COLUMN: A few good things to ask

From Mark Fiore's, "The Right Stuff," Fall '99 From Mark Fiore's, "The Right Stuff," Fall '99After months of discussion and controversy, a committee charged with examining whether Penn will notify parents of students' alcohol-related offenses released a series of recommendations this Tuesday. Yet, instead of putting a final touch on the difficult subject, the committee's recommendations only pose more questions -- questions that demand answers in the next few weeks. First and foremost, what does the University hope to achieve by notifying parents when their son or daughter has been involved in "frequent or serious" alcohol-related incidents? Nowhere in the committee's recommendations nor in the recent comments from University officials is a clear purpose articulated. True, the ultimate goal is to preserve human life -- but the question is how. If University officials hope parental notification will result in treatment for students with severe alcohol problems, Rodin and others should say so. If they hope parents notified of their children's alcoholic tendencies will remove them from school, they should say that instead. But without knowing where the University is going with parental notification, students will rightly resist going along for the ride. One area where University officials have repeatedly said they are not going with parental notification is punishment. "We do not want parental notification to be coupled with punishment," said College of Arts and Sciences Dean Richard Beeman, who chairs the committee that devised the notification recommendations. "It's a challenge to unlink those two." Indeed, the University has yet to unlink them. How, after all, can the University reconcile its desire not to punish with the inevitable punitive result of parental notification? At least some parents will surely come down hard on their children when they receive that phone call. Perhaps that punishment would stem from love for the child. Perhaps it would come solely from concern. But when a Penn student is removed by his parents from his dorm room, the only thing he will be thinking about is that he is being punished. Now, that punishment may well be warranted. A student who drinks himself to the brink of death likely needs a good wake-up call. The University apparently wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It can't. And placing the notification decision under the auspices of the Office for Student Conduct only increases the difficulty inherent in differentiating between notification and punishment. Before proceeding further, Rodin, Beeman and the University community need to address these issues or face nothing more than a convoluted attempt at a potentially good outcome. Also warranting contemplation is the recommendations' potential impact on individual responsibility, which appears to undergo further erosion at the hands of parental notification. In devising the new alcohol policy implemented this semester, the University took as a basic assumption the belief that Penn students are, for the most part, responsible. While a ban on alcohol was implemented for a short time, it was ultimately lifted and the restrictions in place today leave relatively wide latitude for students. Parental notification, by contrast, proceeds from the opposite assumption: Students are too irresponsible to care for themselves, forcing those in authority to intervene. Where, then, does the University stand? Or, perhaps more appropriate, where can the University stand? After all, few of the regulations and deterrents implemented over the years have substantially affected the number of students annually sent to HUP for alcohol-related problems. More than a half dozen students have already landed in the hospital with alcohol-related symptoms this year, a figure that is right in line with previous years. In the end, then, it might not come down to what the University can do or what parents can do. What it comes down to is what young people can do.