Marshall University Under Investigation by U.S. Dept of Education

Student journalists at Marshall University in West Virginia have uncovered a troubling practice at their school’s campus security office. Last Thursday, while investigating rumors of a sexual assault, reporters from the Parthenon contacted the MU police department to obtain campus crime logs. What they ended up being given over the course of that day were two different crime logs — only one of which contained the record of the alleged assault. The student paper’s website has a great story detailing when and by whom the staffers were shown these differing logs and raising questions about the implications of this practice. The Parthenon reporters were particularly unsettled by the fact that they read of the assault in the local Charleston Gazette (which apparently had no trouble accessing the complete crime log), and yet couldn’t verify the information with campus police. As the Parthenon relates:

The Parthenon had been unable to obtain any information on the allegations, despite a story published by the Charleston Gazette on Thursday that a report of sexual assault was obtained from the Marshall University Police Department’s crime log.

From what the Parthenon and the Gazette have pieced together, it appears that the MU security office has been keeping two separate crime logs: one containing what they are legally bound to include under the Clery Act, and another with other records. What’s odd is that the Parthenon reporters were given the latter when they first approached MU police for information on the alleged assault. When they could find no record of the incident in this log, they went back and were given a different log, this time in a binder with “Clery Act” written on it. Now, keeping records in this manner is not necessarily a violation of the Clery Act, as the Gazette notes, but it seems clear that something’s not right. It seems to me that because this system appears to be obfuscating the information that the Act mandates be made public, there’s definitely a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Clery Act. And that’s a huge problem.  Even if the system that MU police are using were not problematic, clearly it’s not being carried out properly. According to the Parthenon report

A Parthenon reporter who asked to review the crime log on multiple occasions during the semester was not given the Clery Act binder.

This could be happening simply to due improper training of security staff, not a deliberate attempt to keep some crime information under wraps, but that doesn’t make it less of a red flag.

Marshall officials are insisting that they have acted within the law. As Jonathan Kassa of Security on Campus told the Gazette, it’s difficult to know at this point whether the University has violated the Clery Act. The school is now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, so I’ll definitely be watching to see what comes out of that process. Kassa is completely right when he  notes that “Considerable questions remain, and students deserve a straightforward answer.” And that’s really the bottom line. The staffers at the Parthenon have done their campus community a great service by bringing this to light, and they should be commended for their diligence and commitment. With luck, the end result will be that MU students become better informed, MU officials improve their efforts when it comes to campus safety, and other students will be inspired to look more closely at their own campuses and hold administrators accountable when needed. But that’s going to require full cooperation from MU police and officials, and I hope students let their administrators know that’s what they expect.

For more information about the Clery Act and why it matters, check out SAFER’s Activist Resource Center (this page is a good place to start), as well as Security on Campus.