By Travis DeNeal 23

A federal bill seeks to change the reporting of campus crime by closing loopholes in campus discipline procedures, but SIUC opposition to the legislation is mounting as the Undergraduate Student Government has created a task force to lobby against the bill.

The Accuracy in Campus Crime Reporting Act is touted by its supporters as a means of improving how colleges report crimes on their campuses. The bill, if passed, will open campus judicial hearings and mandate that colleges maintain open crime logs including the names of accused parties. The bill is in the House of Representative’s subcommittee.

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SIUC’s administration and USG oppose the legislation because they worry that some of the bill’s provisions might keep victims of crimes from reporting incidents.

Last week, USG established a task force that seeks to quash ACCRA. The task force has sent copies of the resolution to members of Congress and other universities and has sent a letter regarding USG’s position on ACCRA to The Washington Post.

Terry Huffman, Student Judicial Affairs coordinator, said at USG’s Oct. 24 meeting that opening judicial hearings could prevent students involved in sexual assault cases from reporting such incidents because they might feel humiliated or embarrassed by a hearing open to the public.

This could have serious implications on the student as well as Student Judicial Affairs, he said.

Student Press Law Center’s executive director Mark Goodman says such fears are unfounded.

That argument doesn’t hold much weight, Goodman said. It is the victims who got together to support this in the first place.

SIUC has a two-pronged closed hearing system for violations. A victim of a crime can request an administrative hearing or a hearing decided by the Student Judicial Board.

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A hearing can be opened to the public only if both the accuser and the accused agree.

Goodman and Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus Inc., a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving safety of students at colleges, said opening hearings ensures a fair judicial process.

The process should be no different than the process by which crimes and arrests are handled by state, local or federal law, Carter said.

The act, co-sponsored by Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., R-Tenn., and Rep. Charles Schumer, D-New York, is designed in part to reduce colleges’ abuse of the Family Educational Right to Privacy Act.

FERPA, also known as the Buckley Amendment, was designed to provide privacy for students’ education records. It lets colleges who prosecute criminal cases internally label conduct code violations as education records. Some colleges have used FERPA to artificially lower their annual crime report rates.

For example, Virginia Tech used the loophole to avoid reporting an alleged rape in 1994. In a similar instance, a former student is suing the University of Pennsylvania over the college’s denial of a sexual assault case.

The woman alleges that the university persuaded her to not file a criminal charge and to let the university handle the incident as a conduct code violation. According to the Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper, the university now claims the rape did not occur.

Huffman and Undergraduate Student Government Internal Affairs chairwoman Connie Howard said that because SIUC accurately reports its crime statistics, ACCRA will not improve University judicial proceedings.

Student Judicial Affairs and the University go out of their way to make sure that students are very much aware of the crime that happens at this University, Howard said.

Huffman also has said that a charge of criminal misconduct against a student, whether or not the student was convicted, would be a permanent part of the student’s judicial record.

USG agreed with the University’s position and passed a resolution opposing ACCRA, known as HR 715 in the U.S. House of Representatives, at its Oct. 24 meeting.

Howard, who leads USG’s task force, agrees with Huffman that ACCRA could reduce reportage of sexual assault cases, and that prospective employers might not hire a person charged with criminal misconduct.

Carter said fear of job discrimination is not a valid argument.

If an employer requests a student’s education records, the potential employee has the choice of whether or not to release those records, Carter said. If the request is denied, the employer is not obligated to hire the person.

Howard also said she worries that students’ lives may play second fiddle to numbers.

I don’t think students’ privacy should be sacrificed for statistics, she said.

Carter, however, said that increased accuracy and fairness will mean safer campuses nationwide.

This bill was developed with careful attention to victims of crimes, he said, and is a direct result of real problems faced by real people across the country.