Though criminal self-disclosure has been championed as a step toward improving campus safety without an obtrusive criminal background check, its effectiveness remains in question.
"I think that self- disclosure is a reasonable middle ground between doing nothing and a criminal background check," said Ann Franke, the president of Wise Results, a legal-consulting firm that advises universities on issues of risk managements.
Penn is looking at self-disclosure policies as part of a review of its hiring practices. The University began examining these practices last January after news that a graduate student and two other members of the staff were convicted sex offenders.
Still, the middle ground can have its failings.
Curtis Dixon, a student at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, murdered dorm-mate Jessica Faulkner in 2004. Dixon failed to mention on the self-disclosure portion of his application that he had stalked and threatened a woman with a knife while enrolled at the North Carolina School of Arts.
In response to the murder and subsequent $500,000 lawsuit filed by the Faulkner family, the state now conducts criminal background checks on some applicants as a way to augment their self-disclosure policy.
Undergraduate applicants to Penn face similar self-disclosure questions.
After discovering that 27 of its employees were convicted felons, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, implemented a standardized criminal background check for all permanent employees this past December.
"Some of our schools had a self-disclosure policy in place, [but] we had a situation where we had members of faculty commit some pretty bad crimes. People started asking questions about our criminal background check policy, . so we were kind of pushed into it," said University of Wisconsin- Madison human-resources director Mark Walters.
The problem, schools have found, with self-disclosure policies is the need for honesty on the part of applicants.
Under such policies, "somebody who does something seriously wrong has an incentive to lie," and someone with a minor infraction may be reluctant to apply for a position, said Jonathan Knight, director of the department of academic freedom, tenure and governance for the American Association of University Professors.
And as the Faculty Senate continues to examine the issue, others will be looking on.
"There's the argument that by being first Penn will signal to persons with serious offenses to go elsewhere. . We are going to scrutinize this closely," Franke said.
