At the end of last semester, while most students were busy studying for exams and preparing for the arrival of summer, a series of troubling events quietly unraveled out of a lack of communication between administrators and students. These events highlight a number of concerns regarding student safety and students’ rights that have negatively impacted the relationship and trust that exists between students and administrators. In this piece, we’d like to bring these issues to light.

The event at the epicenter of this was Scavvy, a scavenger hunt that has been organized by a group of anonymous students each spring for the past four years. The Dean of Students’ Office generally opposes Scavvy’s existence because of its unpredictable nature and because of the option to participate in potentially unsafe situations.

As last spring’s event drew near, students close to head sponsors indicated that the Dean of Students’ Office was aware of the event and when it was scheduled. They approached an OTL staff member about it, head sponsors were warned not to participate, and additional deans were placed on call the night of the event.

Despite knowledge of and opposition to the event, there was no apparent effort by the Dean of Students’ Office to communicate their concerns to the student body or to warn students of the consequences they would face if caught engaging in unsafe behavior.

Apr. 25, the night of Scavvy, approached, and nearly 350 5-C students attended, including over 200 Pomona students (just short of 15 percent of Pomona’s student body). The weekend ended and thirteen days passed with little fanfare.

Then, at around 4 p.m. on the Friday before exams (May 8), at least 19 students (and likely more) began receiving e-mails from the Dean of Students, Miriam Feldblum. The e-mails informed them that they were under sanction for violating the school’s alcohol policy during Scavvy and would receive letters in their mailboxes detailing the sanction. Students got their letters on the Monday (May 11) and Tuesday (May 12) of finals week. While in the midst of exams and moving out, they had until that Friday (May 15) to meet with a dean, make sense of the sanction, and make a decision either to pay a $50 fine for participation in a drinking game or to appeal the sanction to J-Board.

As students began to meet and communicate with deans, some troubling details emerged concerning the evidence gathered against them. The vast majority of the sanctions appear to have arisen out of charges to the Coop Store and Fountain (one clue asked participants to obtain a receipt containing $.47). Security logs, visuals from deans on call, and, in at least one case, Facebook photos were also used as evidence that the accused had participated in a drinking game.

We would like to address two points of particular relevance to the student body. Our first concern is that the actions of the Dean of Students and her office weren’t executed in the interest of student safety. Secondly, we believe the punitive measures taken by the administration in response to Scavvy require a clarification on future policy enforcement decisions. Students need to understand the extent to which the administration will go to obtain evidence in cases of suspected policy violation. Without clarification on these issues, we are concerned that student-administration relations will suffer further strain, disrupting the community we are all trying to build.

Central to our discussion is the fact that the Dean of Students and her office knew that Scavvy was taking place ahead of time, but failed to communicate their concerns about the event to the student body. Preparations were made to stop or potentially break up the event, yet our Dean of Students never sent a school-wide email explaining, “We consider Scavvy dangerous. If you participate in it, we will consider you in violation of our policies and fine you.” RAs take comparable action when they find out about large unregistered parties that may lead to potentially unsafe drinking. Why would our Dean of Students and her office hold themselves to a different standard?

The Dean of Students and her office allowed students to participate in an event that they considered unsafe and then took retroactive action to punish those students for endangering themselves. We find this failure to take action and communicate their concerns to the student body irresponsible and hypocritical, particularly when such a large proportion of the student body participated in the event. In her own e-mail to accused students, Dean Miriam Feldblum put the fines in perspective by noting, “We all take policy very seriously. Policies are in place to ensure a safe and welcoming community for everyone. Taking ownership of one’s actions and acknowledging the consequences is also a core component of living together responsibly and with accountability as a community.” We intend to hold the Dean of Students and her office to these same standards.

How are students supposed to feel safe and welcome when their own Dean of Students and her office seems to have preferenced retroactive punishment over concerns for safety?

We believe that the failure to communicate expectations to students has eroded the “safe and welcoming community” that the Dean of Students speaks of. There exists a grey area between policy and practice—written and enforced. Few students clearly understand what events the administration will take seriously.

Students of all ages, for example, generally can avoid punishment by drinking from a “red cup” in transport, despite the fact it is technically against policy for students to drink under the age of 21 or in public. The policy exists only as the administration and RAs let it slide. Instances like these give the Dean of Students an enormous amount of power over the student body.

The policy is written strictly, but because it is not typically enforced strictly, the administration has quite a bit of leeway to pick and choose which cases to aggressively pursue. Without a clear understanding of the administration’s expectations, as was the case with Scavvy, we believe a culture of distrust begins to emerge.

The fact that the Dean of Students went to such great lengths to punish students is also a major concern. As detailed above, the Dean of Students’ Office used various methods to gather evidence in sanctioning students. One of these was checking charges to the Coop Store and Fountain the night of the event. It is not unprecedented for the Dean of Students’ Office to check swipe records in instances of theft and vandalism, but a very important distinction must be drawn between checking these private records for criminal activity and checking them for evidence in [relatively] petty cases of alcohol policy violation. At what point is the Dean of Students’ Office invading our privacy? How far will they go? And in what instances? There is also no indication that private records like these were merely used to corroborate other existing evidence. Instead, the swipe records appear to have been a source for establishing the evidence itself.

An even more complex issue arises with the use of Coop charges as explicit evidence that students participated in a drinking game. Substantial room for error arises out of a practice like this. Consider one student that was working at the Fountain that night. Out of goodwill, they charged $.47 to their card for another student that had forgotten their ID. The Fountain employee was fined as a participant in a drinking game. While the sanction was eventually dropped, it was only done so with hesitation and only after the employee had proven that they had been working that night. As with any other case concerning store logs, it appears that the Dean of Students presumed the students guilt before innocence, which we find troubling.

We hope that Dean of Students and her office will more thoroughly consider the implications of such divisive action, particularly with regard to the “safe and welcoming community” that they seek. Further, we insist that the Dean of Students’ Office provide a much more open dialogue concerning its expectations, particularly with regard to events that it finds dangerous enough to pursue with post-facto investigations seeking to punish student participants. Furthermore, students have a right to know what constitutes their privacy on campus. We realize that this could simply be an isolated incident, but now that the administration opened Pandora’s box, it must consider what procedural precedent it wants to set and inform the students accordingly.