This situation is particularly common on campuses in urban neighborhoods that are either actually high in crime or (more commonly) understood by the parents and students of the university to be threatening, places like the University of Pennsylvania on Philly’s historically black and working-class west side. “Penn kids (not me!) would smoke pot on the campus green and other places without getting arrested,” recalled one Penn alumna “There were fraternities known for hard drugs, and they weren’t raided. But black kids would be frisked right off campus.”
This patrolling against perceived outsiders can have catastrophic consequences. On July 19, 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer named Ray Tensing noticed a missing license plate on a car and approached an unarmed black man named Samuel Dubose who was sitting in the driver’s seat, just a few blocks from campus. Dubose attempted to drive off, and Officer Tensing shot and killed him. He and his colleagues gave an official account of what happened that differed dramatically, prosecutors said, from what would later appear on the police video.
Okay, you might say: so elite campuses are disorderly in a way that might make Kelling and Wilson nervous, and yes, the community norms allow a whole lot of illicit activity that wouldn’t be tolerated in a poor urban neighborhood. But the kinds of poor urban neighborhoods that police are charged with keeping orderly are also places of exceedingly high violence. Brown University, for example, lacks shoot-outs and drive-bys. So, you might argue, police at Brown can tolerate higher levels of disorder.
This is true. I don’t want to overcompare what happens on elite campuses and what happens in poor neighborhoods. The constant looming threat of gun violence in the latter alters much of how poor communities experience crime and violence, and much of the way they are policed.
But it is simply not the case that campuses are entirely free of violence or that “disorder” in these places can’t plausibly be blamed for leading to a lack of safety. First, the world of Greek life can often be the source of tremendous sadism, abuse, cruelty, and physical danger. In her in-depth exposé of Greek culture, Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic documents the number of deaths and liability claims associated with Greek houses across the country. “The number of lawsuits that involve paddling gone wrong, or branding that necessitated skin grafts,” she writes, “or a particular variety of sexual torture reserved for hazing and best not described in the gentle pages of this magazine, is astounding.”
Then there are the shockingly high rates of sexual assault on college campuses. Our best studies indicate that about 20 percent of women are sexually assaulted during their four years on campus. The overwhelming majority of these assaults are committed by someone the survivor knows, and a relatively small group of repeat offenders seem to account for a large portion of the assaults. And only a tiny percentage of these assaults (around 12 percent according to one study) are actually reported.
In 1986 a freshman named Jeanne Clery at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania was raped and murdered in her dorm by a fellow student. Her parents, frustrated with the lack of information from schools about safety on campus, set about advocating for campus safety and successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Clery Act into law in 1990.
The Clery Act compels colleges and universities to report crime on campus to the federal government annually as well as issue warnings to students. Major institutions, from Penn State to Virginia Polytechnic, have been investigated for apparent failures of transparency under the law. Subsequent amendments to the act, and developments in federal guidance on compliance with Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, have required increased reporting of how colleges deal with allegations in their internal disciplinary procedures. In the last several years, thanks to sustained investigative reporting and high-profile cases of systematic mishandling of sexual assault claims (like at Baylor University, which brought down former president and chancellor Kenneth Starr), the issue of sexual assault on campus has once again captured the public’s attention.
Michelle Anderson, the president of Brooklyn College, has written extensively on campus justice and sexual assault. She says it’s a mistake to view campus rape as a problem distinct from rape more broadly. Given the way rape is dealt with in other environments, from the military chain of command to the regular criminal justice system, she says, it’s hard to make a case that the mishandling of the crime on campus is particularly egregious. It’s more that the crime of rape itself, she argues, so rooted in conceptions of women as property, has not caught up to our current conception of consent, agency, and violence.
But when the outside world looks at the world of campus justice, it can at first seem downright bizarre that almost none of what happens on campus is ever referred to a judicial system outside the college. Crimes as bad as rape are punished with only a maximum of expulsion, and even that is fairly rare. Over the years, an entirely separate justice system has developed in colleges and universities that encompasses transgressions that are violations of criminal law (theft, rape) and those that aren’t (cheating).
It’s not just campuses that run their own internal and parallel justice systems. Michelle Anderson, who’s also worked with the Department of Defense in developing policies for sexual assault, told me “in the military community, you have exactly the same thing: ‘These are our boys. . . . He’s a good one. He’s one of us. He’s a leader in the squadron.’ . . . The desire to have a community police itself creates the same kinds of conflicts.”