Guest Opinion
I read the communication from President Cadge on January 23, titled “Reflection on Campus Events and Community Safety,” with great anticipation, as I imagine did many of my colleagues in the faculty as well as our students and staff and alums. I hoped that it would provide answers to the questions that had distressed so many of us since the Bi-College News’ excellent reporting of private investigators on our campus this past summer. Regrettably, no such questions were answered, beyond the welcome news that no investigations are ongoing. In addition, “To address lingering questions…the College considers the matter closed.”
I write with great concern because I do not think we can consider any of this “closed” until several questions are satisfactorily answered. While the communication says that “Staff and administrators have been available to meet with and answer questions from students and other community members,” I am not aware of any opportunities where these questions have in fact been answered satisfactorily. I think the failure to answer these questions presents very serious obstacles to our ability to move forward together as a college.
I use the term “college” here rather than “community” very deliberately, as I have been troubled by the usage of the term “community” in recent communications about these events. My goal in writing this piece is to clarify the questions that remain to be answered, the dangers of using “community” to evade answering them, and the stakes in which both are situated.
After the Bi-College News published their initial article, President Cadge addressed all of us with an email on December 8 that was titled “December Reflections: Choosing Community and Trust.” The email used the term “community” 14 times and the terms “trust” or “distrust” 10 times. At one point, President Cadge wrote “We must ask ourselves whether we want to be right or be in community.” The implication seemed to be that those of us asking questions about the article, and even the journalists writing the article themselves, were somehow in violation of community norms by distrusting college authorities merely by reporting on or asking questions about what had happened, as if seeking the truth were incompatible with being in community.
This email was immediately followed by the Big Cheese event that same day. During the event, a student named Clara asked President Cadge about the article’s claim that “students were pulled into legal meetings without any knowledge about who they were meeting with.” President Cadge responded “That claim is simply not true.” Later in the same event, a student named Lucy asked President Cadge how the College can prevent persons from impersonating private investigators since she said the College had not done such things. To this, President Cadge responded “I didn’t say that the college hasn’t done those things. I said that there are errors in the story. If you go back to the email that we sent at the beginning of June, it’s linked in my email from today, it explains how the college would respond and the college responded how it said it would. That is our responsibility and obligation.”
This seems to be an admission that the College did hire private investigators to interrogate our students, and it further states that the College had already communicated that it would do so. Yet the previous communications linked in the December 8 email said no such thing. The June 1 email indicated that the College contacted Lower Merion Township Police Department, who would be investigating the vandalism during Reunion Weekend. It also indicated that the College would concurrently be conducting an internal investigation. I am not aware of any previous communication that says anything about third party external private investigators.
This distinction between law enforcement and internal investigations on the one hand and external third-party private investigators on the other hand, is an absolutely crucial one. Both law enforcement and internal investigations are bound by transparent rules and procedures that are written down and accountable to the populations they serve. To my knowledge, no such restrictions exist for external private investigators, which is precisely why so many of us were upset by the Bi-College News’ reporting of their involvement. Specifically, many were deeply disturbed by reports of students being summoned to meetings with no college employees present, students being asked to report the political views and activities of their peers (which have nothing to do with violating the law), students being followed off-campus, and students’ rooms being searched without proper notice or consent.
To be clear, in my view, if the College experiences criminal acts of vandalism, it should have the ability to internally investigate to determine who is responsible. Nor is it necessarily improper to engage law enforcement and have them investigate (though I would hope in the current political climate that it would be cautious and thoughtful about whether or not it is wise or necessary to do so). Under certain circumstances, in my view, it may even find it necessary to consult third-party professionals who have expertise in conducting such investigations. The College has done so in the past, and we have been informed about it. To give one example, on May 10, 2022, President Cassidy informed faculty about the activities of an attorney, named in the email, who was hired to conduct handwriting analyses and interview students about anti-Black graffiti in Rockefeller Dorms. Crucially, we were informed of these investigations, the external entities were named, the limited scope of their activities were listed precisely, and their activities were conducted under the auspices of both law enforcement and college policies.
To date, no such clarity has been provided to us about the activities this past summer. Several crucial questions remain. Among them:
1) What was the name of the private investigation firm with whom we engaged? What are the names of the individuals who interacted with our students?
2) What were the terms of the contract with this firm, and what were the activities of the individuals involved?
3) Were students summoned to meetings with no college employees present? What were they told about these meetings in advance?
4) If college employees were present in these meetings, who were they? How did they identify themselves to the students?
5) Were these meetings initiated by law enforcement or by the College?
6) If they were initiated by the College, what college policies guided this activity? How were those college policies transparently communicated to the students?
7) Did anyone follow students off-campus? What college policies permit this?
8) Were students’ rooms searched? If so, were all college policies followed in doing so?
9) What is being done with the information that has been gathered as a result of these investigations? Do the students involved have a right to review the material?
10) Were the students told to keep these interactions confidential and threatened with disciplinary action if they did not?
Other questions about the usage of cameras and private security have also been raised and deserve further attention as well, though I am limiting my focus here to the private investigators. The answer to these questions matter tremendously, and have critical implications for the trust our students, and in fact all of us, have in the institution.
Again I say “institution” rather than “community.” Community is something I think about a rather lot. My discipline of Sociology took shape in Europe at the turn of the last century at a time when there was much hand-wringing about the fate of “community” in the modern world. Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim all wrote at great length, and with varying views, in response to what Ferdinand Tönnies had described as “Gemeinschaft” (community) vs. “Gesellschaft” (society). To greatly oversimplify, communities are governed through informal norms and values of mutual trust among relatively small groups of people who know each other very well over a very long period of time and generally share the same values and goals. In contrast, societies are governed through written-down formal rules and regulations among larger groups of people who may not all share the same values and goals and relate to each other through temporary instrumental arrangements. A college could potentially be either a community or a society, and there are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches.
In my discipline, Weber is typically held up as the proponent for societies, and Durkheim the proponent for communities, though both knew that modern groupings will always have elements of both. But as Weber rather poignantly noted, all communities in the modern world are embedded within societies, and all societies ultimately rely on a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence that sits behind their written down rules and procedures. As such, members of those societies ultimately place their trust, not in individual persons or leaders, but rather in the rules and procedures and their legitimate usage. And given the violence that undergirds it all, the stakes in that trust are quite high.
Durkheim sought to understand how the informal norms of solidarity associated with communities could survive this transition to impersonal societies, and he demonstrated the value of collective rituals that sustained community trust within them. Yet even he noted that healthy communities needed to have people who violated community norms. These violations allowed the community norms to be renewed and made meaningful through punishing violators. Equally important, however, is the ability to challenge the community norms to make sure they are in fact healthy. If the collective consciousness is so strong that dissent and critical questions are not permitted, this is sign of an unhealthy community. His example of a healthy critic of an unhealthy community was Socrates, a necessary gadfly who was put to death for his critical questions. The point here is that even the defender of community notes that truth-seeking and critical inquiry and dissent are healthy components of community and not incompatible.
I raise all of these issues of community and society because it seems to me that the terms “community” and “trust” have recently been weaponized in order to evade answering the critical questions listed above and to demonize those asking the questions as untrusting and unhealthy members of the community. As a college, we may or may not also be, or even aspire to be, a community. It is worth remembering that we must be a society, a bureaucratic entity whose trust should be placed primarily in our written down formal procedures, procedures which carry the weight of violence. As such, questions about how these procedures are or are not being followed are of the utmost importance, and they should not be shrugged off or dismissed. And nobody should hide behind the language of “community” to avoid this scrutiny. And until these questions are answered in full, I fear this issue is not at all “closed.”
