Shedding Light on Campus Crime   

A bill before Congress would require colleges to maintain open security logs.

Since 1974, when Congress enacted the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (the "Buckley Amendment"), schools have cited the threat of loss of federal funding as their excuse to withhold "education records" from the public.

Education records are broadly defined as documents maintained by an educational institution that "contain information directly related to a student."

The Buckley Amendment was intended to curb indiscriminate release of academic records and to provide students and their families with the right to review their own files. Several states created exemptions to their open records laws to incorporate the statute's provisions.

But for more than 20 years, the scholastic community has cited the Buckley Amendment to justify sealing virtually any record that identifies a particular student. Recent cases provide some absurd examples.

In April, a Texas attorney general's opinion stated that a school district may not release a copy of a videotape of a public school board meeting until it has "edited out" the faces of students.

In September 1996, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld a Fairfax County high school's refusal to disclose the total number of votes received by each candidate in a student election, purportedly to save the losers from humiliation.

In both cases, the governments relied on the states' Buckley Amendment provisions to support their actions, even though no perceptible harm could result from disclosure. Bills introduced in the Virginia assembly designed to overturn the high court's decision failed in the current legislative session.

But as ludicrous as these examples are, they pale in comparison to the opportunistic use of the Buckley Amendment to advance the conspiracy of silence that has long disguised the reality of crime on college campuses. Despite laws requiring federally funded schools to compile, publish and distribute crime statistics annually, administrators use the Buckley Amendment to circumvent state laws requiring public access to campus security reports.

In 1992, Congress explicitly deleted "law enforcement unit records" from the Buckley Amendment's confidentiality requirements. But that didn't deter some colleges. They simply shifted criminal incidents from the jurisdiction of the police department to secret campus disciplinary proceedings.

Although such tribunals have traditionally handled academic misconduct or minor behavior infractions, they now consider such charges as arson, theft and sexual assault. Victims are encouraged to file their complaints exclusively with the school, supposedly to protect them from the embarrassment of having to confront the accused in a public trial.

Some schools produce more favorable statistics by omitting disciplinary cases from their annual federal crime reports. And Education Department rules explicitly permit them to treat disciplinary records, including those involving criminal misconduct, as education records subject to the confidentiality provisions of the Buckley Amendment.

Generally, the harshest punishment that disciplinary tribunals can impose is expulsion. This means that those who commit crime on campus may never be publicly accountable for their misconduct. For example, when the Citadel heard charges that male cadets hazed and assaulted two female students last fall, it eventually expelled one of the cadets and punished nine others. But the school reached its conclusions behind closed doors, in secret campus courts from which the press and the public were barred.

In February, Reps. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.)
and Charles E. Schumer
(D-N.Y.) introduced the "Accuracy in Campus Crime Reporting Act," which requires colleges to maintain open security logs. It also makes clear that disciplinary proceedings involving criminal misconduct may not be kept secret under the Buckley Amendment.

As Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, points out, without access to campus security logs, students cannot be sure that their schools are providing accurate crime statistics. And secret tribunals serve the interests of no one, except perhaps school officials who want to hide the reality of how they deal with misconduct and criminal activity on campus.

Past Congresses have failed to pass similar legislation. But sometimes timing is everything. Perhaps Chelsea Clinton's imminent departure to college thousands of miles from her parents' home will focus Congress – and the president – on much-needed legislation that could enhance the safety and security of students throughout the country.