GABRIELLE NAPOLITANO will graduate from Princeton University this spring with one big image problem.

She was supposed to get her diploma last spring, actually, but was found guilty of copying two full pages of a Spanish textbook in a term paper. Princeton's a Discipline Committee voted to withhold her diploma for a year. According to The Daily Princetonian, the campus newspaper, the plagiarism incident will remain on her transcript for life, thanks to a University policy.

To make matters worst for Napolitano, her lagal battle challenging Princeton disciplinary procedures propelled her cheating scandal into the national spotlight, where she was portrayed unsympathetically. Princeton students now refer to the former senior as "Gabby" Napolitano herself recently told The Princetonian that "the majority of the Princeton community has ostracized me."

Napolitano deserves all the vituperation she has gotten, for plagiarism is the most serious academic crime possible. Her pathetic attempts to weasel out of penalties on sophistries--she insisted just two weeks ago that "there was no attempt on my part to deceive" her Spanish professor--warrant equal criticism. But as her legal appeals drag through the courts interminably, it becomes increasingly clear that other issues relating to the campus case--besides just how unethical Napolitano's behavior has been--are much more intriguing.

Why, for instance, does it seem that disciplinary skirmishes seem to become widely publicized free-for-alls at many leading colleges, but not at Harvard? Read The Chronicle of Higher Education each week and you'll almost inevitably see an account of a punitive step against a student taken by another school being challenged in court. By contrast, at Harvard, according to Dean of the College John B. Fox Jr. '59, "In living memory I'm unaware of any case...going before civil procedure."

The answer has largely in Harvard's rare approach to disciplining students. The Administrative Board, which Fox chairs, may seem big and had, but before on jumps to conclusions, it's worth realizing that Harvard's disciplinary policies diverge from those of most schools in ways that make the University both more merciful and less prone to public knock-down drag-outs like Napolitano's. Consider the following two aspects of Harvard's approach to punishment.

*Harvard has a rather firm policy of purging a student's transcript of his on-campus indiscretions after, in Fox's words, "the penalty has been paid." Undergraduates may have to go on academic or disciplinary probation, or may even "requested" to take a term or year off. But in the end, the student's formal transcript shows nothing more than the fact that a leave of absence may have been taken. Many schools are less Jenient.

"There's no point in carrying on into eternity something which may have happened at the age of 17 or 18 or 19," says Fox. Given the promise of a clean slate, offenders have little incentive to go public with legal actions or loud denials. Were Princeton's Napolitano--who is particularly upset that her plagiarism violation may nix her hopes of getting into law school--a Harvard student, she might never have raised legal hell.

*Unlike Harvard, most other colleges--like Princeton--use adversarial methods of settling disciplinary issues. The student and the college each have the option of trundling in lawyers and, more often than not, one side wins cleanly. The problem is that, when a student loses, there's a great incentive for his lawyer simply to appeal the decision to a real-life court.

Here, by contrast, punishment is usually settled by a slow, case-by-case process of conciliation. There are meeting with a senior tutor and perhaps an academic advisor and others. By the time the Ad Board hears a case, a student often has a good idea what his punishment will be; his tete-a-tetes with his advisors may have led them to press for a less harsh punishment.

Sometimes past incidents do accidentally slip out of a clean transcript, of course. Just ask Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), whose Spanish exam cheating scandal during his undergraduate days is common knowledge. (Kennedy actually got his diploma in 1956).

But on the whole, the system works. For Harvard, of course, that means a lot less grief, not to mention a lot better public relations. And more important, for the student facing discipline, it means a second chance. Gobrielle Napolitano may eventually win her case against Princeton via some legal loophole, but now that the world knows what she once did on a Spanish paper in the winter of 1981, that's chance she'll probably never get.