Former Office of Residential Life and Learning (ORLL) employee Kenneth Hall was convicted of sex offenses against a minor this past June. Tufts hired Hall prior to his conviction, and the Daily does not wish to use this editorial to allege any wrongdoing on the university's part.
However, imagine a scenario in which a convicted felon applied tomorrow to work on campus. Barring a conviction and subsequent registration as a sex offender, Tufts would have no knowledge of a criminal record.
With the exception of positions such as public safety employees, resident directors and those working with children at the Elliot-Pearson School, Tufts does not do routine background checks on potential employees.
This is not to say that those in charge of hiring should see every Tufts Bookstore employee as a possible kleptomaniac, each dining hall worker as an arsonist, and all professors as purveyors of mobile meth labs. According to the 2006-2007 Factbook, Tufts employs 4,071 people, and it is rather obvious that they aren't all child molesters and serial killers.
Nevertheless, criminal records (at least those which do not include pending charges) are readily available to employers and tend to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of just $15 to $30 per person. That means that if the Tufts administration committed to conviction checks, it would spend, at most, slightly over $120,000 in the process - less than one student's tuition over a four-year undergraduate career at Tufts.
Obviously, conviction records should be considered carefully, since Tufts would be remiss if it allowed, for example, a teenage indiscretion to disqualify a potential employee, especially since it prides itself on being an institution that encourages personal growth and learning in its students. One atoned-for mistake in one's youth should not decimate a person's employment opportunities in perpetuity.
A conviction check would not have exposed Kenneth Hall, but it is instances like this that remind us that our university should be more careful in its selection of employees.
Again, that is not to lay an undeserved blanket of assumed guilt on all future applicants, or to say that a person who has served his or her time should not be hired.
However, the university should be aware of the past records of its employees so that it can make intelligent, thoughtful and well-reasoned decisions about who to bring into our dorms, our dining halls and our classrooms.
