How Safe Is Your Campus?

In January an openly gay student at Carroll College in Montana withdrew from the institution after having been knocked unconscious and beaten in his dorm room. His attacker wrote "die fag" in ink across his chest. In February a jury convicted three young men of battery as a hate crime in the severe beating of a University of Wisconsin student who is black and a native of Cameroon. Asian students at the University of California, Davis, held a rally in February, partly in response to an incident in which five Korean American fraternity members say they were beaten by ten white men, some of whom are students at UC Davis.

Thousands of such attacks take place each year on U.S. campuses, according to a report submitted to Congress in January by the U.S. Department of Education. Since the early 1990s, colleges and universities have been required by federal law to collect and publish data on campus crime. Hate crimes are among the violations that institutions must track. Other categories include criminal homicide, sex offenses, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, car theft, and arson.

Congress enacted changes to the law in 1998 to streamline the classification and reporting of data. Institutions must now submit their crime statistics to the Department of Education, which is charged with analyzing and reporting them. In 2000 more than 6,000 two- and four-year colleges and universities provided data for 1999, 1998, and 1997, which the department has made available at www.ope.ed.gov/security.

A total of eleven criminal homicides occurred on U.S. college campuses in 1999. That statistic represents a decline compared with 1998, when twenty-four campus killings were reported, and with 1997, when eighteen murders took place. Like the homicide rate, incidences of aggravated assault decreased in 1999, but other types of crime increased. The number of sex offenses rose 6 percent compared with 1998, and robberies jumped 7 percent. Burglaries were up 2 percent, with 26,035 incidents in 1999; burglary is by far the most frequently reported crime on college campuses, according to the Department of Education.

Some colleges and universities have complained that the department gave confusing instructions about how to report data, resulting in the miscategorization of certain crimes. David Bergeron, chief of policy and budget development in the department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, says that the department hopes to send out further guidance regarding proper methods of reporting and classifying crime in an effort to ensure the reliability of the figures disseminated. It may also, he says, institute online tutorials to make compliance easier.

Despite the rise in some serious crimes, the report to Congress concludes that U.S. campuses have a lower incidence of crime than the nation as a whole and can be considered safe

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