Alec Ward|Auld acquaintance, brought to mind

Fair Enough|A columnist's year in failure and foresight

By Alec Ward 01/12/16 10:36pm

A new year is always a time of reflection. Though a gentile myself, I’ve always liked the idea embedded in Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement which follows the Jewish new year. The practice of reflecting upon failings of the prior year at the start of a new one seems to me both honest and educational, particularly as someone whose somewhat inherently deceptive role is to publicly assert each week that I have a good answer to a significant problem or question.

As such, it seems appropriate in this new year, which coincides with the one-year anniversary of my column, to self-audit, acknowledging failures and victories alike and to check in with new developments on some of the issues I’ve covered.

In re-reading a year’s worth of columns, two major oversights jumped out at me. In my column “This isn’t Jeopardy,” I critiqued students at the University of North Carolina for implying that a speech by conservative writer David Horowitz criticizing pro-Palestinian activism represented a threat to their physical safety.

In making the point that such rhetoric troublingly implies that “dangerous” speech should be suppressed, however, I failed to note that Horowitz himself is no friend of open expression. He has repeatedly called for colleges to ban or punish pro-Palestinian groups and to adopt policies, as the University of California and the U.S. Department of State have, that declare harsh criticism of the state of Israel as presumptively anti-semitic. This fact doesn’t change my point about the rhetoric of safety and comfort, but it was significant to the case study I chose to illustrate that point, and I overlooked it. Mea culpa.

Secondly, in my piece “But for Wales?” I criticized the activist group SOUL without seeking a comment from the group itself. In addition to being good journalistic practice, doing so would have been more intellectually rigorous and appropriately respectful of fellow students. Me paenitet.

In some cases, however, I managed to get things right. My columns about the University’s flawed and capricious system for adjudicating sexual assault cases and its failure to stand up to misguided and possibly illegal federal pressure to adopt policies that obstruct justice for students seem particularly prescient.

The American Association of Universities’ climate study, though not without serious methodological flaws, served to remind us that there remains much to be desired in the way universities handle campus sexual assault. On the heels of the study came the announcement that Christopher Mallios, hired last spring to investigate sexual violence allegations for the University, would be leaving after just one year on the job. A source with knowledge of the investigative process said that prior to his departure, Mallios had expressed a frustration with conflicting pressures to investigate complaints diligently and respect due process while both preserving the University’s public image and demonstrating to a crusading Department of Education that Penn takes all complaints seriously.

To me, this confirms that any university’s proper role is to take steps to prevent and educate students about sexual assault and to offer compassionate support to victims, while leaving the messy business of investigating and adjudicating allegations to law enforcement and courts. Legislative efforts to overrule the misguided Department of Education regulations, which force colleges to perform hopelessly flawed in-house investigations, have stalled.

Also, the Office of Admissions has again vindicated my assertion that it’s running a numbers racket by filling more than half of an incoming class with binding early decision applicants (disclosure: I was one), continuing to insist that it is doing its utmost to build the best class possible while filling more than half the available spots from a pool likely to represent only slightly more than one-eighth of the total applicants.

Furthermore, ED candidates are disproportionately likely to come from a small number of elite, privileged private prep schools, able to commit to binding agreements because they do not need to compare multiple financial aid packages (me again). It’s clearer than ever that they’re far more concerned with how admissions decisions affect Penn’s rankings than about building an optimal class.

I don’t doubt that, in the year to come, I’ll mess up again or make a prediction that turns out to be dead wrong. As the saying goes, I only can hope that I make new mistakes. As far as I’m concerned, turkey for Thanksgiving, lamb for Christmas and crow for New Year’s is all right by me as traditions go.

ALEC WARD is a College junior from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. Follow him on Twitter @TalkBackWard. “Fair Enough,” previously entitled “Talking Backward,” appears every Wednesday.

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