The Five-Year Party (22 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
As recently as June 2008, Eastern Michigan University was fined $350,000 for failure to comply with the Clery Act. Their offense? The college tried to cover up the murder of student Laura Dickinson and did not notify the campus community, as required by the Clery law. After an investigation, three top college officials departed, including president John Fallon, who was fired. The college also paid a $2.5 million settlement to the family of the victim.
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As quickly as party school lawyers can find loopholes in the law that will allow them to cover up crimes, Security on Campus lobbies Congress to revise the law to cover its original and simple intention: all crimes have to be publicly disclosed. This cat-and-mouse game continues to this day, despite the fact that allowing students to think their campuses are safer than they actually are encourages students to be unprepared to be a victim and to take unnecessary chances.
While I was advisor to the student newspaper at Keene State College in New Hampshire, my student reporters ran into this all the time. Rape victims who came forward and wanted the newspaper to write about what happened to them said they had filed a report, but the campus police insisted that no report had been filed. Similarly, students who had items taken from their dorm rooms were told that the crime could not be officially investigated unless they had the serial number of the item, which, of course, they usually did not have. Real police would never require this kind of thing. Crimes that my student reporters had witnessed and wished to write about did not show up on the official weekly crime logs and, as far as the college was concerned, they did not happen.
At Franklin Pierce University in early January 2009, the local town police were attempting to investigate a string of burglaries on the campus but were thwarted by the campus safety officers, who had destroyed most of the evidence by not sealing the crime scene. This conflict, which appeared on the front page of the local newspaper, is easy to explain if you understand that the mission of the town police is to investigate crimes and solve them, but the mission of the campus police at party school campuses is to cover them up.
In New York State, an investigation by the state comptroller’s office in 2008 found that two-thirds of the campuses of the State University of New York were keeping two sets of books on campus crime. One was the official one sent off to Washington to comply with the Clery law requirements. The other, for internal use only, contained the real numbers, which were a lot higher. The investigation also found that colleges were failing to report serious crimes such as sexual offenses, burglaries, and drug offenses.
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“Safety has to come first on college campuses,” said State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli. “Parents and students have a right to know, and colleges have a responsibility to report. Accuracy is the key and some SUNY schools have been inaccurately reporting serious crimes on campus. Not telling the full story on crime will not make crime disappear. What we found is disturbing and must be addressed. Students should have a clear and accurate picture of what’s happening on their campus so they can protect themselves and their property.”
Auditors found that nineteen of SUNY’s twenty-nine colleges had underreported their crime statistics. Nine schools underreported more than twenty crimes. Three campuses—Oneonta, Delhi, and Cobleskill—had more than forty crimes that were not on the federal report. SUNY Stony Brook underreported its campus crimes by nearly 50 percent on its 2006 report, including thirty-three burglaries. The college was able to do this by misclassifying the burglaries as larcenies, which do not have to be reported. In nine separate incidents, campus police classified on-campus sexual offenses as investigations and did not include the nature of the crimes. The University at Buffalo failed to report seventeen drug offenses and underreported seventy-five disciplinary actions, violations of law that did not result in arrests, including forty-three drug violations, twenty-seven liquor violations, and five weapons incidents.
Officials at the schools gave a whole range of explanations for the discrepancies, including lack of training, computer malfunctions, and lack of manpower. However, in every single case, the errors resulted in underreporting of crimes. There was never an error that resulting in overreporting of crime. It’s easy to see what is going on here: deliberate distortion by party schools to protect themselves from bad publicity and to protect their marketing position, exactly what corporate executives are trained to do.
If all of this bad news about how dangerous college campuses are comes as a surprise to you, there’s a very good reason. The American news media has largely ignored the problems created when administrators whose first priority used to be education were replaced with administrators with their eyes focused on the bottom line. Reporters attempting to do serious stories about problems on college campuses are repeatedly turned away when the college cites the FERPA law. Reporters rely on college public relations departments who pitch them stories about the 10 percent of engaged and excellent students and play down the news of students who are arrested for drug dealing, public intoxication, rioting, sexual abuse, and assault. News about how little college graduates actually know is relegated to Jay Leno’s late night “Jaywalking” segments, during which he interviews students who think the Eiffel Tower is in London or that the United States never declared war against Japan.
“Higher education’s weaknesses and shortcomings remain largely out of sight to reporters,” said Gene I. Maeroff, a former national education reporter for the
New York Times
and now a senior fellow at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia. “Higher education is Teflon-coated, remarkably immune to criticism.” When reporters visit college campuses, they are there to report on sports, tuition increases, and admissions numbers. Everything else seems to be off-limits.
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New York Times
and now a senior fellow at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia. “Higher education is Teflon-coated, remarkably immune to criticism.” When reporters visit college campuses, they are there to report on sports, tuition increases, and admissions numbers. Everything else seems to be off-limits.
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“Americans remain relatively uninformed about the state of quality in the academy,” he said. Students and their parents should demand of higher education the same kinds of consumer information they demand about health care, sport utility vehicles, or prescription drugs. Instead, they seem to accept blindly that colleges are delivering a quality product with little evidence on which to base that opinion. The steady decline in academic standards and expectations and the inflation of grades remains largely invisible to them.
Jay Mathews, education reporter and columnist for the
Washington Post
, said academia’s claims about the quality of their product go largely unexamined. “Those groups that do measure the weight of an undergraduate education do it quietly, and often decline to disclose their findings without the permission of the universities that would prefer to keep their failings to themselves,” he said.
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Washington Post
, said academia’s claims about the quality of their product go largely unexamined. “Those groups that do measure the weight of an undergraduate education do it quietly, and often decline to disclose their findings without the permission of the universities that would prefer to keep their failings to themselves,” he said.
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Exposing what really goes on inside the gates of party schools seems not to be on the news media’s agenda, despite all the evidence documented in professional journals and the anecdotal evidence of individual students, who only become newsworthy when they shoot people or are arrested for a sensational crime.
Mark D. Soskin, associate professor of economics at the University of Central Florida, said that if parents and state legislators were aware of the decline in standards at American colleges, there would be a loud uproar of protest and a resistance from parents when it came time to pay those expensive tuition bills. It would soon be evident, he said that “the emperor, if not naked, had a much skimpier wardrobe than commonly presumed.” It’s convenient for everyone involved to pretend that high quality and relevant learning is going on, and students, faculty, taxpayers, legislators, alums, and donors have informally conspired to look the other way.
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Parents and state legislators seem to accept on faith that whatever course of study students pursue in college will teach them what they need to know for today’s competitive and complex environment, said Carol G. Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “But in practice, college figures in the public imagination as something of a magical mystery tour. It is important to be admitted; it is also important to graduate with a degree. But what one does in between, what students actually learn in college, is largely unknown and largely unchallenged.”
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Among those shut out by party school administrators’ refusal to disclose information on campus crimes are the colleges’ own student newspapers. As a student newspaper advisor for a dozen years, I faced this problem about once a month when my reporters told me that the college was refusing to provide information that they had every right to access. This problem only got worse when the college newspaper was posted online so the public and parents everywhere could read it on the internet. I was constantly asked by administrators to “tone down” the content. Not censor it, of course, but just keep students from writing about things that made the college look bad.
Despite being amateurs, my student reporters dug up all kinds of embarrassing stories: students forced to stand outside for hours in subzero temperatures to register for dormitory rooms, student residences with mold so bad that students were going to the hospital, and a college daycare playground that was contaminated by lead paint chips falling off a nearby building. The students got away with reporting this because I backed them up. Any censorship, I warned, and my students would take their stories to the
New Hampshire Union Leader
, which would not hesitate to report the news, as well as the campus efforts to censor their own students. You can imagine how popular this made me with my bosses. It turns out, however, that the student press is under attack all over the country for writing truthful articles that damage party schools’ marketing position and public relations efforts.
New Hampshire Union Leader
, which would not hesitate to report the news, as well as the campus efforts to censor their own students. You can imagine how popular this made me with my bosses. It turns out, however, that the student press is under attack all over the country for writing truthful articles that damage party schools’ marketing position and public relations efforts.
In 1991, student journalists at Southwest Missouri State University asked for campus crime records, but the university denied the request, citing FERPA and its duty to protect students’ privacy. Judge Russell G. Clark of the Federal District Court in Missouri ruled that FERPA was never intended to include criminal records and sided with the students.
Traci M. Bauer, the editor of the student newspaper, correctly stated that the real concern was not about students’ privacy but about the college’s ability to control bad news. “It’s the school’s image that is being protected,” she told the
New York Times
, “and not the privacy of the students.”
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Commenting on the case, Constance Clery, the mother of the victim for which the Clery Act is named, said the ruling gave on-campus crime reports the same status as off-campus reports. “If these crimes occurred off campus the information would be released,” she said. “There should be no double standards.”
New York Times
, “and not the privacy of the students.”
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Commenting on the case, Constance Clery, the mother of the victim for which the Clery Act is named, said the ruling gave on-campus crime reports the same status as off-campus reports. “If these crimes occurred off campus the information would be released,” she said. “There should be no double standards.”
A year later, a judge in Georgia allowed a student newspaper to examine the records from a judicial board hearing on a fraternity hazing case but denied the newspaper’s request to attend future meetings of the board. Mark Goodman, director of the Student Press Law Center, said that the First Amendment right to freedom of the press should overrule FERPA and force colleges to open up the records of the secret judicial board hearings.
“Universities are going to see that they can no longer stand behind it (FERPA) to cover up criminal conduct of their students,” he said.
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But state officials saw it differently. “I’m still not convinced that the behavior offenses we deal with are something the public needs to know about,” said Alfred L. Evans Jr., senior Assistant Attorney General for Georgia. “The carryings on of fraternities here have more to do with drinking beer and acting ill-mannered than any criminal activity. I don’t think college students should be publicly exposed for acting their age.”
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But state officials saw it differently. “I’m still not convinced that the behavior offenses we deal with are something the public needs to know about,” said Alfred L. Evans Jr., senior Assistant Attorney General for Georgia. “The carryings on of fraternities here have more to do with drinking beer and acting ill-mannered than any criminal activity. I don’t think college students should be publicly exposed for acting their age.”
Frank LoMonte, the new executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said that colleges’ misuse of the FERPA law to cover up crimes discourages the press, parents, and government from obtaining the information they need to evaluate programs and officials.
In its final days, the Bush Administration pushed through “ill-considered, eleventh-hour revisions” to FERPA that took effect January 9, 2009.
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“Because of ignorance, bad legal advice, or simply a desire to avoid public scrutiny, far too many school officials ignore the limited scope of FERPA and invoke the law to conceal anything and everything they can,” said LoMonte. “Over-compliance with FERPA is so rampant and so widely documented that you’d assume the U.S. Department of Education, which is in charge of interpreting the Act, would take every opportunity to clarify that the law should be applied narrowly. Sadly, DOE has taken the opposite approach. The department’s new regulations are making FERPA even more confusing to administer—and when confused, schools inevitably err on the side of releasing nothing at all.”
Under the rules passed by the Bush administration on its way out the door, even records with the student’s name and identifying information blacked out can be withheld, he said. This results in campus police press releases that state things like “An unnamed person at an unnamed school on an unnamed date reported being robbed.” When a school is locked down during a safety threat, he said, the new rules prohibit naming the school. They will now simply state that an “unnamed school” has been locked down for a terrorist threat. As LoMonte pointed out, this is a recipe for mass panic. The DOE has lost repeatedly when reporters who sought records were denied by schools citing the FERPA law.
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