The Moment After the Phone Is Found: Integrity, Care and Due Process in Our Campuses

Three Duties Pulling in Different Directions and None Can Be Dropped Return to the

exam hall. You are the invigilator and you have seen the phone. The easy answer would be that the rules are the rules: cheating, especially with AI tools, threatens the fairness every other student in that room depends on.

If you look away, you betray them. But the student in front of you is a young adult on a campus where, his family now alleges, he had faced caste-based slurs for months. The allegation is unproven and under investigation.

You may know none of it. The next twenty minutes, what you say, how you say it and who else is present, may matter far more than any policy document foresaw. There is no version of this in which a duty goes unmet. The only choice is how you meet them.

The three obligations **1.

Academic integrity. The invigilator's duty is real and owed to every honest student. Institutions that stop enforcing it in order to avoid distress do not become kinder. They become unfair and that harms students from marginalised backgrounds most, because they rely most on merit being counted honestly. 2.

Duty of care. The institution owes students, especially vulnerable ones, protection from avoidable harm. That includes the harm a disciplinary encounter can cause. This duty applies whether or not misconduct happened. Enforcing a rule on a student does not end your responsibility for that student. 3.

Due process.** The professor now faces an FIR. The family's grief and their allegations deserve serious, independent investigation. The professor's right not to be punished before that investigation is equally real. The student representatives themselves drew this distinction: temporary relief from administrative duties, "not to presume his guilt."

Applying a

framework A strict deontological reading (duty for duty's sake) supports enforcing the rule. A consequentialist reading asks what the enforcement actually led to. The ethics of care points out what both miss: the obligation is to a particular, vulnerable person, not to an abstract rule-breaker. Constitutional morality adds the institution's positive duty against caste discrimination, which applies in campus life, not only in admissions.

The resolution **The misconduct should be recorded, never ignored.

It should be handled through a designed process, not by one individual in the moment.** That means discreet confiscation, no public confrontation, a written record and an immediate handover to counselling support before the student leaves the hall.

Any penalty should be decided later by a committee that has access to the student's welfare history. On the current crisis, IIT Bombay's step of removing the professor from his administrative post while keeping him on faculty, pending independent inquiry, is defensible.

It shows that the allegations are taken seriously without deciding the outcome in advance. The cost is real. The family and protesters may feel justice is delayed. The professor carries public suspicion that he may not deserve.

Honest students may feel the rules are being softened. But an institution that treats either the rule or the student as expendable has failed at both.