Washington, D.C. -- The debate about crime on college campuses, taken up in many state legislatures over the past three years, has now moved into the federal arena.
A bill pending in Congress would establish requirements for reporting campus crimes and publicizing college safety policies. The requirements would apply to all colleges and universities whose students receive federal student aid.
In a hearing last week, members of the House Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education said colleges and universities must make students, parents, and the public more aware of the hazards of campus life. Two influential Republicans on the panel said college officials had been engaging in “denial” on the issue of crime.
Democrats on the subcommittee were non-committal. Rep. Pat Williams, a Montana Democrat who is the panel’s chairman, said that campus crime was “a problem that concerns all Americans,” but he stopped short of endorsing the bill. An aide to Mr. Williams said it was “too early to say” what would happen it. The Senate has not yet acted on its version of the legislation.
Higher-education officials, meanwhile, said colleges already were doing a lot to cut down on campus crime, and that increased reporting alone probably would not make significant inroads into safety problems. They said, however, that they would not oppose the proposed legislation, provided it was modified slightly.
The legislation was introduced by Rep. William Goodling, a Pennsylvania Republican. In May 1988, Mr. Goodling’s state became the first to adopt the crime-reporting requirements for colleges and universities. Similar laws have since been enacted in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida, and are under consideration in about a dozen other states.
The federal legislation, based closely on the Pennsylvania law, would require colleges to certify that they have campus security policies in place and to report a broad variety of crimes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In addition, colleges would be required to provide an annual report on campus crime to any student, applicant, or faculty or staff member who requested one.
Mr. Goodling called the legislation “basically a consumer right-to-know bill.”
“Students and parents should be informed about security so they can make educated choices about their own safety,” he said.
He said a federal law was necessary to insure that crime statistics coming from colleges and universities are standardized.
There are no complete statistics about the extent of campus crime, but several highly publicized campus murders in the mid-1980’s galvanized public interest in the issue. In the past three years more than 20 states have debated legislation dealing with campus crime.
The Pennsylvania statute was a response to the brutal murder in 1986 of a Lehigh University freshman, Jeanne Clery. Ms. Clery was raped, sodomized, and strangled by a fellow student who had entered Ms. Clery’s dormitory through a door that had been propped open by another resident.
In the debate about the Pennsylvania measure, college officials were criticized for objecting to portions of the original bill. The initial Pennsylvania legislation would have required colleges to give all prospective students the answers to a series of questions, such as whether dormitories have security personnel stationed at entrances on a 24-hour basis.
Those provisions were dropped from the bill, but college officials feared that similarly broad requirements might be included in the federal legislation. That has not happened, although the federal bill, like its state counterparts, is drawing a good deal of attention.
Last week’s hearing, which attracted heavy media coverage, included testimony from two students who had been victims of campus attacks and from Ms. Clery’s parents, Howard and Connie Clery.
Mr. Clery said that when it came to reporting crimes, “the policy of a lot of colleges is that what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
Kristin Eaton-Pollard, a Syracuse University sophomore who was raped on her campus in October 1988, said colleges had shown an “unwillingness to admit that a rape crisis exists on their campuses.” She said colleges should be required to conform to “pro-active” standards of education, awareness, and security.
College officials said they agreed that standardized reporting of campus crime statistics would help raise awareness about safety hazards. Mary-Linda S. Merriam, president of Wilson College, said the campus-crime law in Pennsylvania “did not cause us to do that many things that we weren’t doing before,” but did “focus every person’s attention on a problem of concern to each.”
Higher-education officials said most colleges had taken numerous steps in recent years to improve safety. They added, though, that institutional efforts alone could not insure security.
Robert H. Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, said: “We care deeply about the welfare of our students, and we would like to protect them as best we can. But on campuses, as elsewhere, safety cannot be assured if individuals and groups do not adhere to a common desire to achieve a safe environment.”
Other college officials said the reporting requirements in the legislation should be clarified. They said they were specifically concerned about what crimes must be reported and about the way “campus” is defined in the bill.
The legislation would require colleges to report all incidents of murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft, arson, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, weapons possession, disorderly conduct, and vandalism.
Douglas F. Tuttle, government-relations chairman for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Officers, suggested some changes in the list of reportable incidents. To make statistics comparable from one campus to another, he said, the reporting should be limited to what the FBI classifies as “Part I” crimes: murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft, arson, and automobile theft. Reports of other crimes, such as drug and alcohol abuse, say more about the industriousness of local police than about the actual level of crime in an area, he said.
Mr. Tuttle, who is also director of public safety at the University of Delaware, added that “campus” must be carefully defined because in many cases one police agency is responsible for the campus proper and another has jurisdiction in the surrounding area.
He said colleges should not be expected to report on crimes that happen in places over which campus police have no jurisdiction, such as off-campus fraternities.
Higher-education officials have been working with Congressional staff members for several months to fine-tune the bill, and Representative Goodling said he would continue to consult with those officials to iron out problems. He said that if the bill becomes law, institutions that fail to comply with it will probably lose their eligibility for federal student aid.