The Destruction of Campus Discourse
FERPA’s effects are felt not only in the kind of tragedies that end in death, but in daily campus interaction. To understand the ridiculous muzzle that FERPA creates during ordinary discussions, I would like to relate a telephone conversation I had one day with the director of the campus student center.
DSC: A student has complained to me about an interaction you recently had with her.
ME: What about?
DSC I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.
ME: So who was it who complained?
DSC: I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.
ME: So what do you expect me to do?
DSC: I thought you should know.
I mentioned this to my department chair, who called the student center director and got the very same runaround. It took several days for the director to contact the student so the director could be “released from confidentiality commitments.” It was only then that I learned the student had complained because I had reprimanded her for holding a meeting that I had scheduled a half hour early so that I was unable to attend. Over and over, simple problems go unresolved because of these kinds of ridiculous restrictions on what can be discussed.
How Party Schools Deliberately Cover Up Campus Crimes
Party schools routinely and blatantly abuse the FERPA law to cover up crimes committed on college campuses, even though federal law requires them to disclose crime statistics to the public. Hiding behind FERPA’s confidentiality rules allows college administrators to create a false image that their colleges are free from the kinds of problems one would expect when five thousand to twenty thousand adolescents, many of them consistently intoxicated, converge on a few acres of ground. For years, colleges, citing FERPA, refused to release any statistics or police reports of serious crimes. Although they said this was to protect confidentiality, it’s no secret that the real reason was to protect themselves from the bad publicity generated by high profile crimes like rape, arson, and assault.
Party schools’ broad interpretation of the FERPA law allows them to conduct their own secret criminal justice system out of sight of the public, parents, and the press. These campus judicial boards have a long history on college campuses, but the FERPA law allows them to continue in secrecy when nearly every other kind of official hearing board has been opened up by federal and state freedom of information laws. The municipal police and public prosecutors are not even aware that crimes have been committed. Party school administrators act as investigator, judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, and jury all at the same time.
Because preventing bad publicity is one of college officials’ primary interests, all of these actions have conflicts of interest. The college’s reputation always comes first and justice takes a back seat. In a 2004 press release, the watchdog group Security of Campus charged that college judicial boards abuse the FERPA law to operate “Star Chamber” courts, “which hand down relatively light sentences such as 500-word essays or short suspensions from school for serious crimes such as arson, assault, and rape.”
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Although the public might think these boards handle only minor violations of campus rules like plagiarism or sneaking into a concert without a ticket, the reality is that they deal with major felonies. Their rules are secret. Their proceedings are secret and the results are secret. Critics point out that they are run more like the Gestapo than anything resembling an American court proceeding and, like any other secret organization, they are subject to abuse.
College judicial boards routinely require rape victims to sign confidentiality agreements before they can be told the results of a disciplinary action. The purpose of these agreements is, once again, to prevent the bad publicity that party school administrators seek to avoid at all costs. In a 2004 ruling against Georgetown University, the U.S. Department of Education ruled that federal law protected victims’ right to be told about how the case was resolved without signing the confidentiality agreements.
A rape victim, Kate Dieringer, signed a confidentiality agreement and found out that the man she accused had been expelled from school. Later, however, he appealed and had his sentence reduced to a one-year suspension. When she attempted to complain about the reduction of the sentence, the college barred her from filing a complaint because of the confidentiality agreement.
“Forcing a victim to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to find out the outcome of a hearing which they initiated is not only against the law, it’s inhumane,” Dieringer said. S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, said the Department of Education ruling “breaks the culture of silence that campus rape thrives in.”
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In celebrating this decision, Security on Campus called it a victory for advocates of safety on campus. “This ruling ensures that rape victims won’t be silenced by schools which are more concerned about their image than keeping their students safe,” the group announced.
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“If they want to talk to their friends about what happened to them, they can. If they want to tell them who did it, they can. . . . If they want to hold a news conference and announce to the campus just how the school handled the case, they can. If doing this will help them heal, then they should do just that, and the school can’t stop them.”
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But the secret court system continues to be used by administrators at colleges across the country because it serves their interests to pretend that campuses are safe when most of them are actually high crime areas. These courts exist in a kind of parallel judicial universe where serious offenses, which would attract negative media attention, are disposed of discreetly under the same student conduct codes that forbid plagiarism.
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Although college officials say victims can always take their cases to the outside courts, outside prosecutors complain that the campus systems undermine their cases before they can get them. Colleges’ prime interests in the system are to protect their own people, including star athletes, athletic departments, fraternities, and local businesses that benefit from the college drinking culture.
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R. Keegan Federal, an Atlanta lawyer who challenged and won a case against the University of Georgia’s judicial system, said the systems avoided any kind of accountability. “What we’ve got here,” he said, “is people across the whole United States, people who are selected by a process we don’t know about and sit on hearings that are secret and make decisions affecting people’s lives and freedom and careers, and yet nobody knows about it. Frankly, it scares the hell out of you when you read some of these things.”
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Jeffrey Newman, a lawyer for Security on Campus, said judicial boards usually have conflicts of interest because their sense of justice is always tempered by the absolute necessity of protecting the college from bad publicity, a concern that never enters into cases in the regular judicial system.
Miami University in Ohio reported a “zero” in the rape column in its official crime report for 1995. That seemed a little low for a campus with sixteen thousand students, so a
New York Times
reporter looked a little further and found that two rapes of students had been reported to the local police, but the college did not count them because they were off campus, just blocks from the campus gates. The reporter also identified twenty-one additional rapes that had been reported to various campus agencies but not to the campus police. One rape victim told the reporter that the college’s judicial affairs coordinator suggested to her that, instead of going after the rapist, she handle the case through mediation as a “misunderstanding.” When she declined, a formal hearing was begun. It lasted twenty minutes and it found the rapist guilty of sexual assault. When the victim asked the next day what the punishment would be, she was told by college officials that they could not tell her—FERPA law, of course. What they did not tell her was that three years earlier the U.S. Department of Education had specifically ruled that rape victims have a right to know the punishments handed out to rapists. When the victim’s father complained, the college told him that the rapist had been sentenced to a “student conduct probation.”
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The Clery Act and Unreported Statistics
Incorrect FERPA interpretation allowed colleges to cover up the high rates of crime from 1975 until 1986, when a brutal murder shook the entire system to the core. Jeanne Clery, a freshman at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, was tortured, raped, sodomized, and murdered in her dorm room during the early morning of April 5, 1986. Her killer, a fellow student she had never met, was a campus drug and alcohol abuser who gained access to her dormitory room when fellow students had propped open doors that should have been locked. Although most parents would have simply buried their daughter and shared their grief, Connie and Howard Clery demanded answers and finally got them.
“We learned that institutional response to such tragedies could involve callousness, coverups, and stonewalling,” wrote Howard Clery. “Lehigh officials publicly passed off Jeanne’s torturer/ murderer as an aberration. The college, in an ill-conceived attempt to protect its image, produced a self-serving report written by one of its trustees.” The report said the college’s safety policies were adequate, but Clery discovered that there had been 181 reports of propped-open doors in Jeanne’s dormitory during the previous four months.
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“We learned that crime on campus was one of the best-kept secrets in the country,” Clery continued. “We learned that the true picture of campus crime is startling, even horrifying.” In 1987, he found there were thirty-one murders, more than fifteen hundred armed robberies, and thirteen thousand physical assaults on American campuses. Armed with this information, the Clerys began a campaign to tear the covers off the campus crime problem. They began with a lawsuit against Lehigh for negligence. When they won, they used the proceeds to set up Security on Campus, the nation’s foremost nonprofit campus crime watchdog group.
“Our daughter died because of what she didn’t know,” said Clery. To ensure that other students did not fall victim to a false sense of security, his group began lobbying state and federal government officials to enact laws that required colleges to make their crime statistics public. In 1990, Congress passed the Jeanne Clery Act, which modified FERPA to require all colleges receiving federal funds to collect accurate information about campus crime and make it available to the public. The idea, Clery said, was that awareness that they live in a high crime area can prevent students from becoming victims.
The act is pretty straightforward and should have helped students choose a safe campus, but instead of complying with the law, party school administrators have spent nineteen years fighting it and looking for loopholes to avoid compliance. It was another case of party school administrators putting their own self-interest above the safety of their students by lying to the public and covering up serious crimes. As quickly as Congress plugged the loopholes, party school lawyers found other ways to avoid disclosing the truth about crimes. The reason for this is simple. Parents want a safe campus for their children and colleges that accurately report their crime statistics are at a disadvantage compared with colleges that cook the books and report artificially low numbers.
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“When universities publish the crime statistics, students only receive half the picture,” said Ellen Wilkins, a student at the University of Georgia who is president of Safe Campuses Now.
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She found that there was a severe loophole that permits colleges to use only the crimes that were committed on campus and ignore the crimes students commit just a few feet from the campus wall. Her group found that of 370 crimes in which Georgia students were the victims, 165 occurred off campus and were therefore not reported.
The crime report for Ohio State in 1994 listed just seven forcible sex offenses, but Carin Quirke, head of Women Against Rape in Columbus, said her organization hears complaints from seven Ohio State students a month. Tina Thome, a graduate student who works in the university’s Rape Education and Prevention Program, said her office regularly talked with victims of rapes that were not reported to campus police. Ron Michalec, the chief of campus police at Ohio State, admitted that he only reported rapes in which victims filed an official complaint and many sex-offense victims choose not to file an official report. If they “don’t want a report, I don’t report it,” he said.
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According to the U.S. Department of Justice, only 37 percent of colleges report crimes in a way that is consistent with the intent of the Clery law. Although colleges insist that the problem is with the definition of terms like
student
and
campus
, the real reason is that party school administrators are deliberately cooking the books to compete with other colleges in terms of safety. There is a clear conflict of interest here. Although the law requires colleges to report crimes, it’s in the colleges’ best interest to cover them up.
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