Congress tackles campus crime in higher ed bill

The comprehensive bill may stop schools from underreporting crime. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously yesterday to enact a sweeping set of new federal guidelines dealing with security and crime issues on campuses nationwide. The provisions -- some of which are attempts to close loopholes that have allowed urban schools like Penn to report substantially fewer crimes than actually occur on their campus -- were part of a comprehensive, 600-page bill touching on all aspects of higher education, from student loan interest rates to binge drinking prevention. The bill, which was approved by the House on Monday, is expected to be signed into law by President Clinton. Proponents of the legislation promised that the security aspects of the bill would make campuses safer, by mandating how schools must report crime to its students. "This will save many, many, many lives. Thousands of lives," said Security on Campus, Inc. founder Connie Clery yesterday at an afternoon press conference with Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). Clery applauded Specter's role as a "great champion" of the legislation. Clery and her husband founded Security on Campus, a non-profit advocacy group, 11 years ago after their daughter was raped and murdered while a student at Lehigh University. Part of the legislation is named after her daughter. Specter said of the legislation that "we'll all be the better for it? [especially] the universities, which will have safer grounds." The security provisions address several issues. The most important one for Penn will likely be the new rules regarding which crimes must be reported as having occurred on campus. Previously, urban schools routinely underreported the crime that occurred on campus because of loopholes in the way the term "on-campus" was defined. "The schools? abused [the definition] in a way that defied common sense," SOC Vice President Daniel Carter said in an interview earlier this week. "They were not reporting incidents that a normal person would assume is on campus." Only 10 percent of the robberies reported to University Police in 1995 were designated as having occurred "on campus," a statistic which drew a year-long Department of Education review of the University's crime-reporting methods. The review found no major violations. But according to Carter, it opened Congress' eyes about how far colleges and universities will go to underreport crime. Under the bill, the definition of campus is expanded to include stores and businesses used by students in a campus area but not necessarily owned by the university. Schools will also have to disclose crime statistics for certain areas that don't fall under the new definition of "on campus." Guidelines governing the release of student disciplinary records will also be modified under the new legislation. Schools will now be allowed to release the names of students accused of violent crimes and their punishments. In original drafts of the legislation, all student disciplinary records would have been made open to the public. Officials from many universities, including Penn, testified against those provisions, and Congress decided to make the disclosures optional. Michelle Goldfarb, director of Penn's Office of Student Conduct, said that since the bill does not require schools to release the information, it will not immediately cause changes in how disciplinary records are disclosed. "It's really a policy decision that the University will have to grapple with," Goldfarb said. The bill also allows schools to contact parents of students under age 21 about alcohol- or drug-related disciplinary problems. Goldfarb, who testified in front of the Senate last spring about the bill, said it's important, however, to maintain the student privacy rules that have always prevented colleges and universities from releasing sensitive information about its students. Top university officials openly lobbied against aspects of the bill since its introduction last spring. University President Judith Rodin wrote Specter a letter in May in which she expressed concern that "the changes you propose to the definition of campus would greatly complicate what is already a confusing issue." The law also addresses the increasing amount of binge drinking on college campuses. The legislation urges colleges to "change the culture of alcohol consumption," with alcohol-free activities, a zero-tolerance policy on students found illegally possessing alcohol and the creation of a task force to recommend policy and program changes that would reduce alcohol-related problems.

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