Case Materials- ED Final Program Review Determination Letter (12/20/06) Revised OSU Clery Report (2006) SOC Complaint (03/29/04)

Columbus, Ohio-Ohio State University (OSU) has been required to correct their campus crime reporting after a U.S. Department of Education (ED) review found underreporting and improper disclosures made to students under a federal law known as the Jeanne Clery Act. The Act, named after a student who was killed at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University in 1986, is intended to ensure that colleges warn their students about serious crimes on campus. The two year long review concluded in December and the results were recently released by Security On Campus, Inc. (SOC) a national non-profit advocacy organization that had requested the review in 2004 on behalf of a campus acquaintance rape survivor.

“The most notable improvement is that OSU has been required to do a better job collecting crime reports from campus officials other than police,” said S. Daniel Carter the Vice President of SOC. “They only reported 9 sexual assaults in 2003, the last year ED reviewed, but reported 29 for 2005 which is a much more realistic number for a large campus like OSU’s. Many offices on campus deal with crimes, especially rape, and the law recognizes how important that data is to a complete picture of campus crime.”

Statistics aren’t the only area that has seen improvement at OSU. The case that led to the review involved two women who reported to campus authorities just weeks apart in 2002 that they’d been raped by the same male acquaintance. Although the Clery Act requires colleges to issue timely warnings when there is an ongoing threat they never did so in this case. ED found that it was OSU’s “general practice” that such warnings were “not issued in cases of reported acquaintance rape.” That policy has since changed and warnings will now be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The federal review also found that OSU had not included all required information in their police department’s public crime log, such as the date when a crime occurred if different from when it was reported, or any information at all if a formal report hadn’t been made. In addition, OSU had been missing deadlines for distributing a required annual security report to current and prospective students and staff. Both violations were corrected prior to the review’s conclusion last year according to a summary report produced by ED.

The ED report can be accessed on the SOC web site at http://www.securityoncampus.org/.

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