Punishment of HBS Students Is Far Too Lenient

To the editors:

Apparently, six young men in Harvard Business School (HBS) were found guilty of harassing fellow students and given community service and some are not allowed to attend graduation. When this information was posted in the Public Forum folder of the e-mail system in the business school at the University of Southern California, some people thought that it was a joke.

After all, HBS would take such charges seriously. Community service is not really punishment for such actions. Neither is not being allowed to of to graduate--some students skip it completely or do it just for their argents. Someone must have made this up, but it's not too terribly funny.

I found out that this was not a joke when I read the news in the Wall Street Journal and The Crimson (News, April 14).

These students have been given the message that this behavior is okay. The lightness of the punishments (if the actions can be called punishments at all) show that the administration condones such behavior, that boys will be boys, that you don't "rat" on one of your own, that people of a certain status are above punishment. If a janitor had passed the same notes to students, he would have been fired on the spot.

These young men will go out into the working world and do this time and again to other women and other coworkers. The administration of HBS has not given a clear signal that this behavior is unacceptable, will not be tolerated, and that there are serious penalties for continuing to act in this way.

At the very least, these students should not be allowed to graduate for at least a year. Ideally, these students should not receive diplomas at all. Students who are in their mid-twenties should know the boundaries of acceptable behavior by now. There is no excuse for what they did.

HBS is supposed to be an intellectual leader in the formation of thought in the world wide business community. If this situation was an HBS case, would this be the desired recommendation for the outcome of the case, or would this be the problem that the student is left to wrestle with to clean up after? As one of my classmates stated, "I guess the guys at HBS don't have daughters because these students who did this are only going to go out into the working world and do this to some one else's daughter."

So goes Harvard, so goes the rest of the nation? I truly, most sincerely hope not in this situation. REGINA MUNDEKIS   Monrovia, Calif., April 14, 1998

The writer is a student at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.