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News From (my) Home- Local College Ignores the Clery Act…

Roy

Back when I was an undergrad, I had the pleasure of attending Eastern Michigan University, just outside of Ann Arbor. EMU was a great experience for me, and I had a lot of really great profs there, and I enjoyed the experience of getting my education in a school where I had a chance to get on a first-name basis with my instructors. For all that I, and many other students, enjoy the faculty at EMU, there were a lot of things I didn’t like. When I was there, the administration was woefully out of touch with the student body and faculty. There were serious lapses in judgement with regards to how university funds were spent, and the contract negotiations with the profs have ended in strikes every time they’ve come up since I started there.

Which is why this report is sadly unsurprising. The idea that a student could be raped and murdered, and the administration wouldn’t warn the student-body and the community is disturbing- and rightly so.

The Clery Act, for those who don’t know, was passed back in 1990 after a 19 year-old student (Jeanne Lehigh Clery) was raped and murdered at Lehigh University. It turned out that there had been 38 violent crimes on the Lehigh campus in the three years leading up to Clery’s rape and murder, but that the college had not warned anyone of the dangers. The idea of the Clery Act is to warn students, faculty, and the surrounding community of dangerous criminal activity on campus.

All colleges, including EMU, have an obligation to the student body to warn them that a crime has taken place, especially in cases where the suspect is at large, and could potentially strike again. In this case, EMU failed to warn the student body or the community that a student had been raped and murdered in her room. In fact, the administration dismissed “rumors” that a murder had taken place, and said that there was nothing to worry about and that foul play was not suspected. This, even though police immediately suspected murder due to the position and state of the victim. It was only after the suspect was arrested that the administration finally admitted that the death was, in fact, a rape murder.

To make matters worse, it appears as though the university administration actually took steps to hide the fact that they were failing to comply with the Clery Act, by ordering the shredding of documents. All of which has turned into a costly mistake for the university- the investigation into the violation alone is estimated to cost them somewhere around a half a million dollars. That’s before the university has even been fined.

And that’s only just the financial cost. It’s very important for students and the community to have faith that the university is looking out for their student’s and the public’s interests, and the college sent a big message to everyone by not disclosing the truth about the situation- the message that student safety and honesty are not as important as the facade of a safe, happy campus. The university repeatedly told students that they were perfectly safe, and that there was nothing to be concerned about, even though they knew that the victim had been raped and murdered in her own room, and that the prime suspect was a student on campus.

By failing to disclose these facts to the students, the university prevented the students from being able to make informed choices about their own safety. According to one report, the suspect in the case stole the victim’s keys, and still had access to the building using them. By covering up the fact that this was a murder, the university left students ignorant to a major safety threat. By lying to the students and the community about what was happening, they broke an important bond of trust, and potentially endangered students, and potentially prevented students who may have had information about the crime from coming forward.

The only good aspect to come out of all of this is the EMU Board of Regents listening to student concerns and stepping in to order the independent report. The chairman of the board of regents put it best:

The university got it wrong. What happened is unacceptable.

Read more at MLive.com

6 thoughts on News From (my) Home- Local College Ignores the Clery Act…

  1. 19 year-old student (Jeanne Lehigh) was raped and murdered at Lehigh University

    Shouldn’t that be Jeanne Clery?

  3. I have two issues with the Clery Act:

    1. Students don’t have any context at all to make sense of the statistics. There aren’t similar reporting requirements for non-campus communities, and you generally don’t hear about every crime that occurs in some other neighborhood. So the reporting requirement tends to make students think that their campuses are less safe, relatively speaking, than they really are.

    2. Because student-on-student crime is underreported, the Clery warnings tend to over-state the danger from the surrounding community and under-state the danger from fellow students. That’s most glaring in rape statistics, but it’s true across the board. If you’re punched by a stranger, you’ll probably call the cops. If you’re punched by your boyfriend, probably not. If a guy holds you up on the street, you’ll call the cops, but if your roommate steals money out of your purse, maybe not.

    Most of my educational experiences have been at majority-white campuses next to majority-POC neighborhoods, so maybe I’m just hyper-sensitive to this. But I think the Clery warnings can complicate already-fraught town-gown relations.

    I dunno. I’d be curious to hear what other people think about this.

  4. Sally, I think it’s one of those things where because we are trying to make laws for what should be common sense, they rarely come out quite right.

    I think the Clery Act as is can create problems, but I don’t see that student on student violence will be given the attention it deserves in the absence of the Clery act either, so it make sense to at least require that that schools tell students something.

    But then, my experiences are from small colleges in suburban college towns, so I may be downplaying the problems the Act creates.

    And on a light er note: it made for really fun reading in my college newspaper.

  5. I attend EMU, live in Ypsilanti, and the first I heard of this was through the press neighboring Ann Arbor. I was not surprised by the Admins underwhelming response.

    Last year, a series of rapes and assaults around the university area received administrative attention (with proper announcements via email and on the website) only after a vigorous email campaign by students spurred by Ann Arbor News reporting.

    The kicker is that they used the heck out of these same resources to try to one up the AAUP when the faculty was on strike!

    Needless to say, I have a lot more faith in the administrations ability to make itself look good then to protect the interests of its students and employees.

  6. Sally, I see your concerns but I don’t think they’re really valid criticisms of the Clery Act. There’s no way to force people to report crimes by people they know. I don’t understand your claim that students don’t “have any context at all” for the statistics – the reporting requirements are very clear, as far as I can tell.

    Colleges really hate the Clery Act because they like to sell themselves as little safe havens of learning. From talking to attorneys who represent crime victims in civil suits, a college campus is actually one of the most dangerous places for a young person to live.

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