This spring trustees will be gathering at campuses across the country for their regularly scheduled board meetings. They will undoubtedly face packed agendas filled with issues of critical importance to their institutions. There will be admissions numbers to scrutinize, tuition figures to project, fund-raising goals to analyze, and a variety of other programs, appointments, and decisions to consider. But the recent events at Virginia Tech reinforce that nothing is more fundamental for college leaders to address than campus security and safety.
After the tears, the makeshift memorials, and the intensely painful series of funerals, higher education must come to grips with the fact that it has just had its own September 11. It will never be, nor should it be, the same again at our nation’s colleges and universities.
The personal toll resulting from the carnage on the Virginia Tech campus is incalculable — reaching far beyond the more than 60 families directly affected by the deaths or injuries of their loved ones. Their pain will be shared by the thousands of others whose lives have been marred by violence on college campuses.
Jeanne A. Clery was a Lehigh University student who, on April 5, 1986, was raped and murdered in her dormitory room, where she had been asleep. When her parents subsequently learned that the university had not told students or parents that 38 violent crimes had occurred on the campus in the three years before her death, their outrage and lobbying led to a 1990 federal law that requires institutions to disclose information about campus security and crime statistics.
Seventeen years later, the reported statistics make clear that our campuses are not immune from murders, rapes, hate crimes, and other forms of violence that permeate the world outside academe. And the tragedy at Virginia Tech now requires us to confront the fact that simply disclosing crime statistics does not make our institutions safer.
The sequence of events that took place on Virginia Tech’s campus reveals a timeline of confusion and chaos. From the first dormitory shootings of two people at 7 a.m. — initially labeled a domestic disturbance — to the mass shootings in the engineering building that began more than two and a half hours later, the campus was not effectively warned of any potential danger. But even as the news media set their sights on the administration of Virginia Tech in the hope of finding someone — anyone — to blame, few higher-education institutions in America are equipped to handle a similar set of circumstances.
The fact is that assessing and then acting upon potential dangers on a campus are fraught with complex issues that go to the heart of what it means to be in an academic environment, particularly where federal law guards student privacy to an extent that excludes the real-world implications of that law. The questions that trusteesalong with faculty members, students, and parentsmust now ask seem endless, and the answers obscure. Virginia Tech provides a textbook case of questions, however, for which answers must be found.
For trustees, the questions are both the critical starting point and the foundation for all future discussions. And no questions are more difficult than those that deal with the classic conflict between safety and the privacy rights of students.
Seung-Hui Cho’s past behaviors went far beyond the antisocial or hostile personality traits that college officials frequently, but warily, encounter. The violence-filled writings, the stalkings, the refusal to communicate, and other alarming behaviors previously exhibited by the shooter should — and did — raise many red flags that, nonetheless, failed to prevent him from continuing to attend classes and live in a dormitory.
Federal privacy laws will most likely prevent the university from disclosing the entire history, and such laws may even have inhibited its reaction to Cho’s behaviors at the time. But often those laws provide gray areas that leave administrators feeling paralyzed. Ask any campus official about how he or she responds to student complaints of harassment or stalking, and the answer will inevitably be filled with uncertainty and ambivalence. Overreact and fear a lawsuit. But the consequences from underreacting, we now know, can be catastrophic.
If Cho’s long history of bizarre and frightening behavior did not result in steps to remove him from the campus, then what would bring about such a result? Beyond actually harming someone, is there a line that, if crossed, results in suspension or expulsion? When does a student’s artistic freedom to write about acts of depravity and violence become an actual threat? When a professor is so disturbed by a student’s violence-laden writing that she tells the dean, and the chairman of the department contacts the campus police, student-affairs administrators, and campus-counseling services, is it a sufficient response to tell the professor that she can excuse the student from her class? And when the department chairman tutors the student, is not her need to develop a code to signal her assistant to notify security an indication that something more should be done to deal with the student’s behavior?
It is not only Cho’s troubling history that raises questions. Trustees should scrutinize the timeline of activities on that terrifying Monday morning to learn whatever lessons can be gleaned. The silent passage of time between the first killings and the rampage in the classrooms may have made sense in the context of the unknown facts and turmoil facing campus security, but it is a silence that must never be repeated.
The one sure lesson from Virginia Tech is that college officials must develop a plan for immediate communication of all known information, with updates as more facts become known. Measured responses are not incompatible with intelligent and quick communications that take advantage of the wide range of devices now available to reach a geographically dispersed audience. And as students instantaneously communicate unverified information to their colleagues on the campus and friends around the country, an institution must become the reliable source of continuously updated information that can be the focal point throughout a crisis.
For trustees, that means understanding the range of communication options available within the context of their institution’s location, size, and population, and then developing a comprehensive plan for when each option should be used. Are public-address systems available? Are emergency telephones in every classroom? Should they be installed in every dormitory room? Every restroom? What security devices are available where cars are parked? How long does it take security officers to reach any point on the campus in an emergency? What does the city or town provide by way of emergency services? In what time frame? Those are just some of the questions campus officials should be prepared to discuss with their trustees in the coming weeks when they review safety and communication procedures and determine if any enhancements are needed.
Nor, as trustees and campus leaders conduct their self-examination, should they let political leaders off the hook. Privacy laws that prohibit the disclosure of information that might help families intervene early to protect a student’s health or safety must be reviewed. The irony never escapes parents paying for a child’s education that privacy laws prohibit their being informed of their student’s grades, let alone issues that relate to their child’s mental or physical health.
It is not clear at this time how much information about Cho’s behavior was shared with his family, but the issue arises daily at campuses across America where students struggle with depression, drug addiction, and mental-health problems, frequently without parental knowledge because campus officials are bound by law not to share certain information. If the continuing investigations reveal that Virginia Tech officials believed that the constraints of privacy laws and academic freedom prevented a more aggressive response to Cho’s behavior, than those concepts must be scrutinized carefully against the equally critical right that everyone at Virginia Tech had to a safe campus.
In light of the horrific events, the answers to the many questions that will be asked in the ensuing months about Cho’s mental-health history may seem more obvious than they did at the time. But for trustees and administrators in the midst of confronting a wide array of troubling student behavior, the answers are hardly ever clear-cut. Which is why the questions must continue.
September 11 immediately changed our lives in many ways. Many of those changes have made us safer. Others — like being forced to remove sandals or throw away a bottle of water before passing through airport security — offer only inconvenience without effective protection. Colleges and universities have enormous intellectual resources to provide, in a thoughtful and meaningful way, the security everyone on the campus has a right to expect. For college trustees, the charge is to galvanize those resources and work to create safe communities whose rules make sense.
Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a partner in the Higher Education Practice Group at the law firm of Bowditch & Dewey, LLP, is a trustee at Clark University and executive director of the Bowditch Institute for Women’s Success.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 36, Page B14
