Student Protector, Internet Provider, or Contractual Party? An Examination of the Legal Relationship Between a University and its Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The legal relationship between a university and its students is becoming increasingly complex as the use of technology spreads. Accordingly, it is important to define a university’s responsibilities and legal boundaries in order to understand the liability universities can potentially incur when dealing with students. Each Canadian university is unique in its founding and enacting legislation, as will be discussed further later. The individuality of Canada’s universities means that the questions raised in this paper cannot be given answers that can necessarily be generalized across universities. The approach to analysis in this paper, however, is applicable to any of the Canadian universities. Therefore, this paper will demonstrate the analysis appropriate to any university’s legal relationship between itself and its students with respect to the use of the Internet by students in residence, occasionally using the specific example of the legislative and regulating environment surrounding the University of Western Ontario.\nMore specifically, this paper will ask: does the private viewing of online pornography by a student in his or her residence room constitute an act of sexual harassment, and if it does, is a university legally obliged to protect the other residential students from this harassment? Or, on the other hand, is the university legally obliged to protect the rights to freedom of expression and to privacy of the student viewing the online pornography?\nIn order to respond to these questions, three separate issues will be examined:\n(1) What is the relationship between a university and Student A — the viewer of the pornography? Can a university regulate a student’s online conduct, and if so, which, if any, of the student’s rights are affected?\n(2) If a university can regulate a student’s online conduct, but does not do so, can it incur liability? Does a university as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) have a responsibility to control e-mail use, access to Web sites, and the contents of files publicly available through file sharing programs?\n(3) Thirdly, what different legal obligations exist — under contract law, tort law, the Canadian Criminal Code, or other statutes — on a university with respect to its relationship with Student B — the student claiming sexual harassment? Should a university, on any of these grounds, take responsibility for Internet content regulation in residences?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".