College-Crime Reports Are Breaking Records This Year. Blame Years-Ago Abuses by Campus Doctors.

Jake May, The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP Images

Higher education’s annual federally mandated disclosure of campus crimes has been an especially grim task this year for officials at three universities dealing with the aftermath of sexual-abuse accusations against campus physicians.

The federal campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act requires colleges that receive federal funding to release a compilation of crime statistics each October 1 for the preceding three calendar years. Because the disclosures reflect the date that a crime is reported rather than when it is alleged to have occurred, the universities — Michigan State, Ohio State, and the University of Southern California — saw steep surges in reports of abuse, most dating to years-ago incidents.

Ohio State’s new Clery report, published on Tuesday, states that more than 992 instances of fondling and 30 instances of rape were reported in 2018 against Richard H. Strauss, a team doctor for the university from 1978 to 1998. WOSU, the university’s public radio station, reported that accusations filed against Strauss since the start of this year would push the total number of sexual-abuse instances attributed to him so far in 2018-19 to more than 1,500.

At Michigan State, the 946 rape accusations reported in 2018 against the sports physician Larry Nassar pushed its total number of rape reports to 1,013 — a record number for a university in a single year, according to an expert interviewed by the Detroit Free Press. In 2018, Michigan State agreed to pay a $500-million settlement to Nassar’s victims.

The Department of Education last month fined Michigan State a record $4.5 million for failing to comply with campus-safety regulations in its handling of the Nassar scandal.

At Southern California, officials partly attributed a 200-percent increase in reports of rape and fondling in 2018 to sexual-misconduct accusations against George Tyndall, a former campus gynecologist, the Los Angeles Times reported.

USC agreed to a $215-million class-action settlement of the case. Tyndall pleaded not guilty to related criminal charges.

Don Troop is an editor. Contact him at don.troop@chronicle.com.