Ed Bordas was accused last week of striking a woman in the face downtown. He now faces three criminal misdemeanor charges, and has since been cut from the wrestling team and suspended from school pending a campus judicial hearing.

Now, Binghamton University officials — namely Dean of Students Lloyd M. Howe and the University judicial board — must consider whether to hand down academic punishment, including suspension or expulsion from BU.

Their decision hinges on whether they think Bordas presents “a clear and present danger” to the campus community or others. The question is: does he pose a risk to other students? And does his behavior equate a breach of University policy when it happened off campus? These are the only things they should be considering when deciding if Bordas should be charged judicially.

The extremity of Bordas’s actions is without question: Bordas, as the front page story in this paper points out, punched a woman in the face without warning. There’s a chance he may have been going for the victim’s friend, but the argument that precipitated the striking had faded down and in the end the result was the same. When detained by police, Bordas was combative, belligerent and destructive.

But the fact remains: it was a heat-of-the-moment incident that took place off campus, to someone who wasn’t a BU student.

While he certainly presented such a danger to the woman he is accused of hitting, whether he would be dangerous to others on campus is harder to tell. He was by police accounts highly intoxicated, and how many of us would present a “clear and present danger” if the standard was predicated solely on our behavior when drunk?

Administrators must avoid the expediency of suspending or expelling Bordas just because it seems fitting. His personal indiscretions, although now public record, may not have any bearing on his academic performance or interactions with other students. Even the woman Bordas punched said that he should be allowed to go back to school, chalking up his behavior to drunkenness. Maybe it’s because she’s a student herself; in any case, it begs a good look at what warrants University intervention and what doesn’t.

It’s important to keep in mind: suspension is not a punishment, expulsion even less so. They’re supposed to be solutions to a problem. The question of whether Bordas’s behavior off campus constitutes a problem for those on campus must be kept at the forefront, and all other issues pushed aside.

The precedent administrators will set with this decision will go beyond the immediate image of the University and affect the lives of students — both on campus and off — for years to come.