On Campus Safety, the Left Is Hopelessly Confused

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on October 14, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.

Ah, October, when temperatures fall, men rake leaves, and universities publish their annual crime data, as required by the 1990 Clery Act. A surprising addition to the calendar, you say? Perhaps so. But that discordance is nothing compared to the bizarre politics of campus safety.

First, a review. In 1986, a Lehigh University freshman named Jeanne Clery was murdered in her campus dormitory, a depraved act of violence that led directly to the passage of the law bearing the young woman’s name. Each year, American universities that accept G.I. Bill or federal-loan dollars must publish a Security and Fire Safety Report designed to improve student well-being by alerting the public to campus crime statistics. As the Martin Center argued in 2022, Clery Act reporting can be both misleading and seemingly arbitrary, with institutions regularly revising politically charged stats—for example, those concerning “stalking”—upwards or downwards. Nevertheless, the requirement is based on a coherent and sound idea: that universities have an obligation to keep students safe and should reveal, at regular intervals, the extent to which they have succeeded or failed.

It was at least arguably with this notion in mind that the Biden education department leveled an unprecedented $14 million fine against Liberty University earlier this year. According to the department’s press release, the Lynchburg, Va., institution committed “material and ongoing violations” of the Clery Act between 2016 and 2023, failing, among other things, to “properly classify and disclose [its] crime statistics.” Though critics can—and did—argue that the feds’ interest in Liberty was a “malign” response to the university’s Christian values, the administration’s crackdown was not necessarily vindictive. I would love to see Uncle Sam remove himself from the student-loan business altogether, thus eliminating whole boatloads of regulatory attachments. Yet, as long as the feds are involved, it is at least theoretically reasonable to ask publicly supported colleges to maintain a safe quad.

If that were all there were to the story, you would probably not be reading this article. Running alongside the left’s campus-safety pragmatism, however, is an ideological vein that threatens to swamp the whole project of keeping college-goers out of harm’s way. Simply put, Democrats and their allies hold strange and incongruous views about criminals and crime, regularly robbing the Peter of campus safety to pay social-justice Paul. Looked at in toto, recent developments call into serious question progressives’ commitment to crime-free universities. If that commitment isn’t real, it is difficult to see this spring’s Liberty fine as anything other than selective—and political—prosecution.

Take, for example, the so-called Ban the Box movement, endorsed by the Department of Education in 2023. According to that campaign’s sages and illuminati, colleges commit a moral error by asking prospective students to disclose their criminal histories. The attendant reasoning, made plain in the ed department’s guidance on the subject, is that “removing the question of criminal history [from college applications] will significantly lower barriers to admission for formerly incarcerated students.” That is, of course, true, just as weakening academic requirements will lower barriers for the intellectually unprepared. Left unremarked upon, though, is the fact that increasing criminal access to campus runs directly counter to the thinking behind the Clery Act. Universities can prioritize campus safety, or they can prioritize education’s restorative and rehabilitative properties. One is tempted to sympathize with their plight. No matter what colleges do, some members of the public will be displeased.

Ironically, the Department of Education’s guidance makes many of the same arguments that a colleague and I laid out in our aforementioned 2022 Martin Center article. “Violent crime on campus is … a rare occurrence,” the feds allow. “In general, college students are at lower risk for violent crime relative to nonstudents.” These are accurate and important concessions and ought to be part of any legislative conversation when the Clery Act is next reauthorized. Where the ed department goes wrong, however, is in its preposterous assertion that “very little research link[s] individuals with criminal records to campus crimes.” One of the two papers used to support this doubtful claim is a 2013 “pilot” examination that looked at a mere 120 students. The other is a 2007 Ed.D. dissertation that actually leads with the 2004 murders of two UNC Wilmington students. Both perpetrators were fellow UNCW enrollees, one current and one former, and both had previous criminal histories! I suppose those tragedies are meant to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Sadly, it is not only in the “Ban the Box” movement that the left’s campus-safety confusion can be seen. Similar perplexities attend progressive attitudes toward campus policing in general, especially in our post-George Floyd era of dilettantish anti-police sentiment and pro-Hamas encampments. When, in July of this year, Stony Brook University’s Maurie McInnis assumed the presidency of Yale, she did so despite having narrowly avoided censure by the Stony Brook faculty senate mere weeks earlier. McInnis’s crime? On May 1, faced with antisemitic radicals refusing to make way for a previously scheduled Jewish student event, she called in the campus police to disperse the mob.

If that story sounds familiar, it is because analogous happenings took place all over the country during the pro-Hamas protests of spring ’24. At Columbia, Arizona State, Northeastern, NYU, and many other universities, campus and local police cleared encampments and arrested rule- and law-breaking students, many of whom were threatening the safety of their Jewish peers. In each and every case, college leftists took to social media in the days that followed to condemn police and administrative actions. Undoubtedly, these progressive students and faculty members were merely singing from the progressive hymnal. The Nation: “University-based police departments have … shown themselves to be … capable of brutalizing students.” Inside Higher Ed: “The [campus-safety] answer surely is not more police.” The Chronicle of Higher Education: “We should abolish the campus police.” Does this sound like a movement with an authentic concern for the victims of crime?

Here in North Carolina, a similar confusion has reigned since at least 2018, when student protesters toppled UNC-Chapel Hill’s iconic “Silent Sam” monument, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy more than 100 years earlier. As the Raleigh News & Observer reported shortly after the statue’s—illegal—removal, Chapel Hill had “installed surveillance cameras and spent $390,000 on security around the statue.” Yet efforts to prevent the monument’s destruction appear to have been halfhearted at best, with police largely letting events play out and administrators failing to erect barricades despite advance knowledge of the protest. A thought experiment for the reader: Would today’s campus leaders stand by and allow the destruction of, say, a monument to President Obama? If, as seems clear to me, the answer is “no,” then we have left altogether the realm of justice. Some crimes, to borrow George Orwell’s endlessly applicable phrase, are more equal than others.

Of course, it is easy to poke fun at obvious double standards and hypocrisy. The more difficult task is parsing the utter inconsistency of campus progressives where public safety is concerned. In 2016, the Daily Tar Heel published an editorial under the heading “Silence Is Violence,” arguing that the university “system … doesn’t care” about sexual assault. Last month, having apparently soured on criminal justice, the same paper ran an article lambasting Chapel Hill’s latest batch of security cameras. Allow me to resolve the tension. Still crackling with #MeToo energy, the left cares very much about sexual violence in all of its modes and iterations. But petty theft, disorder, vandalism, illegal drug-use? Progressives are usually on the side of the lawless.

Will the Clery Act be felled one day by these unresolvable contradictions? Probably not. Should it? Even I can’t quite decide. One thing, however, is certain. Progressives can harp all day about “safety,” “violence,” and other contemporary campus concerns. But there is no reason to suppose that they mean it.

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