Accidents Rise on Campuses as Inspections Decline

A Chronicle analysis finds serious injuries have risen 41% since the mid-1980s

Related materials

Table: Government oversight lessens for college workplaces

Table: How The Chronicle analyzed OSHA data

Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Ralph O. Allen, director of environmental health and safety at the University of Virginia, about whether the federal government should regulate workplace safety on campuses more strictly.

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines 150 Campuses Win Recognition in Survey of Great Colleges to Work For More than 300 four-year and two-year colleges signed up for the second annual survey by The Chronicle, and 39 were named to a new Honor Roll for their workplace policies. New Top Republican on House Panel: Washington Doesn't Always Know Best They Thought Globally, but Now Colleges Push Online Programs Locally Jill Biden Shines Global Spotlight on U.S. Community Colleges A Town Rich in Colleges and Cows Gains a Crown College Towns as Baby Names? A Few May Resist Trendiness Commentary Kevin Carey: Stanford U., Duke U., Rice U., ... and Gates U.?

By JEFFREY BRAINARD

When a fire ripped through a maintenance room in the physics building at the University of Maryland at College Park in October 2002, a master electrician, Kurt G. Tassche, died of smoke inhalation. While four other university workers managed to escape, Mr. Tassche, 41, was trapped by Christmas decorations and chairs stored in the cramped space. The illegally stored items were among six serious violations cited by state safety officials during their investigation of the fire.

Serious accidents, in which workers were killed or hospitalized, have became more common on college campuses, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal safety-inspection records. Maintenance workers were the employees most commonly affected.

Nearly 200 significant campus incidents were cited by government officials between 1996 and early 2006, up from the 140 serious injuries in the decade before. The increase well outpaced the growth in the number of nonprofessional employees at colleges.

That escalation also came during a period when the government conducted fewer inspections of workplaces, particularly academic employers. The Chronicle analysis found that in the last 10 years, enforcement of occupational-safety rules at colleges fell sharply, with fewer inspections and citations for serious violations.

Observers attribute the drop to the expansion of campus health-and-safety departments and their progress in reducing hazards. But university safety officers, government officials, and union safety advocates who work with colleges were stumped to explain the surge in accidents.

The numbers suggest that "colleges and universities are paying attention to these things, but they need to continue to work on them," says Ralph O. Allen, director of environmental health and safety at the University of Virginia.

Among the key findings of the Chronicle analysis:

• Fewer government occupational-safety inspectors are visiting college campuses. There were 2,776 inspections from 1996 to early 2006, about 40 percent below the level in the previous 10-year period. Inspections of all types of workplaces dropped just 15 percent between these two periods.

• Although the number of serious injuries has risen, the number of "serious violations" — conditions likely to cause death or "serious physical harm" — cited by inspectors dropped by more than half, to 2,772.

• Most fines against colleges were relatively small, a median of $1,100, and even serious violations did not always result in fines.

• Enforcement varied widely with geography. Of the top 100 colleges receiving the highest cumulative dollar amounts in fines from 1996 to 2006, nearly half were in California or New York.

Expanded Safety Departments

Workplace safety is regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration but is handled differently in various states. In about half the states, state agencies oversee both public and private employers on behalf of OSHA because those states' legislatures chose to do so. In 26 other states, Congress requires that OSHA monitor private colleges but not public ones.

Over all, college campuses seem to be safer than many other workplaces. OSHA reports that, on average, 2.7 out of every 100 employees at private colleges suffered a nonfatal work-related injury or illness in 2005, the last year for which numbers were available. The national average for all industries was 4.6 per 100 workers.

Academic institutions have been working over the past several years to improve safety precautions campuswide. In response to a crackdown by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1999, many colleges changed policies on the storage and handling of hazardous materials. Following a dormitory blaze that killed three students at Seton Hall University in 2000, colleges revamped their fire-safety procedures. And after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and again after Hurricane Katrina, institutions drew up emergency-preparedness plans.

To carry out those changes, many colleges expanded their safety departments, which often monitor occupational health, says Robin L. Elliott, chair of the Campus Safety, Health, and Environmental Management Association.

"My sense is that these [occupational-safety] programs are mature and well developed," says Ms. Elliott, who is director of occupational health and safety at the University of Delaware. However, she says, "health-and-safety offices are not overfunded, and with their additional responsibilities, offices might be spread thin."

Since 1996, at least 29 people have died in work-related accidents on campuses, The Chronicle found. In 2005 a worker who was not wearing a safety harness fell off an extendable lift while changing light bulbs above a basketball court at Tennessee State University. In 2001 a custodian at the State University of New York College at Oswego fell off the back of a truck while moving a half-ton printing press, which toppled over and crushed him.

Such accidents — workers falling or being struck by objects — were among the most common campus incidents that resulted in fatalities or hospital stays, according to The Chronicle's analysis.

Fines Stay Small

Colleges that do not find and eliminate workplace hazards risk being fined. But the amount is typically a pittance, if the institutions pay at all. In part, that is because some states, like Tennessee, lack the power to fine public institutions. In other states, such as New York, inspectors typically agree not to levy a fine if the employer fixes the cited problems.

When fines are imposed on colleges, federal regulations allow charges of up to $7,000 for each serious violation. But OSHA officials have discretion to negotiate that down, based on the employers' past records and other factors. "My sense is that if you're trying to do the right thing and you don't get it all quite right, regulators aren't interested in trying to beat on you," said Mr. Allen, the safety director at Virginia. "If you're not trying, they're more likely to try to get your attention by citing a whole bunch of violations."

Partly because of limitations on fining public universities, the institutions with the highest number of serious violations often do not pay a penalty. Of the 50 institutions with the largest cumulative numbers of serious violations from 1996 to 2006, only half were hit with any fine.

Fewer than half of the 198 serious accidents on campuses over the last decade resulted in any fine. When there was one, the median amount was $3,000. Only about a third of the 100 highest individual fines against colleges involved deaths or serious injuries, The Chronicle found.

Inspectors tend to base fines on the number of employees who could have been seriously hurt, whether or not they actually were. In fact, the highest fine against a college involved no immediate fatality. Long Island University was fined $147,250 because contractors removing asbestos on the campus in 1999 did not take precautions to protect workers from exposure.

The largest fine for a campus-workplace fatality from 1996 to 2006 was $15,000, at the University of Vermont. A staff member at the university's Proctor Maple Research Center had been driving a tractor on uneven ground, and it flipped. He was crushed and died because the vehicle lacked an adequate roll bar and a seat belt, as required by regulation.

OSHA is unlikely to increase its fines against colleges anytime soon. The agency is focusing its budget, which since 2002 has not kept pace with inflation, on enforcement action against industries with the highest injury rates and on helping companies voluntarily comply with rules.

However, that approach often ignores the service-sector employees, including ones on campuses, who now make up the majority of workers nationally and who suffer the majority of occupational injuries, says William K. Borwegen, director of occupational health and safety for the Service Employees International Union. Its 1.8 million members include thousands of college workers.

"An OSHA inspector will drive by a hospital or campus where 1,000 people are working and go to an industrial plant where a few dozen are working," said Mr. Borwegen. "In industries with low injury rates, like colleges, they employ a lot of people, so a little bit of additional oversight could have an incredible impact. OSHA is stuck in this industrial mind-set."

For colleges, the incentives for improvements may lie beyond avoiding inspections and fines: in reducing workers'-compensation costs, maintaining productivity, and avoiding bad publicity.

After the death of Mr. Tassche at Maryland, the university was immune from any fine because Maryland law does not allow the state's safety inspectors to fine public employers.

However, administrators took a number of steps to fix the problems. They inspected 1,500 maintenance rooms on the campus to remove items stored there, increased training for employees, reviewed electrical systems, and renovated the circuitry in the 50-year-old John S. Toll Physics Building.

University administrators also proposed to replace the structure, which a committee of reviewers from other institutions found in 2005 was "in deplorable condition."

The university has asked the Maryland General Assembly since Mr. Tassche's death for money to build a new building. But Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, included none for the project in his budget for next year.