Editor,

I am writing in response to the letter entitled "Harassment Policy Inadequate" that was published in the October 12 edition of TSL. While the letter addresses a perceived lack of importance given to the events of the early hours of September 9 by the Office of Student Affairs, I see it as a thinly veiled attempt to slander two members of the Pomona College community. Though the respondents were unnamed in the letter and chose to remain so in a previous TSL article, within a college community as small as ours, the anonymity of the respondents is hardly guaranteed.

Throughout their letter, the authors reiterate their point that racial and gender-based remarks had been directed at Dr. Thomas during the verbal altercation. Where did this information come from? Clearly, none of the authors were present during the incident in question. Furthermore, I would hope that none of the parties involved provided them with any detailed information about the pending charges before a Judiciary Board had convened and decided the case. If this did in fact occur, then I see it as compromising to the assumption of privacy that one should expect pending Judicial Board action of such a serious nature. I am extremely disheartened that a group of students would use such information as the basis for a letter that was published in the online edition of TSL before the decision had been handed down. I truly hope that the letter in question was not a sensationalistic attempt to sway potential members of the Judiciary Boards. Whether any members of either of the Judiciary Boards were in fact influenced by the same information that this letter pertains to rests on the conscience of these individual members.

I am further troubled by the fact that an organization as aware of the premature assumptions and prejudicial conclusions that exist in the Pomona community as the Pan-African Student Association would sign their name to such a divisive letter before a decision had been reached.

In The Student Life article of October 5, Professor Thomas comments " `I’m not telling people what to do or how to think…If there is going to be dialogue, I want it to be productive, serious dialogue and not inflamed, reactionary dialogue.’" I hardly think that using the open forum that The Student Life provides as a means to vilify these two students as racists when the facts of the case were still in doubt is what Dr. Thomas had in mind.

Sincerely,

Tom Woo ’04