COLUMN: Serve justice, not youth

From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99In the wake of changes to federal law, Penn can now release the names of students convicted of violent acts or sexual offenses by the University judicial system; the nature of the violations and the punishments assigned can also be released. At Penn, you have no way of finding out if they live down the hall. For the longest time, that was a matter of national policy. Congress had a law on the books protecting the confidentiality of student disciplinary records. That law was finally amended this year. Such records are now open to the public at the discretion of individual universities. You might half-expect Penn administrators to cheer the news, perhaps offering a champagne toast to the opportunity to keep students that much safer. But the reaction from College Hall has been cautious at best. College Dean Richard Beeman has been placed in charge of a committee to consider the issue. And Dean Beeman thinks there is more to the issue than your safety. Per Beeman, the guilty student's right to privacy is at stake. If there is such a right, it certainly doesn't apply to adults who have been convicted of crimes by America's judicial system -- their names are a matter of public record. But Penn views its undergraduate students -- you, me and the 22-year-old College senior living next door -- as adolescents in need of some measure of protection from the world at large and some measure of supervision by the University. It is common practice at universities nationwide to shelter such adolescents from public disclosure of their youthful excesses, because they are not yet the person they will someday be. It is the status quo at Penn, as well. At the very least, right or wrong, Penn is being consistent. The University's belief in the continued adolescence of its student body is the grounding premise of both the new alcohol policy and the proposed policy on parental notification. The implications of Penn's supervisory role emerge particularly with respect to the new alcohol policy -- all undergraduate students are defined as adolescents and therefore hard alcohol and keggers are proscribed on the grounds that we are not yet entitled to be as reckless as we please. But at some point, the in loco parentis instinct to protect grows inappropriate and dangerous. At some point, Penn's insistence on playing the role of partial parent means you may not find out when a rape was committed on campus -- or who committed it. But perhaps that is as it should be. Perhaps the rapist should enjoy the same right to privacy as you or me. Perhaps. But common sense tells me that rights -- like the right to privacy -- are contingent on responsibilities, such as not physically assaulting your fellow students. Is the 22-year-old living across the hall from you somehow exempt from this logic just because he or she beat up a Penn student rather than a West Philadelphia resident? Because the University judicial system handled the case rather than the city courts? There are historical precedents, to be sure, for secretive judicial systems. However, I'm not entirely sure Penn does itself a service by associating with authoritarian regimes and medieval England's Star Chamber. You'd be hard-pressed to find a modern, industrialized country which seriously maintains that closed judicial hearings are preferable to open ones. The need to ensure impartiality argues against it. The possibility of corruption behind closed doors argues against it. The dangers of preferential treatment argues against it. Logic fairly cries out in favor of keeping the doors to the courtroom open and subject to review. But Penn's doors are firmly closed. And so, there is no assurance that the system treats everyone in an even-handed manner. There is no assurance that favoritism and inappropriate extenuating circumstances never enter into sentencing discussions. And even if Penn is doing these things today, there is no assurance that it will be doing them tomorrow. That is not to say that they are not. For all you or I know, they are. But that's just a shot in the dark. This isn't about opening up judicial proceedings. There is no need for false accusations to unnecessarily stain a student's reputation through public disclosure of the charges. But once a student is convicted, the community has a right to know who they are, what they've done and how they were punished.