Coming Mon: The 100 Most Dangerous College Campuses In New England

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Tracey Minkin, GoLocalProv Features Editor

 

How safe--or unsafe--are the college campuses in New England?

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On Monday, March 25, GoLocalProv will release its first ranking of the 100 Most Dangerous College Campuses in New England… and what these rankings reveal may surprise you.

Whereas parents might think that a dangerous campus is one that sits at the crossroads of dangerous neighborhoods, the situation inside New England's campuses is far more complex--and difficult at best to capture.

Crimes ranging from property crimes of burglary, car theft and even arson, to violent crimes including aggravated assault, robbery, sexual offenses, manslaughter and murder occur on the region's campuses and since 1990 must be reported by each educational institution to the US Department of Education, as mandated by the Clery Act.

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And those numbers, broken down by campus, by year, are all available to the public. This formed the basis for GoLocal's first ever look at the incidence of crimes as reported by each campus in New England, and an assessment of crime rates based on each college's enrollment, to form a statistically comparable basis for ranking.

Reporting crimes on campus

The US Department of Education's Clery database is both illuminating in its expansiveness, but challenging in the reporting that informs its data. Longtime concerns have existed about how well each college does or does not comply with the admittedly complex Clery requirements of what constitutes each crime, and how it must be counted (a 285-page handbook exists to guide schools in compliance).

Further, a surge in campus-based outrage both in New England and nationwide has called many college's attitudes about criminal activities on its campuses into question. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, for example, former student Angie Epifano published an account in October, 2012, of her rape at Amherst in 2011 and detailed what she described as a response from the college so inhibiting that she felt forced to withdraw. Epifano's piece cracked open a series of allegations about the highly regarded small liberal arts college's handling--and reporting--of sexual assault, and the school has already engaged in an in-house assessment of its practices, with results that have stirred even more controversy.

UNC and national actions

Several months later in January 2013, three women at the University of North Carolina--Andrea Pino, UNC alumna Annie Clark, and UNC student Landen Gambill, all of them sexual assault survivors--filed a formal complaint with the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights on behalf of themselves and 64 other victims. The women alleged that UNC had violated assault survivors' rights under the Campus Sexual Assault Victims' Bill of Rights, the Clery Act and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and equal opportunity mandates under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The situation at UNC-Chapel Hill has deteriorated further, and the U.S. Department of Education's Clery Act Compliance Division has announced that it will conduct a review of the university to see if the school violated federal law in its response to sexual violence and other crimes.

Clery Compliance Coordinator James Moore III said that this review is in response to a complaint that the school "failed to accurately and completely disclose" its campus crime statistics--exposing the weak center of Clery statistics.

Clery Act data

There has never been a more volatile time with regards to the reporting and handling of college crime, which has inspired GoLocal's research into what data currently exists at every campus in the region.

See what the Clery data reveals and hear students from local schools talk about what they think of the crime and reporting on their campuses. Find out how schools of all sizes look when their data is exposed and assessed. The topic has never been more timely.

Coming Monday.  

 

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