May 29, 2008
Criminal-Background Checks
Criminal-background and credit checks are becoming a common element of faculty and administrative searches. Many states, and an increasing number of private colleges, are requiring background checks prior to or as part of job offers. My university added them this year, and thus we have been navigating in new waters as we deal with candidates during the offer process.
A certain amount of griping has ensued. One of the clearest vestiges of academe’s history as a “gentleman’s profession” is the idea that we, as academics and holders of advanced degrees, are somehow above suspicion, and thus requiring a background check is insulting and degrades us as professionals. That sentiment is certainly understandable, as the presence of a background check is prima facie evidence that candidates are not being taken at their word.
The paradox, of course, is that only those whose word is not good get caught by a background check. I have been around long enough to know about cases where an impostor has gotten an academic job (easily avoided by the now almost-universal requirement for official transcripts sent directly to the employing institution) or where someone with a criminal record has been hired.
In today’s litigious atmosphere — and, more important, as part of our obligation to students, parents, and other constituencies — transcripts and background checks are a fair way to avoid potential hiring disasters.
However, there is another side of this issue. When an institution has a policy requiring background checks, that policy entails that whoever performs those checks be held to absolute standards of accuracy. A recent case discussed in The Chronicle’s Forums described a candidate’s experiences being offered a position contingent on a background check which later came back with negative information that led to the withdrawal of the offer. The information turned out to be wrong, and it fell to the candidate to correct the record, supplying numerous documents and affidavits certifying the candidate’s innocence. The offer was then reinstated only to be withdrawn again, apparently by the institution’s human-resources office. Why? Because the candidate had protested the negative finding.
If this candidate’s story is true (and it certainly sounds plausible), it indicates the worst possible kind of behavior on the part of the hiring institution. Certainly a university is right to protect itself, and a criminal background check is probably a good part of such self-protection. But colleges and universities also owe candidates the opportunity to clear any negative information that comes to light. They should never be penalized for protesting negative information that turns out to be wrong. Otherwise, such checks are merely the coarse and insulting bureaucratic instruments that a lot of academics suspect them to be.
Editor’s Note: David R. Evans, dean of the college of arts and sciences at Oklahoma City University, has joined the On Hiring blog as a regular contributor. Welcome.
By David R. Evans | Posted on Thursday May 29, 2008 | PermalinkComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: A New Chancellor for UW-Madison
Next: Presidential News
Guilty until proven innocent. Nice way to build morale.
— j May 29, 03:08 PM #
Criminal background checks OK. Don’t want child molesters near kids. (How come Ayers and his wife are college teachers when they bombed buildings?)
But credit checks? I have a bankruptcy on my credit – because of a community college breaching a contract. Does this mean I’m unhirable?
Unless applicants get a chance to explain negative information, credit checks for employment purposes are just another way to make sure poor people (who often have terrible credit) don’t ever get chance at college teaching jobs. Yet another way elites discriminate against the the rest of us.
— Muap Conners May 29, 03:53 PM #
I’m president of a background screening firm. The unfortunate truth is that many background checks sold to large companies and institutions are inexpensive database-driven reports that are often incomplete and inaccurate.
Before delivering public record information (such as a criminal history) to the employer, the background check agency should, under federal law, verify the accuracy of the information. The alternative to verifying the accuracy of the information is to provide the information to the job candidate at the same time they provide it to the employer. It sounds like neither of these responsibilities were met by the background screening firm in the example cited above.
LexisNexis, a dvision of the largest data broker in the world, recently settled a class action lawsuit for $20 million related to their execution of their responsibilites under the federal law. More info on that case can be found at http://blogs.imperativeinfo.com/imperative_information/2008/05/lexisnexis-sett.html
For most positions, we encourage employers NOT to consider credit. It simply isn’t relevant in most circumstances. The candidate’s honesty about their previous employment, education, and criminal history should be the employer’s main concern. In the case of an honest job candidate, the background check only affirms their honesty.
— Mike Coffey, Imperative Information Group May 29, 04:49 PM #
As an attorney and the president of a national background screening firm. I have talked with a nubmer of schools about this issue. It is very sensitive because faulty members can view a background check as a sign of mistrust, or evidence that Big Brother is alive and well.
In reality, a background screening program is a benefit to both faculty members and the school, and when done properly, is NOT an is not an invasion of privacy. Consider the following:
1. If a school hires someone with a fraudulent credential or an unsuitable criminal record, everyone suffers, including the reputation of the school and the faculty. Schools occupy a special position of trust in our society, and schools arguably have a greater duty of care, especially since so many young people are in attendance. A bad hire can also lead to litigation. Faculty members will hopefully see that theses checks are for the greater good of the school and of the entire faculty.
2. A background check is very focused to what can be found. Generally, it is looking for criminal records that bear some relevancy to the job. There are numerous that laws that limit the use of criminal records only to situations where there is a business necessity. It is unlikely for example, that a driving related offense will have any impact, but a serious sexual offense is something a school should know about.
3. All background checks are done in accordance with strict provision of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which gives applicants a great deal of rights, including the right to challenge a report before it is used if the applicant feels it was incomplete or inaccurate. If a background report is challenged, a screening firm has 30 days to conduct a full investigation.
4. A credit report should not be utilized unless it is directly related to the job, such as a person who is in the accounting department handling money. A personal bankruptcy certainly has no bearing on a candidate. A job candidate cannot be penalized for exercising a lawful right in a lawful manner.
For more information about background checks and applicant’s rights are at www.ESRcheck.com
— Les Rosen, Employment Screening Resources May 29, 06:22 PM #
1. re. post number 4’s point 3 – how would a candidate know?
2. guilty until proven innocent.
3. are you going to make them take drug tests too?
4. see number 2
5. Are you going to check to see if they smoke?
6. see number 2
7. are you going to check their cholesterol?
8. you get the point right? – where does it end? At some level you have to trust somebody or do you really want to live in the police state that you are helping to create?
I’m also curious as to how prevalent of a problem this actually is? Sounds as though an industry is trying to drum up business by creating a climate of fear of litigation.
— j May 29, 07:18 PM #
Just so you know, this happened to me. Exactly as is written here.
Cleared up the erroneous charges, appropriately protested and then lost the job.
— -c May 29, 07:40 PM #
I’m surprised that most universities have not yet resorted to mandatory MMPIs, pre-employment polygraphs, genetic profiling, and interview thumbnails of all known bi-peds during the previous three years. Let the applicant absorb such application costs and the carefree use/disposal of even more discriminatory information too.
Financial screening for duty bound introverts – the meddling nerve, outside of financially related positions. Nonetheless, criminal background checks, credit ratings, and real estate valuation inquiries are easy enough to obtain on interviewing faculty and administrators for free as well. It prospectively curbs mooching before tenure once in the hallowed halls.
— Thomas May 30, 04:11 AM #
re – #6 – I did not mean to imply that it is not having negative effects on candidates. It clearly is. My last sentence was meant to call into question whether there really is a big enough problem with candidates lying that requires the implementation of yet another very costly administrative layer that benefits no one outside of the industry designed to support it.
— j May 30, 08:59 AM #
J:
Unfortunately, resume “padding” is rampant. I have headed several searches that disqualified individuals based on “creative” interpretation of former position responsibilities. You would be surprises at the number of applicants with terminal degrees from diploma mills.
— Dr. Bill May 30, 12:41 PM #
Dr. Bill: Did you have to hire someone to do a criminal and credit background check on them to find out? Methinks our precious resources could be spent on something better. Like chalk.
— j May 30, 05:55 PM #
It seems that the students should be the ones that get the background checks. They are the ones shooting up campuses and putting faculty and other students in danger. Maybe all students should be required to provide proof that they don’t have a mental illness also. I haven’t heard anything about faculty shooting sprees on campuses.
— Deb May 31, 02:28 PM #
The VPAA currently doing her best to ruin my college is a resume impostor (and various other manifestations of rampant psychopathy). I wish the hiring committee would have checked her out, because she has fired two of our best people already, and who knows how many more she’ll take with her before we can push her out of here.
The worst is that upper admin is protecting her and trying to cover up what she did, because it reflects poorly on their failure to check her out.
Stay tuned for details. The whole story will surely be in the Chronicle before the year is done.
— Nora May 31, 03:48 PM #
If we are having trouble getting basic classroom supplies, should we really be spending big money on CYA background checks that could be easily handled by the search committee using Google? Transcripts and Googling someone would most likely have caught your VPAA #12. In an era of ever tightening state appropriations is this really a wise use of resources? If you are in Florida and the choice is between being able to do a search for a tenure line professor or having to make do with yet another adjunct because the Admin keeps becoming more and more expensive, whose interests are served? Do you tell parents and students – um yeah we’re raising tuition to cover background checks that really aren’t necessary but we’re insuring that some kid googling and looking at transcripts is getting rich. cheers!
— j May 31, 04:16 PM #
#13, though my ambivalence about background checks is, I hope, clear, you should know that they cost about $100 per candidate, and since normally you only check the candidate to whom you plan to offer the job, it’s hardly the apocalyptic expenditure you’re positing.
You can’t always find people’s criminal records with a simple google search.
And I do think parents are perfectly glad to have this done with faculty and staff.
There are problems and challenges with background checks, for sure, but what they cost isn’t really one of them.
— David R. Evans May 31, 05:02 PM #
Ask for transcripts (verify them). Ask for and examine references (talk to them as well). Google. Use Lexis-Nexis for court cases, etc. Doing this would most likely solve the “problem” and would not take that long if you’re only going to do it with finalists. ie. search committees doing their job ought to mitigate what is being trumpeted as a crisis. It is not a crisis. Even if it only costs $100, it is an unnecessary expenditure and could be better spent on something else. And in a system as large as Florida (or for a more cash strapped example – Wisconsin) that still would translate into tens of thousands of dollars spent with the only beneficiaries being the manufacturers of the perception of a crisis.
— j Jun 1, 07:39 AM #
I forgot to add that my main objection is to yet another layer of unproductive (counter-productive if you count morale) administrative expense. Even if it is low-cost on a case by case measure the broader costs are much higher. I used to teach at a large state U where the Administrators kept getting 5-10% raises every year (all made at least 2x what an Asst. Professor did – and some Assoc for that matter) while faculty were told that because of state budget restrictions we would only be getting 1-2% increases if at all. The point is that administration and administrative cost are consuming an ever larger share of resources in a climate where every one else is being asked to tighten their belts and there is much howling in the public about ever increasing tuition. Why add another expense that causes further erosion of morale without any appreciable gain (that could be obtained much more cheaply).
— j Jun 1, 07:49 AM #
J, again: not every criminal conviction goes to court (Lexis-Nexis), and not every university (and especially small, undergraduate college) has Lexis-Nexis access. For instance, my school has it, but it’s only accessible to law school faculty and students, so searches in A&S would have to beg that access. I’ve been at a SLAC that doesn’t have it at all, and it is extremely costly.
Administrative corruption is an entirely separate issue—administrators getting 10% raises while faculty get none is a real issue, but relative to background checks it’s a red herring.
Generally, I agree with you about administrative costs, particularly the proliferation of “HR roles,” of which background checks certainly would be one new one. But there are much bigger and less legitimate (or at least less arguable) expansions of administrative roles and privileges that are worth fighting against.
Transcripts—of course. References, sure, but do you think the previous school of the VPAA in #12 was going to say, “Oh, sure, hire her—she’s done ruining us so it’s time for her to move on and destroy a new place?” Institutions want to get rid of bad people, and making them someone else’s problem is one of the easier was to do so. (Also, this is kind of a red herring as well, as we’re likely talking incompetence and bad character rather than criminal behavior.)
Again, I also suspect that the general public would be shocked to find that we DON’T routinely employ background checks.
— David R. Evans Jun 1, 08:14 AM #
Credit Check!? I have heard of this in business, and I have objections to it there too, but for faculty members – there is so much room for abuse of this kind of investigation. What do they expect for those lower middle class and first generation college students in the 80s who took advantage of student loans – they often got into debt and some have bad credit. I hate the idea that this is then correlated with moral failure, but there is historical precedent to this (debtors’ prison) and should not be suprising…
I do not think credit should be a criteria for most faculty positions – usually people with good credentials are desperately trying to get a faculty position so they can REPAIR their credit!
— phd Jun 1, 06:22 PM #
#18, I agree totally on credit checks. The only people who should be subjected to them are people who handle significant sums of institutional money. This would exclude most faculty.
I am not sure about how to think about people administering substantial grants. However, these people are answerable not only to their institution but to the granting agency as well, so there are plenty of checks and balances.
Also, good credit is a much less significant criterion for being a good faculty member than is not being convicted of certain kinds of crime.
— David R. Evans Jun 1, 06:49 PM #
Many faculty members work with children in the course of their work (health professions, education, psychology, etc.). The parents whose children are involved are being reasonable when they expect that a check of everyone who works with their child in day care setting, school setting, health care setting, etc. has been checked and is not a child molester or someone with a past history of criminal violence. In today’s society, we all have a right to exect that.
— Linda Jun 2, 08:35 AM #
#20 – I (and all of my colleagues) only teach people who are adults. Do I/we need to be checked as well?
— j Jun 2, 08:43 AM #
David – your critique of my comments is well taken and I concede some of your points. However, I have yet to hear anything to convince me that this push for background checks is anything more than an industry stirring up fear in order to create a market for their services. It’s an old tactic borrowed from pharmaceutical advertising. Deploying the child molester card fits this exactly. Precisely how many faculty on your campus works with minors? On mine it would be about a half of a percent. I still am of the opinion that from a financial standpoint this is not a good use of resources. If money is tight (ask Wisconsin) then we really ought to consider how best to use the limited (and drying up) resources that we do have. Create another HR position or hire a faculty member? Raise tuition? Limit access to college education further?
— j Jun 2, 08:51 AM #
The only question I have is what to do with the results of a criminal background check. How bad is too bad? Do we not hire someone who has a DUI conviction some years ago? Of course there was the one guy convicted of theft from his previous univ. We decided that this WAS bad enough.
— M Jun 2, 09:13 AM #
At least for the summer camps where I volunteer, credit and criminal checks are a package deal. The administrators of the camp say the company they use automatically checks both—even though one’s credit history has little to do with one’s ability to make macrame bracelets with 7 year olds.
I don’t have a problem with background checks, per se. I have a problem with being penalized when you correct information that is inaccurate. With credit checks, one can check one’s own credit and fix problems before someone else knows about it. I’m not aware of any possibility of doing this with criminal background checks—and for someone with an EXTREMELY common first name/last name combination, the chances of my criminal record being inaccurate are pretty high (straightening out my credit report took forever.)
— Susan Jun 2, 12:37 PM #
Many fields require higher education to “get the job”. There are occassions where exposure to the criminal justice system has been the catalyst for someone to pursue a particular career ie counselor, probation officer, parole officer etc. It’s not much of a stretch for me to think the same could hold true for a college professor. People make mistakes. Many folk who have committed crimes after becoming employed have no criminal history at all. In light of all this I think it important a person be given an opportunitiy to show they’ve changed with criminal history questions such as “ have you been convicted of a felony in the past 12 years or have you been convicted of a misdemeanor in the past 5 years. Surely people should be allowed to redeem themselves and not be branded for life for something done way back in their past. There are alot of folk that have violated the law but didnt get caught??
— Jim Jun 2, 02:53 PM #
My story…I applied for a job I really wanted. I got an interview and it went really well (not just my opinion). I got a ding letter adn I didn’t feel bad about it it UNTIL……
A member of the search committee, who I had known from years before and with whom I had struck up a very easy kinship called me to let me know that I would have gotten the job had it not been for my conviction for embezzlement of funds and for assault and battery.
Stunned, I responded that I had never even received a parking ticket. To this he responded that I needed to correct my entries in Google.com, which identiified me with these convictions.
I learned a very sad and enfuriating lesson that day…The internet is NO PLACE to check on any applicant’s background. I cannot correct a record that is not mine and yet Pretentious U. with its smug SC gatekeepers thought nothing of libeling and slandering my professional and personal reputation with “hearsay” from a website with as much credibility as subway graffiti. What a disgrace. So this is what we’ve come to in our ignorance and arrogance. And we wonder why the academy continues to lose credibility as fast as an ice cube in the Sahara. How smart of us.
— Martin Jun 13, 10:16 PM #
My concern about all of this is in the practice of two institutions I have worked—both have made offers of employment; have had the new employee move to campus; and then ask them to fill out a background check form. Isn’t this a little late to be doing this and in bad taste to begin with? I have wondered if this might not also be illegal if not published in your employee handbook. Thoughts?
— Timothy Jun 14, 09:56 PM #