Opinion ID: 2003365
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Late Date for Meeting

Text: The opinion found no prejudice resulted from the fact that the Institutional Committee met on December 13th, rather than December 10th, in clear violation of the BOR/COHE agreement which requires that recommendations of the institutional committee will be submitted to the President by no later than December 10 of each academic year. (emphasis added) (§ 11.10, ¶ 8) Section 1.19 states: `Will' is a verb having the mandatory sense of `shall' or `must'. It is a word of certainty.... There can be no question that a clear violation of the contract terms occurred. Prejudice to the applicant resulted from this violation because: 1) The violation in section 1 created a problem, and this error compounded the problem; 2) Contracts which contain specific time limitations can be assumed to have such limitations for a purpose. A reading of the designated time sections in this contract make it obvious that the purpose here was to avoid time conflicts with the end of the semester. The end of the semester creates time and attendance problems for faculty and students. These time lines were meant to prevent exactly what happened here: a student committee member was unable to attend a meeting because the late date pushed the meeting time into conflict with end of the term concerns, i.e., final exams.