With Penn determined to continue with the prosecution, Eden and Kors called Robin
Read and laid out to the JIO their entire defense. No date had been set for a
hearing, and Read still had the opportunity to drop the charges in the face of
this new evidence. She was asked, "Will you examine it, talk to the witnesses,
and see if it wouldn't be a mistake to continue the prosecution?" "Yes," she
promised. Two weeks later, Eden was informed that the Judicial Office wished
to schedule a hearing, and he discovered that Read had contacted not one of his
new witnesses.
The judicial administrator at Penn was John Brobeck, a retired professor of
medicine, whose position was described by the Judicial System Charter as wholly
"independent" and existing to secure the end of "substantive justice." He set
a hearing for Monday, April 26, a date that would force Kors to cancel a major
scholarly meeting. Brobeck, however, was explicit and emphatic: "The hearing
will be held on April 26, period. If you can make it, wonderful. If you can't,
then Eden will have to be there without his advisor. There is no possible change
of the April 26 date."18 When Hackney was advised that Eden now
would take his case to the deeper court of public opinion, he replied, "Do what
you have to do."19
What Eden "had to do," simply put, was to prevent Penn's administration from
continuing the travesty, and to secure some modicum of equal justice. At Penn,
however, there was no equality before the law. One incident caught the double
standard in all of its hypocrisy. In 1990, several black members of a racially
integrated campus fraternity had tried to teach a lesson to a white student in
another fraternity, a student named Sheffield, whom they believed to be a bigot.
By mistake, they kidnapped a student named O'Flanagan. In Municipal Court, that
Spring, the following charges and underlying facts were admitted, uncontested, in
connection with the accused kidnappers' plea bargains:
[The kidnappers] played a tape of a Malcolm X speech containing references to
violence directed at whites....O'Flanagan believed that no one would be able to
hear any possible cries for help...[They] drove [him] to a secluded playground/park
area....They encircled [him] whispering to him again the phrase "Sheffield
Deathfield!"....They also taunted him by referring to lynchings in the South,
in Alabama. [He] remained handcuffed to the metal structure [in an inner-city
playground] for a period of time...barefoot and only minimally clothed, and the
night was cold and rainy....They then conducted a mock "trial" which consisted in
part of [his] being subjected to physical discomfort, emotional distress, and
repeated and intense verbal abuse....[They] talked about lynchings....and they
shouted obscenities and abusive language at him. Among the phrases used were
statements such as (a) "Fuck you!"; (b) "racist"; (c) "You're a neo-Nazi racist
fuck!"....[They] then shoved [him] back in the car, recuffed him and drove him to
the intersection of 34th and Chestnut Streets. During this 10 to 15 minute ride,
they again played the same Malcolm X tape. At the intersection, they pulled [him]
from the car, blindfolded. [He] believed he was being left in the middle of a
highway or a busy street.20
Now, if that was not racial harassment, it was hard to see what might be, yet
Penn simply suspended the integrated fraternity from having an active chapter
on the campus. No individual punishment. No sensitivity seminars. No stamped
transcripts.21 Reverse the races, and the date of the kidnapping
would have become an annual day of shame at Penn.
