Campus safety has become a national issue not just because of tragedies, but also through the efforts of one advocate at the forefront of a small organization: S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus. But last month he left the group, and now it is shifting away from its well-known watchdog role.
“They’re not completely leaving the arena, but certainly they are stepping out of it in a significant way,” Mr. Carter said in an interview on Friday.
According to the group, public awareness of campus safety is now high enough that scrutiny of colleges’ response to crimes is widespread. “We don’t necessarily have to be a watchdog anymore,” said Alison Kiss, executive director of Security on Campus.
The group began with a watchdog mission. It was founded in 1987 by Connie and Howard Clery, whose daughter, Jeanne, had been raped and murdered in her dormitory room at Lehigh University. The federal consumer-protection law that they saw passed in 1990 is known as the Clery Act. It originally compelled colleges to report crimes in annual security reports, but, through amendments, it has expanded in scope, requiring, for example, emergency plans and notifications of any imminent threat to campus safety.
Mr. Carter began volunteering for the group as a student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1991, and he went on to serve as a field director, vice president, and most recently director of public policy. Over the past two decades, he has successfully lobbied state and federal lawmakers for both new legislation and amendments to the Clery Act, including the Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights, under which colleges must notify alleged victims of options for changing courses and housing, for example, and the outcome of any disciplinary hearings. A loyal victims’ advocate, he has negotiated regulations and helped write federal guidance. He recalls the details of those and other measures encyclopedically. “Page 279, Section 304,” he recited last week, referring a reporter to a bill.
“Public policy is my passion,” said Mr. Carter, whose comments appear regularly in the news media. “As complicated as the legislative process is right now, I have faith in it” to make campuses safer, he said.
By fighting for federal involvement, Mr. Carter has often been an adversary of colleges. When he has found their compliance lacking and enforcement by the U.S. Department of Education lax, he has filed complaints with the department—more than 50, including two that prompted high-profile investigations of Eastern Michigan University and Virginia Tech. The latter institution bitterly contested Mr. Carter’s argument—and the Education Department’s conclusion—that a campuswide warning should have gone out sooner than two hours after the first shootings in a dormitory there on April 16, 2007, and that if it had, people may have taken cover before a gunman opened fire in an academic building.
Exactly which actions improve campus safety is the matter of some debate. Even Mr. Carter acknowledges that federal regulation is not always helpful. “The annual security reports have become overly burdensome, bureaucratic documents,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Clery Act has brought considerable attention to security at colleges. “Now it is widely accepted that there is a legal duty to provide a reasonably safe campus environment,” Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law, wrote in an e-mail.
Mr. Carter has led that movement, despite hostility. “Would higher education be as safe today without him? I doubt it,” said Mr. Lake. “Would most people in higher education acknowledge this? No.”
Mr. Carter’s complaints to the Education Department, issued by Security on Campus, complicated the group’s attempts to train administrators on compliance, said Ms. Kiss, who started as executive director a year ago. Participants worried that any disclosure might make them the subject of the next complaint.
She and the group’s Board of Directors plan to focus on victim advocacy; training campus officials on prevention and compliance; and education, such as peer mentoring in high schools on violence prevention and bystander intervention. The group will still promote legislation, including the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (S 1925) recently introduced in Congress, but no longer devote a member of its full-time staff of six to public policy. It plans to change its name to the Clery Center for Security on Campus.
New Role
The Education Department’s increased attention to enforcement has encouraged Mr. Carter (“Prior to 2008, there were about two full, formal reviews completed every year,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Now the numbers are in double digits”). And he applauds a new public complaint process that uses the e-mail address clery@ed.gov. Though he filed his most recent complaint on behalf of Security on Campus in 2008, he hardly plans to step back from public policy, he said.
One role he has been interviewed for is Clery Act compliance coordinator at Pennsylvania State University, a new position born out of the child-sexual-abuse scandal there. “The potential to set a high example of how to do things right is profound,” Mr. Carter said.
He is now serving as a consultant to the VTV (Virginia Tech Victims) Family Outreach Foundation and may broaden his work with that group. “They very much want to come on the national scene,” he said, and are “well poised to immediately fill the vacuum” left by the shift of Security on Campus.
The foundation is also supporting the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act—which requires colleges to offer prevention programs that incorporate education about dating violence and stalking—as well as the recently introduced Campus Safety Act (S 1749), which would establish a National Center for Campus Public Safety. This past weekend the group held a retreat to discuss, among other things, its state and federal legislation agenda and outreach to the news media.
“If our family members want to say why a bill is important,” said Kenneth A. Fulmer, executive director of the foundation, “most reporters will listen.” He looks forward to working with Mr. Carter in some capacity.
“Daniel has been a blessing to the campus safety and security community for many years,” Mr. Fulmer said. “He has been at the side of our family members as a loving friend,” he added. “He knows the players, and he has a strong message to carry.”
