability to have healthy relationships with our neighborhood, doesn’t jeopardize our reputation as an institution.

We know that college is for learning, and that learning also comes with behavior as well. You’re going to push some boundaries. But what I want students to know is that as you experiment safely and with your community, if behavior happens that wasn’t the best reflection of who you are, that behavior does not characterize who you are. It was a moment in time. We’re not going to ignore it. We’re going to talk about it because it’s still a part of your experience and it still impacts the community.

So when you infuse these different types of principles and storytelling, reflection sharing and engaging in a collaborative process to build an agreement to move forward about how you’re going to repair harm or move differently, that’s the change in building a healthy community. It takes work and everyone has to do their piece.

What’s different about Georgetown’s code this year?

Rowe: What is new this year is we have an Educational Conference process, which is akin to a restorative process. I didn’t create this — this is the work that’s already been happening at Georgetown — but my office is responsible for implementing and administering the Code. There’s still a process to resolve these matters through an Administrative Conference that exists as it always has.

We can engage differently through an Educational Conference. We can have a different type of conversation with a different type of agreement that may lead to different types of sanctions.

I think that students will have a different way of engaging with community directors and with folks in my office about prohibitive conduct. That’s not to say folks will get a ‘get-out-of-jail card,’ but for me, it comes down to accountability, understanding mitigating and aggravating factors and how we can just really strengthen this healthy relationship and build upon these values that we already have here.