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BY JACK KEEFE

In print | April 26, 2007

Four female students have reported encounters at student parties with an individual who they identified as a male member of the Dining Services staff. The incidents described by these students allegedly occurred at student-run parties thrown with Party Associates present. According to Associate Dean for Student Life Myrt Westphal, to whom The Phoenix was referred by the Human Resources office, there is no administration-level overall policy on faculty and staff attendance at student-run parties under the party permit/PA system.

All individuals who described these alleged encounters requested anonymity for the purposes of this article. Reasons for anonymity involved concerns over being targeted or harassed, along with discomfort about being publicly identified as having drunk alcohol at the parties where they claim these incidents took place.

In one of the alleged incidents that occurred this semester, a female junior said she was dancing at Paces when an unknown male approached her. Having returned from a semester abroad, she thought he might be a first-year and started dancing with him. After she became suspicious about the way he was acting, he showed her his ID, which she claimed identified him as staff. Feeling uncomfortable, she said that she headed out of the main party area, near the bathrooms.

“I was standing outside the back and … he pinned me up against the wall with his arm to my neck. And then he tried to get me in the men’s bathroom with him,” the junior said, adding that she felt sexually threatened by the situation. “I grabbed onto a friend’s arm who just came out of the bathroom [and ran].”

A few days later, the junior said that she saw the same unknown male in Sharples, wearing a red Dining Services shirt. She later identified him as purportedly being an employee of Dining Services. She and the other individuals interviewed in this article indicated that they had not filed an official report concerning these encounters with the college administration or a police authority.

“He’s a [college] worker, and I’d feel bad if he lost his job,” the junior said when asked why she didn’t report the alleged incident. She expressed concerns as to the weight her claims might carry with administrators, partly due to her consumption of alcohol at the party, and was also concerned about how she would feel being potentially responsible for a termination of employment. Nonetheless, she said, “pinning me up against the wall is an act of violence, especially as I wasn’t completely sober.”

Each of the four accounts independently gave only a first name, but all gave the same name. They also gave very similar physical descriptions of the individual in question. Associate Vice President of Human Resources Melanie Young confirmed a first-name match on a Dining Services employee for the name the individual reportedly gave all four women. Additionally, one of the women who had allegedly had encounters with this individual claimed to have seen him wearing a sweatshirt outside of a party environment bearing the name he purportedly gave her as his own. Due to the lack of external substantiation of these claims through reports, legal proceedings or other additional evidence, The Phoenix chose not to publish the name or identifying characteristics given by the four women.

One of the other women, a first-year, said she initially thought the male individual in question was a junior back from abroad when she met him at a party in Paces. They allegedly danced for a while, until, she said, he attempted to “seduce her.” According to the woman, the man walked her to the bathroom and said “let’s just get naked” and “come on, just have sex with me.”

“He said ‘Come on, I’ll do it’ … and then he put his pants down, and he tried to grope me,” the first-year said, saying she ran away as he did this. “He was really drunk … [but] it’s not a good excuse.”

The other two accounts presented to The Phoenix involve a male individual who fit the same description and went by the same name. Another first-year woman described numerous unwanted sexual advances by the individual. She also said that he had a “wingman” that followed him around sometimes.

“They lurk at parties, come up behind girls, trying to hook up with them,” the first-year said. “They’re always really, really trashed and will come up to the same person. And you’ll be like, ‘No, I just blew you off.’”

The fourth woman, a senior, said that she and a friend have had numerous unwanted encounters with this individual at various campus party venues. “said … he was a freshman and lived off campus because he couldn’t afford to live on campus,” the senior said. “He danced with [my friend] who was visiting off of campus, and tried to touch her inappropriately, more so than the average [party attendee].”

According to Westphal, staff and faculty are implicitly covered under the guest policy at parties, through which a Swarthmore student with student ID may sign in a single guest for whom they are then responsible.

“All guests at parties must be signed in by a Swarthmore student,” Acting Coordinator of Student Activities Kelly Wilcox ’97 said. “There is a green [sign-in] sheet provided for every party, and the PAs are trained at the beginning of each semester regarding this policy.”

Party Associate Christine ‘10 had a similar understanding with the policy as it stands. "In terms of staff and faculty members, we’ve been told not to let them in, as far as I know," Christine Stott ’10 said.

“If they are signed in by students, I think it’s accepted they enter the party, but if they’re just random faculty members entering the party, it’s seen as a breach of their position,” she said.

Though there is currently no official statement in regards to staff/faculty attendance, Westphal believes that there is a tacit understanding that attending student parties, much less engaging in inappropriate behavior at student parties, is inadvisable.

“I think it’s generally discouraged, because students feel uncomfortable when their faculty or staff members are at a party … not because they’ve had a bad interaction with faculty and staff, but just because [students] are like ‘Who are they, and why are they here? I thought this was a student party,’” Westphal said. Westphal had general knowledge that The Phoenix was investigating claims of inappropriate conduct by a staff member but was not made specifically aware of the details of the allegations.

The Phoenix contacted the office of Assistant Dean and Gender Education Advisor Karen Henry ’87 by phone and e-mail to discuss the concept of student-run parties as a “safe space” for students and to ask to what degree, if any, she felt that faculty/staff attending these parties would impinge on such a status, but received no comment before print.

According to Westphal, independently of this incident, there had in fact been some conversation in the college administration in regards to setting a policy, though no specific action has been taken as of the present.

“There had been some conversation about that because there had been two or three incidents about faculty or staff coming to parties, and the PAs were asking for some clarification, because it’s awkward to be a PA and have [faculty/staff] come to a party,” Westphal said. “We talked about it with [Young] and talked amongst ourselves, and we never really wrote up a policy in part because there are so many different categories of events that it was hard to list them all.”

Director of Public Safety Owen Redgrave could recall no significant incidents of which Public Safety was informed or responded to in which a staff or faculty member was involved.

Director of Dining Services Linda McDougall agreed. “I have not personally received any complaints about any staff member attending a party and causing problems,” McDougall said, when asked whether she had heard of any complaints or incidents of this nature in the past regarding her own department. “I also cannot think of any other manager in my team dealing with complaints with staff partygoers. There could have been minor incidents [that] PAs had to deal with, and I was never made aware of them.”

McDougall was not made aware of the specific claims published in this article before commenting, though was informed of some of the basic allegations presented here a day prior to print. She was not asked for further comment at that time.

Additionally, McDougall said that there was “no official policy” for Dining Services about attending student parties.

McDougall explained that any actions against employees charged with misconduct would “depend on the severity of the offense” and would involve the Human Resources office in the discussion due to lack of general policy on the subject.

One of the concerns discussed during the interviews for this article was the role of the ID system at Swarthmore in ensuring that the faculty and staff are treated differently in terms of party entry than a Swarthmore student with ID. One issue is the similarity in layout between student and faculty/staff ID cards. They are mostly identical, aside from the specific designation listed under the “Class or Department” header on the front of the card.

The junior believed that the ID similarity posed a significant security problem. “What the PAs see is that you have a Swarthmore ID, not if you have ‘staff’ or ‘student’ on it,” she said. “You can just flash it and they’ll be like, ‘oh, you’re a student.’”

Though the surface resemblance between the cards is potentially confusing, Redgrave believed that the similarities didn’t necessarily imply insecurity in the system. “It need not be [a security concern],” Redgrave said. “I would hope that the card is somewhat scrutinized … if one does this, even a cursory look will disclose the student/faculty/staff designation. We haven’t heard that this is an issue from the PAs but should it be we can explore what possibilities exist within our ID card system.”

“require you to look more closely at people’s IDs to really verify they are students. So that’s one thing I try to do. Normally, you can tell if there’s a group [of staff] who are trying to come,” Stott said. “I haven’t had any sort of dilemma [with non-students trying to enter], nor would I know what I would do in that position. It’s difficult, because you are trying to look at people’s IDs pretty quickly. I can see that that would pose a problem, that you might let someone in who really shouldn’t be in the party,” she said.

Wilcox said that during her tenure this semester, the ID similarity was not brought up to her by the PAs or PA coordinators as a concern for party security operations.

Asked about the issue of faculty/staff-student ID similarities, Westphal said, “I think where we have the most trouble is underage faculty and staff children whose ID cards look like everybody else’s … this is the part that should worry us the most.” However, she also expressed that it was probably “difficult [for a PA] to stop an adult who has a card.”

“If the PA is either uncomfortable or unsure, it’s more likely they will just look at [the card] and pass them through,” Westphal said. “It’s an awkward situation for the PAs.”

The junior woman expressed the need to pinpoint those who are involved in these activities, and not to place blanket blame on any one group or on the faculty and staff as a whole.

“Some of the staff I’ve met are really nice,” the junior said. “And if they want to come to a party and they’re all right, it’s fine. I don’t think they should discourage the staff from going, but if it poses a problem, they should deal with it.”

Westphal expressed a similar sentiment. “It’s not one group or another that [comes to student parties],” she said. “We’ve had people from different corners of the campus come to parties. I want to make sure that it’s known that it isn’t one group of people who are doing this.”

If any student has concerns about the behavior of faculty or staff at a party, Westphal encouraged them to “speak with anyone in the dean’s office or their RA.”

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