About SUNYSCI

The SUNY Student Conduct Institute (SCI) was established in 2018 and trains staff and faculty at public and private institutions of higher education on how to fairly and equitably investigate and adjudicate conduct violations and disclosures. The SCI’s establishment was a result of collaboration among the SUNY Student Conduct Association, the SUNY Title IX Coordinators Association, and the SUNY Office of General Counsel. The institute was designed to offer training and support for student conduct professionals, ensuring compliance with relevant legal standards and best practices for handling student conduct cases in higher education.

SCI trainings are focused on topics including, but not limited to, due process, trauma-informed investigations and adjudications, and best practices for investigation and conduct processes that comply with case law, Title IX, the Jeanne Clery Act, VAWA, and other relevant federal laws.

In 2020, the SCI launched their online learning platform and began offering courses and guidance related to the 2020 Title IX Final Rule and has since expanded from a regional to national facing training program due to high demand and lauded credentials.

The SCI works diligently to curate a rotating pool of courses from semester to semester to ensure SCI content keeps up with evolving legislation and standards in the student conduct and Title IX related fields. Whether your faculty are experts in need of retraining or fresh to the field, the SCI has the training and materials for them.

The SCI provides training in two different modalities: Live@Distance (webinar) trainings and an On Demand catalog of 70+ courses available at any time on the SCI online learning platform. This platform allows campuses to track and assign training and credentials for every individual involved in an adjudication or investigation process. Additionally, the SCI offers a robust portfolio of tangible and resourceful tools for members to utilize in practice, from model policy language to decision trees.

It is the SCI’s mission to support higher education institutions across the country by providing compliant and updated training from our in-house content team, SUNY’s Office of General Counsel, and our partnered nationally recognized experts.

Disclaimer: SCI does not certify any institution as compliant, and disclaims any liability for any perceived or actual shortcomings in the text of the training or an institution’s utilization of the information presented in such training. Per the Department of Education’s (ED) 2015 and 2020 letters and posts, no training offered by anyone is officially certified by ED and any organization that makes such a claim is making a false claim. The SCI does certify individuals’ completion of the SCI program, which national experts and reviewers believe meets and exceeds training requirements. SCI does not claim to have the approval of ED as ED does not offer such an approval.

While the SCI does not certify any institution, institutions that are active members of the SCI are free to make statements of their membership on their websites (Ex: "[Institution] is a SUNY Student Conduct Institute Participating Institution. As a Participating Institution, our staff has access to regular training on how to fairly and equitably investigate and adjudicate conduct violations and disclosures.”) and may post participation in the Annual Security Report section describing annual training as required by the Clery Act.