I stumbled across two very recent articles that make reference to the Dickinson rape/murder/cover-up this past school year that I thought I’d pass along:
- From the Grand Rapids Press, “Warnings issued quickly after Ferris State assault.”
- From the In-House Counsel section of Law.com, “University GC Reprimanded for Inadequate Advice in Campus Murder Probe.”
Both are interesting and suggest lessons learned by others from EMU’s mistakes.
At Ferris State, the administration made a point of promptly alerting campus after a sexual assault on a female first year student by three men. To quote from the article:
The alert system, in place at Ferris for a few years, reflects a growing understanding on campuses nationwide about the importance of disclosing crime.
In contrast, Eastern Michigan University’s top administrators lost their jobs this year for violating federal law by failing to disclose a student murder on campus.
The Law.com article is a little more technical but I think more interesting because the audience of this publication seems to be institutional and corporate lawyers, and the way things were handled at EMU last winter is presented as an example of what not to do. Here’s a quote:
Experts say that while EMU is an extreme example of a school that didn’t follow the Clery Act, many other universities have failed to educate themselves about the law. Alan McEvoy, a sociology professor at Wittenberg University in Ohio and an expert on school violence, calls Eastern Michigan “a case study in what not to do.” But McEvoy adds that most colleges “are not in full compliance with the Clery Act.”
Alice Vachss, a former sex crimes prosecutor in New York who has advised universities on how to respond to campus violence, says there are lessons here for their general counsel. “What [EMU] did — which most universities do — is fail to have adequate policies and procedures in place for campus violence,” she says. Too often, Vachss adds, GCs sit passively on the sidelines until someone specifically asks for their advice.
My hope is that EMU folks have also learned from past mistakes.
