New staff members to help restructure Office of Student Conduct

By Sophia Witte 01/26/15 11:46pm

As part of an effort to restructure the office, the Office of Student Conduct has renamed and transformed its staff positions with both new and old members.

Based on a search committee that invited previous staff members to apply, OSC has filled three of the four positions, with the final one set to be filled over the next week. These new positions reflect OSC’s extensive effort to be more efficient with its case handling and to revitalize its role on campus.

“I interviewed candidates for all new positions that each require different qualifications, skills and expertise, but previous staff members were fully informed of the process and the timetable for the searches,” OSC Director Julie Nettleton said. “Some of the positions have new faces, and some have faces carried over from the old structure.”

Nettleton declined to have the new staff members interviewed to give them time to first adjust to their new positions. She also did not give the names of the staff members who no longer work in OSC.

While the new deputy director position — the final position to be hired — will manage the internal flow of the office and the management of disciplinary cases, the two senior case manager positions will focus on outward engagement throughout campus.

“The senior case managers will be assigned liaison roles to undergraduate and graduate schools and centers to create comfort zones in the community,” Nettleton said. “We will benefit from being proactive and having more education and training with key stakeholders on campus.”

As Penn is in the process of creating a separate agency to handle sexual assault cases, OSC, which used to manage these cases, now has more time and resources to emphasize other initiatives such as the liaison roles.

“With our staff out in the community, we want to identify trends that might be unique to certain schools,” she said. “For example, academic integrity cases for the Design school versus the Engineering school might look very different so we want to know how to best educate key stakeholders.”

Since previous OSC Director Michele Goldfarb decided to step down last year, OSC has been working to reposition itself on campus. Growing discussion about academic integrity cases and sexual assault on campus played a key role in the push to restructure.

“Since it was hard to disrupt all the structure that was in place before in the office, Penn saw the transition to a new director as an opportunity to better address these campus issues,” said Lucas Siegmund, Chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, which helped with the search process to find a new director after Goldfarb’s departure in June.

Nettleton said that OSC will start training the staff and dividing the liaison roles up to different points on campus after the final position is filled next week.

“It’s a really good mix of people who already know Penn and people who are new and add some variety,” Nettleton said. “I think we’ve done a great job at retaining the sort of institutional memory and knowledge while also gaining some new members and new experience to bring to the table.”

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