In support of the Caltech Community

This is an open letter to the Caltech community by a former undergraduate about the ongoing breakdown in communications between students and staff. Community members may add their signatures here if they feel that this letter speaks their minds.

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I'm going to tell you about the worst time I've ever been right.

It was about the time the firepot got torn down in Ricketts and we got in all that trouble. I was writing a letter to the Tech, a letter that was never published, because I felt like some points needed to get made about responsibility and the principle of in loco parentis. I was very disturbed by that whole incident, because I felt it set a dangerous precedent. It was the first time in my memory that the administration at Caltech made a unilateral move that overruled a decision students had made for themselves.

One of the biggest things that initially attracted me to the Institute was the latitude students were given to determine the character of student life, and the way the administration and the students really listened to each other and worked together to make things good. There are lots of schools out there where you can get an excellent engineering education. In many of them, you even have access to research that is at or near the caliber we find at Caltech. That's just the truth. But Caltech had something special, something I hadn't seen anywhere else. Only at Caltech, it seemed to me, were students trusted to be young adults, with the capacity to make important choices for themselves, and treated with dignity even when problems arose that needed administrative guidance.

At the time I wrote this letter to the Tech, I'd been around the Institute for a few years. I'd attended for a few terms, then taken a couple years off from classes to figure life out a little better, and so I was newly back -- a re-freshman -- but in the meanwhile I'd been hanging out in the houses and watching things happen. Watching things change.

And a lot of things changed. Little things, slowly. But in a consistent direction. As I watched, during those four years, I saw this happen, over and over: first, a student would do something silly and make a mess. At first it was little things. Students were accustomed to taking care of themselves, and so by and large they were careful and thought through consequences. But just this once, somebody would get a little careless and wind up exercising some bad judgement.

So the administration would get involved. Security would catch this person in the act of using poor judgement and file a security report, and the Dean's Office would get involved, and the hapless kid would have to have an embarrassing chat with the dean about what precisely possessed them to do that stupid thing, and how they, indeed, really did know better and ought to have acted like it. And that was good. That's what was needed.

But what started to happen was that it would go farther. Instead of talking to this one person about what they did that was stupid and why they shouldn't do it anymore and how they should make it right for anybody who they inconvenienced or anything they broke, it turned into a big policy thing. Folks said, "uh-oh.. there's a problem. Students are doing this bad thing. Let's make sure no more students do that thing!" Which is laudable. And there are right ways and wrong ways to do that.

The right way, and the one that happened most of the time when I was first there, is that the RAs would haul us in and we'd have a talk. They'd tell us "Somebody," and there'd be some snickering coz generally everybody knew who the somebody was, "somebody seems to have thought it would be funny to fill all of the toilets with dry ice." And then they'd go on to explain why that, yes, was funny, but also could have really done a lot of damage to the plumbing and even maybe hurt somebody. And we'd all laugh like crazy maniacs, because we were teenagers and pretty much were crazy maniacs. And so they'd explain about how the somebody had had to pay for the damage to the plumbing, which would sober us all up a little because we didn't like to have to pay for stuff. And then the problem was solved, coz we all knew that if we pulled that stunt we'd have to pay for it too, so it didn't sound like such a good idea to do that anymore.

But there's a wrong way, too. And the wrong way is saying "OK, since someone in this house decided to cause damage, we're going to punish the whole house. No one can have any dry ice, and you all have to pay more than the damage was worth out of the house damage fund, and you can't have any parties this month because you're bad."

Because doing that, making the consequences into punishment and not restitution... well, to be perfectly frank, everyone here is too smart for that. We all understand that when the consequence exceeds the action, it constitutes manipulation. Coercion. Unfair advantage, if you will. ('Cause I will.) And whether we realise it or not, it makes the...