After the death in May of Yeardley Love, a senior at the University of Virginia, and the arrest on murder charges of George Huguely V, a classmate with a prior arrest unknown to the university, officials there made bold proposals. They suggested running regular criminal background checks on all students and setting up a system in which state law-enforcement agencies would notify the university of students’ arrests.
But three months of deliberation led the university to abandon those proposals, which had renewed debate about the fairness and utility of such measures.
“Neither approach is feasible,” Elizabeth P. Wilkerson, a spokeswoman, said in a written statement. Virginia’s new president, Teresa A. Sullivan, announced last week that the university would instead ask students to disclose annually whether they had been arrested or convicted of any crimes.
Prospective students at Virginia already answer questions, on the Common Application, about convictions for any felonies or misdemeanors, as well as about academic or behavioral misconduct at any educational institution. Since 2004, Virginia has also required all students to report any new arrests, under a policy buried in its “nonacademic regulations.”
Now, at the beginning of each academic year, all students attempting to log on to the university’s system for e-mail and course materials will see a prompt.
“On your honor as a University of Virginia student, since you were first admitted to the university until now, have you been arrested or convicted of any crime excluding minor traffic violations that did not result in an arrest or injury to others?” Students will have to click “Yes” or “No” and check a box acknowledging a continuing duty to report any criminal arrests to the dean of students within 72 hours.
A Viable Alternative
Conducting regular, effective background checks on all students would have been logistically impossible, said Allen W. Groves, Virginia’s dean of students. “I’m not aware of an online database where I could run 21,000 students and get information in a reasonable way,” he said. Legal and public-safety experts at a wide variety of colleges have questioned proposals for comprehensive student background checks because the checks would cost too much, involve too much work, and possibly return unreliable information.
The other proposal that the University of Virginia had considered, a notification system in which state law-enforcement agencies would report students’ arrests to the university, involved similar logistical challenges. The university’s former president, John T. Casteen III, and Virginia’s governor, Robert F. McDonnell, acknowledged as much at a meeting in May.
Such a system would have required a major investment to change national recordkeeping standards, said S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security on Campus, a watchdog group. “It would basically have taken a reworking on the federal level of the National Crime Information Center database.”
Beyond being concerned about logistics, officials at the university preferred a less intrusive, more candid approach drawing on the university’s honor code, Mr. Groves said.
“It is very consistent with the values we are trying to instill,” he said of the revised approach. “There is a lesson there in accepting responsibility and being truthful and forthcoming.”
‘Great Faith’
When students report having been arrested or convicted, Mr. Groves will investigate. He is now working with the university’s information-technology staff to develop a possible second round of electronic questions, which would ask for a description of the incident.
Mr. Groves, who is also a lawyer, will consider each case individually and deliberatively, he said. “I’m very cognizant of the fact, as an attorney, that an arrest is not a conviction.”
Depending on a student’s offense and the surrounding circumstances, the university may simply note it, said Mr. Groves. Or he might summon a student for a conversation—or recommend that he or she participate in, for instance, a substance-abuse program. In more severe cases, he may refer a student to the university’s threat-assessment team or to its judiciary committee for a disciplinary hearing. He will suspend only those students he considers active threats to themselves or others, Mr. Groves said.
Since he became dean of students three years ago, about 20 students have disclosed arrests, Mr. Groves said. He could not recall any self-reported incidents that had led to disciplinary sanctions. Only a small percentage of cases require such action, he said. “But in the world in which we operate, we’ve got to have this information.”
The university must also protect it. Administrators do not violate privacy laws when they request criminal information about students because those records are almost always public. But the university’s notes on any subsequent actions become education records, which are protected under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. All information pertaining to Virginia students will be stored in a locked database, Mr. Groves said.
If a student fails to disclose an arrest or conviction and administrators discover it by other means, they will probably refer the student to the judiciary committee, Mr. Groves said. But he expects the self-disclosure system to be successful.
“I do believe that when people are fully aware of the policy and their obligations under it, they will comply,” he said. “I have always had great faith in our students.”
Practical Challenges
Darby Dickerson is more doubtful. In national research on criminal background checks, Ms. Dickerson, dean of Stetson University’s College of Law, has found that many people don’t report their arrests. “A higher percentage fail to disclose than you would think,” she said.
And even when a student discloses accurate information, an arrest doesn’t foretell future bad behavior, just as a clean record is no assurance of safety, said Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, which recently surveyed colleges’ approaches to evaluating applicants’ criminal histories.
“The student may answer ‘No’ while stalking their ex-girlfriend,” Mr. Nassirian said. Several legal experts cautioned against focusing too much on self-disclosed criminal information in an overall risk-management strategy.
University of Virginia officials plan to evaluate their new practice by checking students’ disclosures against court records and noting what comes to light that students haven’t reported. Campus administrators are reaching out to their counterparts at other colleges in the state to set up a voluntary system of reciprocal notification: If your student is arrested here, I’ll tell you; if my student is arrested there, please tell me.
The success of Virginia’s new approach, which seems to be the first of its kind, could make it a model for campus safety. As colleges face increasing public pressure to improve security, many administrators remain wary of conducting background checks on all students.
Virginia is trying other measures, too, including a new “bystander training” this summer to help students learn when and how to intervene in crises. This fall the university plans to start an online safety-education program to train students to identify unsafe situations, threatening behavior, and peers in need of help.