CAMPUS CORRESPONDENCE : Hidden Violence: Low Campus-Crime Rates Don’t Tell the Whole Story

In the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the amount of crime committed on college campuses. This rise has turned universities, historically considered safe, into a micro cosm of society in which rape, assault and larceny occur every day.

At large universities, campus courts dispense their definition of justice to students convicted of violating “conduct codes.” Often, university due process consists of a school administrator hearing the case, making the judgment and determining the punishment. Surprisingly, these courts, though conducted at public institutions, do not open their proceedings and records for public inspection.

Why are the students in all these cases being treated differently from an everyday citizen who could have been charged by the state? To ensure their privacy?

No. If the records were accessible, the public would learn that students are avoiding criminal charges because they are fortunate enough to attend a university that doesn’t want bad press.

Across the country, university administrators, in attempting to justify secret meetings, argue that non-academic disciplinary records are shielded from public access by a federal law passed in 1974. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), or Buckley Amendment, was designed to bar schools from haphazardly disclosing students’ “education records.” But the law does not specifically refer to disciplinary records or student judicial proceedings. Under the Buckley Amendment, administrators insist it is their duty to protect the privacy of students--a noble cause but, unfortunately, a false one. Actually, by keeping judicial records private, universities can skew campus crime statistics.

Many schools maintain police forces that have full power of arrest and are required by law to make their activities public. Yet, instead of having the police arrest a student accused of a crime, a housing administrator or resident adviser can charge the student with a rules infraction. Thus, the incident never has to become public. By burying crime statistics, a school’s cultivated image as a crime-free environment is kept intact.

A 1992 report by the Campus Safety and Security Institute revealed that 32% of colleges and universities are concealing information on the true extent of crime on their campuses. The report, which surveyed police and security personnel at various institutions, concluded that many schools use their campus courts to prosecute perpetrators of criminal acts.

William Whitman, director of the institute, said, in a speech to campus administrators, that the administrators “believe this type of publicity will adversely affect the institutions’ fund-raising efforts and its ability to recruit qualified students.”

Nationally, many campus newspapers are legally challenging their administrations’ position that judicial records are protected by the Buckley Amendment. In March, the student newspaper at the University of Georgia, the Red & Black, won a landmark case in the Georgia Supreme Court. The court ruled that FERPA does not cover non-academic disciplinary records. The school’s student court now is required to have open sessions and make all documents available to the public.

The Almagest, the campus paper at Louisiana State University-Shreveport, is currently involved in litigation to gain access to all records concerning the embezzlement case of two student government officials. The Arkansas Traveler, at the University of Arkansas, is waiting for legal representation so it can sue to obtain judicial records in the case of three students charged with photocopying parking permits. The Crimson White, at the University of Alabama, also is soliciting legal representation to gain access to the judiciary records of a case involving a fraternity brawl that resulted in five students being injured, one serious enough to require hospitalization. These cases and others around the country are not being pursued by a district attorney, despite the fact that the relevant acts, or “rules violations,” are felony offenses. The judicial head at the University of Arkansas, for example, said that the photocopying incident was relayed to his office by the campus police, but no charges had been filed.

There is no justification for a tax-funded institution to withhold information from those who support it. Judicial court hearings must be open even if the privacy of students who commit violations and the image of higher education suffers.

The reality of crime on campus cannot be addressed until the practice of hiding crime in student courts is discontinued, and this can only be accomplished by that time-honored method--public scrutiny.