The Student Life

I happen to have served as advisor to the two students in the recent “celebrated” case, and have had numerous other experiences with our judicial system (although never as defendant!). It does function well and is carefully administered by the faculty, Deans and students who serve.
However, this recent much publicized case was extra-ordinary and, I firmly believe, raised some points which need our community’s attention. Since any system is capable of errors, if these indicate the need for revisions, we should consider them.
1) The two students had no advisor in their first trials, and I have never known a case more full of difficulty and sensationalism. So I believe one very simple matter is never to allow anyone to come to trial without a legal advisor. The college may need to work on setting up such a system, since we are in an era in which many faculty do not want such involvement.
2) I have always worried about the fact that advisors cannot address the council directly, whereas others, with plenty of positions to advocate, can say all they wish to. I know myself that, although I often speak privately to students on trial and suggest things they might say, most do not have enough experience to know how to speak directly to the technical issues.
3) The atmosphere on campus in this recent situation wa smore inflamed than any other I can remember. I believe any court of law would have moved it to a different location, for fear that the students could not have had an impartial hearing in such a highly emotional atmosphere. This is the negative side of Pomona’s famous virtue: we are a close community and support each other as a family. This is fine, unless the closeness creates a situation in which fairness is threatened due to public statements spread around the campus.
4) Most important, in this case I saw our need for an established review system. The President has this authority and Peter Stanley did agree to hear an appeal (only his second in his tenure) but said himself that he did not know enough about the situation or the procedures to alter a judgement. In the same spring issue of the Pomona magazine is a story about two well-known Pomona grads who have spent a lifetime on the judicial bench. We have many such experts and could easily, I believe, establish a panel of outside experts to review difficult cases. If we want to prepare our students for “real life,” we should not let them feel that any decision they make is never subject to impartial review. The whole U.S. judicial system is based on such a procedure.
5) In this case, records indicate that the penalty was far more extreme than most judicial system decisions in similar cases. True, the atmosphere was inflamed, but that is exactly why we need to have impartial outside, professional review as part of our regular procedure. All Sagehens leaving Pomona will face that for the rest of their lives.
6) Read Mike Cadoux’s three long letters in the spring issues of The Student Life, which set out the situation about as clearly as I know it. Letters of apology, social work-service, social suspension — these are all familiar penalties. But with suspension/expulsion from the college (as happened in this case) we are playing with people’s lives and their whole future is at stake. We must be sure that we are not damaging them but rather improving their behavior.
7) At the very least, let’s have some outside experts (like the Judges Piatt) come in and review our system and tell us whether they would recommend any changes to ensure impartial justice in each case, particularly potentially explosive situations in need of some emotional distance.
Pomona College’s reputation is what it is nationally because we have been innovative in our education program and in the handling of our community problems. I think the time has come to show that we can deal with major judicial sytem difficulties, and not simply by claiming that “we are always right” and so should never be subjected to outside professional review.
Yours, with every confidence in our ability to deal with the problems always arising in our future,

Frederick Sontag