Penn employs no set guidelines in response to student violations

When an alcohol-related disciplinary issue is reported at Penn, University judicial officials have a wide array of possible responses at their disposal.

From fines to mandatory counseling, from a rendezvous with a college house dean to an appointment with the director of the Office of Student Conduct, disciplinary measures at Penn remain extremely varied.

"We have never adopted a cookie-cutter kind of sentencing guidelines," OSC Director Michele Goldfarb said of her office's take on discipline. "We don't believe that there's one fail-safe approach" for dealing with alcohol violations.

Goldfarb's mentality may be comforting to some students who are opposed to the more clear-cut "three strikes, you're out" methodology that some schools use. Chances are, even if convicted of an alcohol violation, most students will not end up in Goldfarb's office.

"The alcohol policy is enforced ... through a number of mechanisms," Goldfarb said, citing the College House System, the Liquor Control Board, the Penn Police and the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs as other avenues of on-campus reprimand.

In fact, Goldfarb said she typically only examines two or three dozen purely alcohol-related violations per year. The OSC's most recent report, from the 2001-02 school year, cites 21 such cases.

"They only come to us in general when they're the most serious," she said of the incidents that she examines. She said she thinks this decentralized approach to discipline is productive.

"I think it's appropriate, actually, that the folks who are closest to the [specific] situation are the ones who deal with it," she said.

College house deans are automatically sent any incident reports relating to their residents, even if the incident occurred in another college house. College house deans are generally given autonomy when it comes to dealing with alcohol violations. There are no set University standards.

Hamilton College House Dean Tabitha Dell'Angelo said she typically calls students who have reportedly violated the alcohol policy into her office to talk.

"I like to find out what their take on it was," she said.

Though Dell'Angelo said "more often than not, I'll refer them to First Step" -- a personalized alcohol education program run through the Office of Health Education -- she said she shies away from using fines as punishment.

"I don't fine students, because I personally don't think that's a deterrent," she said. "I don't want a student to ever feel like [we're] using this as a way to make money."

Other college houses do impose fines and have a more structured method of evaluating disciplinary infractions; for example, Hill College House has its own judicial board. Goldfarb also uses fines, as well as disciplinary reprimands -- which are not recorded on the student's permanent record -- and possibly probation, suspension or expulsion for the most serious cases.

But differences in punishment do not just exist internally at Penn -- ideologies vary widely among academic institutions.

"We tend to take an educational perspective, as opposed to an enforcement or punishment perspective," Stanford University Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention Program Manager Ralph Castro said of alcohol-related judicial issues at his school.

Duke University Interim Associate Dean for Judicial Affairs Stephen Bryan said that when his university re-evaluated its alcohol policy several years ago, the administration decided to move from an initiative with "very specific sanctions" to a more open-ended approach.

"There was a notion in the community that [the previous policy] was too prescriptive and didn't allow for catering to individual circumstances that arose," Bryan said.

But officials at schools that employ a more well-defined policy say that there are benefits to a structured system.

"It's helpful for students to know what's going to happen to them, so they don't have to stress about what the next steps are," said April Thompson, assistant director of the Undergraduate Judicial Affairs Office at Dartmouth College.

Her colleague, Senior Associate Dean of the College Dan Nelson, also emphasized that students can be confident that they are being treated equally under Dartmouth's policy.

"It helps the individual deans respond in a way that's consistent and fair," he said. He also noted that the pre-designed disciplinary measures are not carved in stone and can still be adapted to suit a specific situation.

Goldfarb maintained that "consistency is not necessarily fairer."

"In our opinion, to really look into what occurred and to have appropriate sanctions, as opposed to wholly predictable ones, is a better way to go."

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