IVORY TOWERS: Legislation uncovering campus crime records

Two years ago, Traci Bauer, editor of the Southwest Missouri State University Standard, had a reliable tip about a rape involving a basketball player at the school. To substantiate her lead, she sought the police record of the alleged rape -- a record that would be public record if held by city police. However, she was stymied at the school's police department, where officials were unable to release records of crimes on campus -- records which are considered confidential education records. Bauer sued the university in federal court, and now, after seventeen years of secrecy, the ruling in her case may finally bring campus crime reports out from their shroud. Clery's parents, Howard and Connie Clery, were outraged that the school had never informed them of security risks on Lehigh's campus, and founded Security On Campus, a non-profit organization that began lobbying for campus police departments to open their records. As a direct result of the Clery's efforts, first Pennsylvania and, last year, the federal government passed "Right-to-Know" legislation, requiring all schools that receive government funding to release annual crime statistics. Although helpful for prospective students choosing a college or university, the raw statistics were of little help to students already on campus. So after the federal legislation passed, the Clerys turned their efforts to campus crime reports. Arguing that public knowledge of campus crime alerts students to the presence of potential criminals and dangerous sites around campus, the Clerys and other organizations began pushing for access to incident reports and other documents collected by campus security units. "[Releasing information about crimes] would tell victims and potential victims to watch out, to avoid a specific area," according to Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based media rights organization. And students who are found guilty of crimes often remain on campus after committing a crime and "return to co-ed dorms," according to Howard Clery. Clery cited a Harvard University case in which a student who was raped returned to campus after taking a semester off. "She asked, 'Is my rapist still on campus and what was his punishment?' and the administration said, 'We can't tell you that,' " Clery said. "That's an abomination." But in their effort to gain access to the reports, the Clerys and student activists like Traci Bauer ran into a roadblock -- the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. · The act, commonly known as FERPA or the Buckley Amendment, was originally passed by Congress in 1974 to protect students' privacy rights, so that only they and their families could see their educational files. But some colleges and universities began classifying campus crime records as educational records and denying both to public access. "It was designed to protect students, but became ambiguous, and about five years later universities concealed names of student felons by putting them in educational files and saying they are not going to release the names," Clery said this week. "It was probably not until the late 1970s that colleges realized this was a great way to conceal crime and refused to give statistics." Though some schools continued following their open records policy, others closed crime records in accordance with the Education Department's interpretation of the Buckley Amendment. When Bauer found her access to the records blocked, she decided to take legal action. "What some universities were doing, including ours, was saying crime is included under educational records," Bauer said this week. "It's their way of hiding behind a federal law. It helped prevent these universities from getting a negative image because of campus crime, so [students will] think their campus is safe." A federal judge agreed with Bauer, saying that to extend the Buckley Amendment to cover campus crime reports is unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments. The ruling set off a firestorm of activity. · During the federal suit in Missouri, Bauer's lawyers introduced a survey conducted by the Student Press Law Center which named 14 schools across the country that had a policy of releasing campus crime information to the press and public. Upon learning the schools were releasing crime records, the Education Department sent letters to all 14 schools, "advising them what the [Buckley Amendment] said," a spokesperson for the department said this week. "There is a provision that if schools violate that law they could lose federal funding," the spokesperson said. Federal funding includes all federal scholarship aid to students and research grants. But this strict interpretation of the Buckley Amendment left many schools across the country in a quandary. While the Buckley Amendment prevented access to the records, many state open records laws required the schools to release them. Arizona State University, for example, received one of the letters from Education and tried to revise its open records policy for fear of losing federal funding. Previously, ASU had followed Arizona's open records law, which requires that crime reports be released to local police agencies, campus officials and media organization. ASU's policy is a "sanitized" compromise between federal and state laws, according to Sergeant Bill Right, a spokesperson for the school's public safety department. "It's a real pain to us to release a sanitized version," Right said. "We have to black out with black magic marker and run it through the xerox machine again. It's costly and time-consuming and a strain on the otherwise good relations we've had with the school newspaper." Student Press Law Center's Goodman said the motive behind the Education Department's strict enforcement of the Buckley Amendment is a "mystery." "[They must have] cronies that are administrators that want to keep crime reports on campus secret," Goodman said. "The institution putting the roadblock was the Education Department and Secretary Lamar Alexander. [Their] actions were just inexcusable." · This summer, however, all the furor over the Buckley Amendment came to a head. In a surprise move, the Education Department, which had asked a federal appeals panel to rehear the Bauer decision, dropped its appeal and did what Goodman called "a 180 degree" turn-around. The department issued a press release announcing that it would propose legislation to exempt campus crime reports from the Buckley Amendment. According to Goodman, Education received "a lot of pressure to change their position" from campus security and press-rights groups. The department then asked two congressmen -- Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. William Goodling (R-Pa.) -- to propose bills to change it. Two other congressmen -- Rep. John Rhodes (R-Ariz.), who represents ASU's district, and Sen. Tim Wirth (R-Colo.), who was contacted by another affected school, Colorado State University -- have also introduced similar bills. "ASU started fixing the records, leaving out people's names," said Manjula Vas, a spokesperson for Rhodes. "The Department of Education gave us the language, they told us how to write it so it would pass." Goodling said he backed the bill because the confusion was hurting efforts to solve the problem of campus crime. "At the present time, colleges and universities don't know what they're supposed to do. They treat criminal records as they treat educational records," he said this week. "My amendment would divorce the two so colleges and universities would not feel threatened." Education is still telling schools to keep their crime reports under wraps, however -- explaining "1974 is the law" -- but once the legislation passes, the crime reports would become public records. · The double standard between campus police and city police, whose records must be available, is what may have caused the Education Department to change its mind, Clery said. "Campus police are part of the government. They are responsible to the public. They're authorized to be police, they make arrests, they carry guns," Clery said. One of the bills is expected to pass in Congress this fall, whether alone or attached to another larger bill. The changes to the Buckley Amendment would be uniform nationally and "this would make sure information is indeed available, this would open up all those records," said Laura Chivers, a spokesperson from Senator Hatch's office. "Once they amend that, the ball game's over," said Clery.

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