Penn State--State Pen Joke In Here Somewhere,
But It's Four O'Clock in the Morning
'With two more sex offenders joining a slew of misbehaving colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania - including Wharton professor emeritus L. Scott Ward, who pleaded guilty yesterday to producing child pornography - the school is reexamining its hiring practices...
...Three committees are looking into whether policies need to be "strengthened" for staff, faculty and students... Measures being discussed include criminal background checks for faculty and requiring all students to divulge criminal convictions on their applications.
Most staff members, but not faculty, are now screened before they are hired... Penn has opposed state legislation that would require it to investigate prospective faculty.
The committees convened last month ... following "a number of situations" over the last year, including the case of Rafael Robb, an economics professor charged with murdering his wife in December. Robb is currently on academic leave.
Also last month, two Penn employees were found to be convicted sex offenders on the Megan's Law list. One, an administrator in the Anthropology department of the College of Arts & Sciences, was dismissed, Doyle said. The other had a temporary job in the School of Nursing that came to an end, she said.
Since 1993, Penn's glossy Ivy League image has been tarnished by five professors, all but Robb involved in sex crimes. Ward, who had no convictions on sex or pornography charges when he was hired at Penn in 1980, continued to teach even after he was convicted in 1999 of soliciting sex from a male police officer posing as a minor. (Ward received a fine and five years' probation.) He wasn't removed from the classroom until August when he was arrested for importing child pornography.
...There is no research that academics are more prone to committing crimes than anyone else...
But Catherine Bath, executive director of Security on Campus, a nonprofit organization involved with campus safety, said colleges should scrutinize professors.
"They figure they're academics, they got Ph.D.s, they should be exempt," she said. "Violence cuts across all segments."'
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