DANGER IN THE DORM.(failure of universities to report violent crimes and deficiencies in disciplinary actions)

Here's one picture you won't see in those glossy brochures: the ugly face of crime on campus. Learn how and why universities actively hide this disturbing side of student life.

* In the early morning hours of January 30, 1999, Sarah Alter returned to her dorm room at Saint Mary's College, a private Catholic women's school in Indiana across the street from the University of Notre Dame, where she'd been at a party. She logged on to her computer and found an instant message from a Notre Dame junior she'd dated twice before. He suggested they meet, and 30 minutes later, Sarah was sitting in his truck in a parking lot of the Saint Mary campus. Although she was very drunk, she remembers telling him repeatedly that she didn't want to have sex. He had other ideas. "I had so much alcohol in my system, I was starting to pass out," says Sarah, now 21. By the time she returned to her room at five that morning, the only thing she wanted to do was go to sleep and forget everything that had happened.

Yet when she woke several hours later, she realized she could not forget. There was blood on her underwear and bruises on her arms and legs. Over the next 36 hours, she confronted a growing conviction that she'd been raped, and on Monday, she met with a school counselor, whose behavior struck Sarah as a little strange. "She asked me if I wanted to report the rape, and I said 'yes,' but then she never did anything about it," says Sarah. "I went to her three or four times after that and told her again that I wanted to report it, but nothing was ever done." Feeling stonewalled, Sarah says she went to Notre Dame's security officers three months later and told her story. She even testified at a school hearing against the student the following September. A week later, the school called with the results of the hearing: Notre Dame had decided that the accused student had not violated the school's code of conduct, but they sent him to counseling. "Both schools were behaving as if the whole thing had never happened," Sarah says.

It's shocking, but according to some critics, that's exactly how many colleges and universities behave when it comes to violent crime on campus. Whether these types of crimes are rising or falling remains unclear--studies are inconclusive, with the FBI determining that rapes, murders, and assaults declined by 11 percent in 1999 and the Chronicle of Higher Education showing an increase of the same amount for 1998. No one is disputing that campus crime exists. But the institutions themselves do little or nothing to dispel the common illusion that campuses are a safe harbor from the real world--a community of peers where they can come to no harm. "College campuses are always trying to look inviting to new students," says Asa Boynton, past president of thc International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. Not only are healthy enrollment and a reliable flow of tuition money at stake, but alumni and corporate donations are also affected by a school's reputation for danger. "Schools don't want the se things to become public knowledge," adds Jack Feinberg, an attorney who represented a rape victim whose case was covered up by the University of Pennsylvania. "The bottom line is, they know it will hurt business."

Congress has tried to force these ivory towers to shed some light on their dark sides. In 1986, 19-year-old Jeanne Clery was raped and beaten to death while she was sleeping in her dorm room at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. When her parents discovered that students hadn't been told about 38 other violent crimes that had occurred on campus in the three years prior to their daughter's murder, they successfully lobbied for the Campus Security Act, which was passed in 1990 and requires schools to compile and make available statistics on alleged crimes that are reported to security officers, residence hall counselors, and faculty advisers of student organizations. The act also requires schools to issue timely warnings when a violent crime occurs, and in 1998, Congress amended the law: Now schools must report not only the crimes that happen on their campuses but also those that occur on nearby public property and in noncampus buildings where students hold organized activities. Schools must also rep ort their statistics to the Department of Education (DOE), where they are posted on a Web site for access by prospective students (ope.ed.gov/security/OPEHorne.asp).

But many schools have been negligent. In the past several years, West Virginia Wesleyan College, Clemson University, and Miami University of Ohio have all been found in violation of the act by the DOE for underreporting crimes. "There has been a pattern of underreporting for years," says S. Daniel Carter, of Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit watchdog organization in Pennsylvania. "By and large, any kind of victimization, particularly student-on-student victimization, is something they just want to go away."

LOOKIN THE OTHER WAY