COLUMN: "Rolling the Dice: Fraternity Justice and Tricia Phaup"

From Bruce Forman's "Shaking The Tree," Spring '92. Several months ago, before I was elected IFC president, when I was IFC vice president for Rush, I walked into the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs with the Greek Week T-shirt design in my hand. Perhaps you've seen it. It displays Benjamin Franklin on the back wearing a toga. I showed it to OFSA director Tricia Phaup. She didn't particularly like it: Tricia said that dear Ben, founder of our University and founding father of our nation, was an offensive symbol to some members of the Penn community. She probably would have been happier if I had included Mrs. Franklin in the design. She told me that I should only use geometric shapes and figures, arranged in an interesting fashion. But, I used the design anyway and it turned out well. Over 1300 t-shirts were sold and I didn't hear a peep from anyone. This is Tricia Phaup, the administrator who negotiated the judicial settlement that kicked my fraternity off campus. · Maybe my fraternity deserved it. Maybe we didn't. You'll probably never know for sure. Regardless, the judicial process, which resulted in expelling me and thirty other students from our house, must be unacceptable to the Penn community. It was made irrespective of the standards and values of the community, without the slightest input from students. The power to determine what was right or wrong, what was acceptable or punishable behavior, was placed in the hands of a few administrators -- people who may have concerns that rank higher than meting out justice (like careers and salary, for example). It is important to recognize that students are the foundation for campus life. Without us, the University ceases to exist economically, socially and conceptually as an academic institution. Each student and student group together comprise the social patchwork at Penn, from which flows our collective morals and expectations for ourselves. This moral fabric may be ragged, but it shouldn't be ignored; it should predominate. This principle of student empowerment extends beyond the judicial process to other areas. For example, students should also have a stronger voice on important University committees. However, reform is most sorely needed in the judicial process. · Let's examine the chain of events which the judicial process follows for fraternities, almost without exception. It goes something like this: 1) the fraternity -- or, more likely, a couple brothers of the fraternity -- make a mistake. 2) the Judicial Inquiry Officer investigates and invariably finds the fraternity collectively responsible for a particular incident. 3) the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs then enters the process and begins negotiations with the national fraternity representatives to settle the matter. 4) the national fraternity can either accept the settlement or, if it is unhappy with it, can appeal it to the Fraternity and Sorority Advisory Board -- a hodge-podge of faculty, administrators, Greek alumni and a couple UA members -- where it can receive a public hearing and possible national attention. 5) students get screwed. And in this process, the accused students are relegated to the role of mute spectators who see their lives tossed about like a political football. This may surprise you, but my fraternity brothers and I had no power to negotiate, no power to accept or reject settlements, and finally, no power or voice to appeal a settlement to the FSAB. You may also think the interests of the local chapter and its national are the same, but they are often divergent. OFSA has a thick folder of correspondences from national fraternities who wish to start a chapter at Penn; the prestige of having an Ivy League chapter is highly coveted by many. National representatives consider preserving the chapter for the next decade paramount and place a smaller premium on saving the present chapter and its members. The students place conflicting weights on long-term and short-term priorities. The consequence is that the national fraternity is more likely than students to accept a settlement and bury the matter. The students are at the mercy of the political acumen and wealth of their national fraternity. These obviously vary among nationals, allowing for settlements that differ not so much because of facts, but as a result of negotiating personnel. Eliminating differences in negotiating prowess is impossible, but it would be more palatable if the University showed more interest in listening to students' ideas and proposals to settle issues. · Sitting across from the national fraternity representatives at the negotiating table is the indefatigable Tricia Phaup, director of OFSA. She's in a tough position. She has to simultaneously be the advocate, disciplinarian, confidant and executioner of the Greek system. Considering she usually knows several members of the fraternity personally, it must be especially hard to decide their fate. How the University can expect one person or office to handle all these conflicts and still render a fair settlement is hard to imagine. From the JIO, she receives a finding of fact statement and a collective responsibility verdict. Beyond this point, it is Tricia's job to decide the relative severity of the matter and an appropriate punishment for it. Her decision has severe implications for the lives of many students, so her decisions are of keen importance to the entire Penn community. The community is implicitly trusting her to uphold their values and to apply them to mete out just punishments. This is a tall order. I am unsure if she or any other single person -- especially one who is an administrator and not a student -- can execute this task fully. If one administrator has difficulty deciding what's appropriate on a t-shirt, how can one administrator decide what's an appropriate punishment for a fraternity? And, ostensibly, the punishments set precedents for future cases and future punishments, creating a snowball of decisions which may be based on unreasonable criteria. The decisions may be too harsh or too lenient for fraternities, but in any case they are not made by the most educated and impartial members of the community: the students. Most would agree that decision-makers who had the least self-interest riding on the decision -- whose job performance and career was not going to be based on the punishments -- would make the most equitable judgments. It's about time students asserted themselves and assumed some governing responsibility. The student community has an obligation and right to oversee the judicial process to insure its standards are fairly applied and its members' rights are not violated. The best approach would be a panel of students representing a fair cross-section of the student body. Under this panel, the motivations for justice and equity would be clear and sincere. Perhaps the punishment to my fraternity would not have changed if the case was reviewed by a panel of my peers. It would have saved me and eighty more students from drowning in a nasty stew of self-interest and bureaucracy. And at least I would walk away from the process knowing that we were judged by our peers, and the verdict was an honest decision of the community. · Bruce Forman is a junior Finance major from East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Shaking the Tree will appear alternate Mondays.