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Chapter Seven - The Legacy of Claimsmakers
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 181-200
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Summary
We want to briefly discuss a central presumption of the Clery Act – that students have a right to know about crime on campuses because [institutions of higher education] are potentially dangerous places. To a degree, it is difficult to argue against students having more knowledge about the safety risks of the [schools] that they are attending or may choose to attend. However, using the law to address social problems…is not cost free. It is burdensome on the [schools] to have to implement an unfunded mandate that requires them to collect crime statistics…and to publish and distribute annual security reports. In this regard, it seems reasonable to place the Clery Act in an appropriate social context about whether college and university campuses are, in fact, sufficiently dangerous places to warrant legislatively mandated oversight.
The social construction of campus crime as a new American social problem began during the late 1980s and into the 1990s with claims made by four groups: Security On Campus, Inc. (SOC); campus feminists; student crime victims and their families; and public health researchers. Collectively, their claims created a damning picture of the “new reality” of the dark side of the ivory tower. Each group claimed ownership of a particular aspect of the campus crime problem and legitimatized ownership of that component. With the help of electronic and print media, each group spread its message to the public about the problem it had identified. Eventually, each group had its claims institutionalized, and through individual and collective efforts, the legislative and judicial branches of government established new mandates and rulings designed to attack the problems of violence, vice, and victimization on college campuses. Administrators at postsecondary institutions responded, in turn, by implementing new campus-based policies or programs aimed at complying with the mandates.
Claims about crime occurring on American college and university campuses and the spread of these claims occurred despite historical evidence showing that violence, vice, and victimization had existed on American college and university campuses for nearly 300 years. Yet, within two decades, four activist groups had convinced not only the parents of college-age children but the American public as well that campus crime was a “new and dangerous threat” to the health, safety, and well-being of millions of American college-age students. As the public demanded action, state legislatures and then Congress became involved and created new policy mandates concerning how higher education would respond to the “new” problem of campus crime.
Chapter Five - Constructing Postsecondary Institutional Liability for Campus Crime
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 111-138
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On the one hand, we have a very tight regulatory environment and horrific liability exposures today. On the other hand, we have security folks, accustomed to compartmentalized jobs, who now find themselves on the front lines. Anything that happens on campus – from date rape, to murder, to IT encroachments – lands at their feet.
Call it what you will, as long as you make it a priority on your campus.
American colleges and universities have evolved into such complex organizations that it is not unusual for them to resemble small cities. To illustrate, college campuses occupy physical space, in some cases several square miles, and often possess lines of demarcation (e.g., gates and fences or green space) that separate them from adjacent spaces. Colleges and universities provide housing to hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of young people in dormitories and on-campus apartments, and many of them are living away from their families for the first time. Thousands of people may be drawn to postsecondary institutions as visitors and because of the employment opportunities they offer. Colleges and universities are also home to many entertainment options, including cultural events such as concerts or musical performances; artistic readings and lectures; and seasonal athletic competitions, which sometimes occur before 100,000 or more people gathered in large stadiums. College and university campuses commonly offer physical fitness facilities and may provide dental, optical, mental health, and medical services to countless students, visitors, and patients. Indeed, in some instances a college campus may house a major medical center, which could include one or more hospitals, numerous clinics, and even high-level research laboratories devoted to solving the problems of emerging diseases.
As colleges and universities grew in size and mission, their daily operations became increasingly more complex. This growth resulted in their safety and security needs also becoming more pressing and more complicated. As is the case with their city counterparts, colleges and universities have to provide a range of safety and security measures for students, staff, and visitors to help prevent and respond to not only criminal events but those events involving natural or man-made disasters, such as toxic spills and fires.
Chapter Two - Constructing Campus Crime as a New Social Problem
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 29-51
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On April 5, 1986, the whole Clery family fell victim to the medieval myth that college campuses that look safe are safe and the policy of a lot of college campuses, if it’s negative to their image, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
Beginning in the late 1980s, mass-media sources were not the only ones focusing on the apparent emergence of a dark side of the ivory tower. Elected officials, government agencies, and academic researchers also began focusing their attention on it as well. In the late 1980s and early 1990s several states – including Pennsylvania, California, and Tennessee – passed “campus crime legislation” designed, among other goals, to ostensibly force postsecondary institutions to publish their crime statistics annually. In the 1990s Congress also passed federal campus crime legislation, which it then amended several times, including most recently in 2008. This legislation, originally known as the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act of 1990, mandates all postsecondary institutions eligible to participate in federal financial aid programs to, among other requirements, compile an annual report on security policies and crime statistics for their campuses and make it available to the public, including prospective and current students and employees.
Additionally, throughout the 1990s a small but relatively prolific group of researchers from a range of disciplines began conducting social scientific studies into the extent and nature of crime on college campuses and published that work in both academic and popular press outlets. In the late 1990s the U.S. General Accounting Office expressed its concerns over “a steady rise in violent crime [being] reported on some college campuses,” while news outlets including the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times frequently reported that “heinous crimes” were routinely occurring on (or near) college and university campuses in the United States.
Chapter Four - Constructing the Sexual Victimization of College Women on Campus
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 81-110
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Until the 1980s, most people assumed that college campuses were a safe environment for women. The little concern that existed for women’s safety on campus was limited to stranger rapes, although these are relatively rare compared to women’s victimization by men they know.
Sadly, the sexual victimization of college women on campus is nothing new. The stereotypical lecherous professor not only has been parodied in the arts but has become symbolic of how some members of the academy exploit their positions to garner sexual favors from students. Beyond suffering sexual harassment from their professors, college women also experience various forms of sexual harassment from their peers as well. Further, empirical evidence reveals that sexual assaults of college women by college men – including coercive fondling and rape – also occur with some frequency on college campuses. Only since the 1980s, however, has discourse about the sexual victimization of college women on campus changed, resulting not only in new orientations toward the issue but in policies aimed at both preventing it and responding to such behavior when it occurs.
To understand how the construction of campus crime as a new social problem occurred during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, we now look at a second group of claimsmakers, campus feminists, outraged over what they saw as “epidemic levels” of sexual victimization experienced on campus by female students throughout their collegiate years. Campus feminists claimed that young women enrolled at postsecondary institutions and hoping to obtain educational and economic equality were experiencing neither. Instead, they were being subjected not only to the physical and emotional horrors of being raped or sexually assaulted by dates and acquaintances (primarily college men) but also to the horror of having college or university administrators disbelieve, discredit, or attempt to silence them in an effort to preserve the public images of their colleges and universities. Just as Security On Campus, Inc., constructed the new problem of unsafe and violent college campuses by claiming that on-campus violence was rampant, that college or university administrators knew this but failed to take appropriate steps to address the problem, and that they also failed to adequately address the needs of victims, campus feminists, concerned with the sexual victimization of college women, likewise focused their attention on three fronts.
Chapter Three - Constructing Unsafe and Violent College Campuses
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 52-80
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The impact of crime on college and university campuses has increased dramatically. The Columbine High School tragedy confronts all educational institutions with the previously unimaginable possibility that members of our campus communities are capable of planning and carrying out…a brutal massacre of students, faculty and administrators.
While the spree murders that occurred at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University raised serious public concerns over the safety of college and university students in the United States, campus violence is hardly new. With some exceptions during the 1960s, media coverage of violence on college campuses during the 20th century generally took a matter-of-fact tone. That is, the facts of these incidents were reported – who, what, where, and when – along with observations from various commentators on both sides of the larger gun control debate. However, claims about these incidents serving as a harbinger of bigger problems were largely absent.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, however, a change occurred in the tone of mass-media coverage of campus violence. What had been relatively routine reports of serious criminal incidents on college campuses now began including language hinting that something alarming was occurring that put millions of college students at risk of becoming the victims of serious violence – including murder. For example, a 1981 story appearing in the New York Times indicated that “violence was becoming a way of life for students” and that “large numbers” of students involved in romantic relationships were “physically abusing their partners.” Similarly, a 1984 New York Times story indicated that rioting by college students after athletic contests or when large parties were broken up by police was becoming common on college campuses.
Contents
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp v-vi
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Chapter One - Violence, Vice, and Victimization on American College and University Campuses
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 1-28
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Despite…numerous warnings…[19th-century] college students continued to consume alcohol, play cards, bet on horse races, and pursue sexual liaisons. They also used violence to settle conflicts among themselves and to protest college discipline. College students’ persistent reputation for rowdiness and debauchery reflects the influence of the “code of honor” which allowed, and even encouraged, drunkenness, gambling, sexual license, and fighting.
Since the 1980s, a shift in thinking about college and university campuses has occurred in the United States. No longer is the “ivory tower” of academe perceived as a place of retreat for scholarly inquiry. Nor is college perceived as a time for growth, where students “find themselves” and their place in the world. Rather, when talk turns to life on college campuses, that talk is often about crime, especially violence. In particular, the recent mass shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University are often used to illustrate just how dangerous college campuses have apparently become. Besides mass shootings occurring on campus, date rape, sexual assault, and other forms of violence against women seem commonplace. In fact, a recent report on the sexual victimization of college women published by the U.S. Department of Justice indicated that approximately 3 percent of college women experience either an attempted or a completed rape during a typical nine-month academic year. According to one New York Times story, violence has “become a way of life for college students,” and some researchers suggest that media reports on campus violence have “created the impression that college and university campuses are increasingly dangerous places.”
During the past 20 years, individuals and their families who have been affected by violence on campus have often responded to these events by successfully suing postsecondary institutions over these incidents. In their lawsuits, student victims or their families have claimed that colleges and universities were liable for damages arising from these incidents because campus security was lax at best and nonexistent at worst. The legal basis for victims’ claims was the argument that postsecondary institutions owed a legal duty of care to students and campus visitors to protect them from harm, especially when such harm was foreseeable.
The Dark Side of The Ivory Tower
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp xv-xvi
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Index
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 201-211
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Acknowledgments
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp xiii-xiv
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Frontmatter
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp i-iv
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Preface
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp vii-xii
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Preface
On February 14, 2008, 27-year-old former graduate student Steven P. Kazmierczak killed 5 people and wounded 16 others after he opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University using a shotgun and three handguns. That shooting came almost a year to the day after the worst mass shooting ever on a U.S. college campus occurred at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), when 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a senior there, shot and killed 32 students and professors and wounded dozens of others in two separate on-campus incidents before taking his own life. Media reports of shootings, rapes, serious sexual and physical assaults, stalking, and other heinous crimes occurring on college campuses have become common, appearing in news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe and trade publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education. These publications have also widely reported that alcohol abuse among college students is rampant and has been linked to many deaths from alcohol poisoning or serious injuries suffered while intoxicated. If media reports are to be believed, a “dark side” of the ivory tower of academe has emerged, which threatens the health and safety of millions of college students in the United States.
What is interesting is this: violence, vice, and victimization have occurred on college campuses dating back to the origins of higher education in America. Historical evidence indicates that during the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, murders, lynchings, rapes, violent assaults, serious vandalism, hunger strikes, and riots were not uncommon on college campuses. What is also interesting is that beginning in the 1980s, and continuing to the present, alarm bells started ringing as a variety of sources – including government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. General Accounting Office – expressed mounting concern about crime and safety on American college campuses. Claims began appearing in mass-media outlets that college students were routinely being murdered, raped, and otherwise victimized on college campuses. Reporters described a “rape culture” that had apparently developed on college campuses. According to these reports, the campus rape culture encouraged college men, enabled by alcohol use or by the provision of drugs such as GHB or Rohypnol (“roofies”) to unsuspecting women, to sexually victimize college women on campus. Student offenders appeared to be committing these types of assault with relative impunity. Parents of student victims claimed to the press that security on college campuses was either lax or nonexistent, which created many opportunities for on-campus victimizations. Students also appeared to be drowning themselves in a sea of alcohol, engaging in dangerous “binge drinking” with far-too-frequent fatal consequences. Finally, claims were leveled by a variety of sources – including student victims, their parents, counselors, and campus officials – that postsecondary administrators, in a cynical effort to maintain the images of their institutions, denied there was a crime problem on their campuses, did little to prevent on-campus victimizations, failed to respond adequately to the needs of campus crime victims, and failed to punish adequately known student offenders.
The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
- Campus Crime as a Social Problem
- John J. Sloan III, Bonnie S. Fisher
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- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2010
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A cursory reading of the history of US colleges and universities reveals that campus crime has been part of collegiate life since the Colonial Era, yet it was not until the late 1980s that it suddenly became an issue on the public stage. Drawing from numerous mass media and scholarly sources and using a theoretical framework grounded in social constructionism, this text chronicles how four groups of activists - college student advocates, feminists, victims and their families, and public health experts - used a variety of tactics and strategies to convince the public that campus crime posed a new danger to the safety and security of college students and the ivory tower itself, while simultaneously convincing policymakers to take action against the problem. Readers from a range of disciplinary interests will find the book both compelling and valuable to understanding campus crime as a newly constructed social reality.
Chapter Six - Constructing Binge Drinking on College Campuses
- John J. Sloan III, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati
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- The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 September 2010, pp 139-180
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Dude, dude! Wait just a minute here! UCONN should be the undisputed #1 party school in the country!!! On any night of the week (and I do mean any night), you can walk into 10 different wild parties at 10 different spots on or around campus. Don’t forget, Spring Weekend at UCONN is the WILDEST partying on earth. If you’ve never been, let me give you an idea….Thursday night is the first night where Carriage Housing Community packs in 20,000–25,000 people into the streets, the woods, and the houses. Friday night is next at Celeron Housing where the crowd has been increased to around 30,000–35,000 screaming drunken maniacs. Last but not least, Saturday finishes out the weekend in X Lot, a huge parking lot with hundreds of kegs feeding the needs of anywhere from 45,000–50,000 kids with enough alcohol in their systems to kill a team of Clydesdales!
Binge drinking remains higher education’s “dirty little secret.”
The Ivory Tower image of America’s college campuses is severely blurred by alcohol.
For many students entering college, the first few months on campus provide them the opportunity to explore newfound personal freedom. Choices that previously had been made for them by parents and school officials are now theirs to make. As a result, they are free to choose whether to attend class or skip and sleep in. They are also free to choose whether to study in the evening or, instead, play a video game, watch TV, or socialize with friends on various social networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. They can choose to stay up as late as they wish and not have a parent tell them “it’s time for bed” or sleep until noon without a parent telling them “it’s time to get up.” They can explore their own sexuality by dating or “hooking up” with peers. Perhaps most important, students are free to experiment with alcohol or recreational drugs such as marijuana – both of which are readily available on today’s college campuses.
Drinking alcohol is both one of the earliest and most important choices new college students face as they transition into life on campus. According to some observers, both the proportion of students who drink and the amount of alcohol they consume is clear evidence that a core “party culture” – a set of beliefs and customs – exists at many postsecondary institutions. In turn, exposure to the party culture quickly shapes students’ attitudes toward, not to mention their behavior involving, the consumption of alcohol. For example, the collegiate party culture is alleged to approve of drinking not only after class in the evenings and on the weekends but before class as well. The party culture also condones students’ drinking alcohol before, during, and after sporting events, especially football and basketball games, and is actively supported by multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns sponsored by the beer, wine, and distilled spirits industry. In this party culture, drinking plays a pervasive role in routine on- and off-campus social gatherings by students.
How Many Authors Does It Take to Publish an Article? Trends and Patterns in Political Science
- Bonnie S. Fisher, Craig T. Cobane, Thomas M. Vander Ven, Francis T. Cullen
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- Journal:
- PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 31 / Issue 4 / December 1998
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 September 2013, pp. 847-856
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- December 1998
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