What’s New
While higher-ed leaders fret over policy changes expected under President-elect Donald J. Trump, another deadline may be closer on the horizon.
If a bill passed by both chambers of Congress is signed into law by December 31, colleges will have to start tracking hazing incidents on January 1. If it’s enacted in 2025, colleges will get another year to prepare.
The U.S. Senate last week passed the Stop Campus Hazing Act, which requires colleges that receive federal support to include incidents of hazing by student organizations in their annual security reports. The bill defines hazing as an “intentional, knowing, or reckless” act that a person or group of people commits against another person or group of people, is tied to membership in a student organization, and carries a risk of physical or psychological harm.
President Biden is widely expected to sign the bill, which the House passed in September, into law. Hazing prevention has broad bipartisan support. According to the research organization StopHazing, 44 states have laws against hazing on the books, many of them spurred by hazing deaths on college campuses.
College administrators and anti-hazing advocates say that colleges in states that already have anti-hazing laws will be mostly prepared to meet the transparency mandates. But they also said that all institutions will need to compare their anti-hazing efforts to the bill to identify gaps — and do so quickly.
The Details
The bill specifies that colleges publish the hazing statistics they collect in the year after the bill’s enactment in the following year’s security reports (or “Clery reports,” after the law that requires them). In other words: If the bill is enacted in 2024, colleges will use hazing data from 2025 in their 2026 report. Colleges will also be expected to describe their hazing policies and prevention programs in future Clery reports.
But the measures that might reach more students and parents are “transparency reports” that colleges will have to make available online no later than a year after the bill is enacted.
Those reports, updated semiannually, must name college-recognized student groups that are found to have violated the campus’s hazing policies, describe the violations and any sanctions, and include important dates in the process. Colleges must keep each update online for five years.
Regardless of when Biden signs the bill into law, colleges will have to start collecting hazing information for these tools on July 1, 2025, according to the text of the bill.
Douglas Bell, director of community standards at Texas A&M University, and Jim P. Barber, senior associate dean of academic programs at William & Mary, in Virginia, said this demand won’t be too heavy of a lift since they already disclose hazing violations on their websites. Both Texas and Virginia require it.
“I think those other states that don’t have similar transparency reporting already as a part of their process are going to have to come up with processes to do that fairly quickly,” Barber said.
Still, Bell said, adding hazing statistics to Clery reporting “will be a big change.”
The Backdrop
Instances of hazing on campuses that resulted in death or injury have mobilized state legislatures to pass laws requiring colleges to identify student organizations that engage in hazing, train members of student groups on hazing prevention, and strip students of their scholarships if they are found responsible for hazing.
New Mexico’s attorney general called for such a law in his state on Thursday, citing the hazing and sexual-assault claims plaguing the men’s basketball team at New Mexico State University.
“This is not something that is on the radar unless an incident emerges, and especially the high-profile incidents tend to catalyze more action,” said Elizabeth J. Allan, a professor of higher education at the University of Maine at Orono and principal of StopHazing. “But none of these are rules. Certainly there are campuses we’re working with that are being proactive.”
So, some colleges may find that they’re already doing more than the bill asks them to do, and complying with it will just be a matter of identifying the incidents that meet a broad definition of “hazing” for Clery-reporting purposes. Colleges may have some questions, said Jeffrey M. Weimer, leader of the higher-education team at the law firm Reed Smith.
What’s Next
Weimer and Allan said they don’t anticipate that colleges would have to hire employees to manage the new responsibilities. Weimer said offices involved in the Clery-reporting process would likely be able to absorb the reporting requirements, and colleges could lean on third parties to provide prevention and awareness programs, or provide training to existing staff members.
Barber wondered if down the line more colleges might dedicate positions to hazing education and prevention, just as colleges have hired coordinators in alcohol and drug prevention over the last 20 years.
“I think with the emphasis on research-based practices, education, and additional reporting, it’s possible that there may be some specific hiring as we look at the next five years of implementation of this law,” Barber said.
Bell, at Texas A&M, said he’s not ruling it out.
A future hire, he said, could “focus on that education and training for our student [organizations] … and maybe also to help with outreach to our faculty and staff.”
