Drew Armstrong: A process that is far too secretive

When I was in the seventh grade, I got suspended for three days. On a bus ride home from a track meet, two of my teammates and I conceived a particularly juvenile act of vandalism involving urine and a gym locker. While waiting for our parents to come pick us up from school, we carried it out, leaving one of our fellow seventh grader's shorts, T-shirts and baseball equipment useless for anything but trash. I got caught, and I was put in front of a disciplinary committee of teachers and administrators. They interrogated me for several hours to try to get me to rat out the other students. They told me they'd go easier on me if I told on them, that maybe they wouldn't expel me. They told me that the other two students were more popular than me (true), and that I was just a follower and that they didn't care about me. They told me that they would catch the two other students eventually, and that I was just going to help them make this all disappear sooner -- didn't I want to be helpful? (I had always been a very helpful child.) They told me that the other two students would sell me out as soon as they were caught (they never were). I didn't rat, but I did get suspended for three days by the headmaster, who hadn't even heard my case. My mother called him an asshole to his face, and I left Greenhills for a public high school after the eighth grade. When, during the last few days of school, we all signed yearbooks, everybody wrote about the embarrassing incident -- as if I needed help remembering. It made me realize that the "caring community" was anything but. In a school that disallowed locks on lockers, instead trusting the "honor code," using Gestapo tactics to interrogate a 12-year-old didn't seem right. On Friday, a municipal court ruled on the fate of the Quad Five, whose prank has gotten far more attention than my middle school escapades did. Three of the five motor oil-wielding hooligans had all charges dropped; two will get misdemeanors. But who knows what Penn -- which has greater leeway in governing student conduct -- will do? Excuse me if my childhood leaves me with little trust in private school authority figures. Office of Student Conduct Director Michele Goldfarb has been extremely informative: We know that the cases against the Quad Five may or may not have already been resolved, but, if they haven't been resolved (and Goldfarb won't tell us when they are), they will be resolved in a "reasonable amount of time." And we'll never know what punishment was given out. The criminal courts have spoken and decided what they thought was just. College freshman David Hochfelder and College sophomore Thomas Bispham Jr. will likely do some probation and get their records expunged. So be it. But that the OSC operates in total silence scares me -- regardless of what I think the Quad Five deserve. What happens if, after Hochfelder and Bispham are found guilty by the courts, the OSC lets them off scot-free? No one on this campus would ever know about it. Ditto with any other type of violent crime, it seems (though federal law permits Penn to disclose disciplinary actions when the crime is a violent one). The Code of Student Conduct says that students have "the right to fair University judicial process in the determination of accountability for conduct," but Penn's students have no oversight of the system that disciplines those who break it. We aren't allowed to know, beyond a few vague, theoretical statements and a Web page, how we will be dealt with if we're one of the accused. It's important to know for three reasons -- one, because it lets students know that the University cares about their safety when it suspends or expels those convicted of violent crimes against other students; two, because it can let students know if a student has been wrongly accused and punished. But most importantly, it keeps those at the OSC honest. It'd be nice to think that those who mete out punishment are always fair, have every bit of evidence and carry no biases. But I suspect that this isn't the case -- they're only human. Perhaps ironically, the front of the OSC's Web page cites Penn's motto: "Laws without morals are useless." The OSC assures us that it has plenty of law and that it's handling things for us, but I'd be a bit more comfortable knowing what its morals are when nobody's looking. The idea of secret criminal courts is abhorrent to us in our government; why shouldn't it be so in our school? Drew Armstrong is a senior English major from Ann Arbor, Mich.

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