Campus safety has long been a defining responsibility of higher education, but what that responsibility looks like has changed dramatically over time. And the mechanisms that dictate campus security have become increasingly politicized, utilized by the Trump administration as tools of leverage against universities.
In this episode of Campus Docket, Scott Schneider and Eric Kelderman are joined by attorney and higher ed specialist John Graff, to unpack how legal frameworks, campus policing, and compliance expectations are colliding in today’s risk-filled, politically fraught environment.
The conversation begins with the Clery Act, often misunderstood as a safety solution when, in practice, it functions primarily as a transparency and reporting law. Graff explains how Clery requirements — annual security reports, daily crime logs, and emergency notifications — have grown increasingly complex, sometimes pulling institutional focus toward compliance mechanics rather than real-time safety decisions. While timely warnings remain a critical tool, the broader reporting structure, the group notes, is rarely used by students or families to inform enrollment decisions.
From there, the discussion widens to the evolution of campus policing. Once controversial, the presence of fully operational campus police departments has become widely accepted, shaped by active shooter realities, large-scale athletic events, and heightened expectations for rapid response. Graff traces this shift through decades of legal and cultural change, noting how modern campus safety now depends on coordination among law enforcement, student affairs, counseling services, and behavioral intervention teams.
The conversation also explores how politics increasingly intersects with safety enforcement. Recent federal actions, particularly under the Trump administration, signal a willingness to use Clery reviews and civil rights investigations as leverage, sometimes tied to protests or controversial speakers. That approach, Schneider warns, may open the door to long-term “compliance whiplash,” where shifting administrations redefine expectations without resetting norms.
The Docket
- Elias v. Rolling Stone LLC (2017)
- Defamation lawsuit filed by UVA administrator Nicole Eramo against Rolling Stone magazine and author Sabrina Rubin Erdely over the discredited 2014 article “A Rape on Campus,” which alleged a gang rape at a UVA fraternity. The case resulted in a jury finding defamation and awarding damages.
- Defamation lawsuit filed by UVA administrator Nicole Eramo against Rolling Stone magazine and author Sabrina Rubin Erdely over the discredited 2014 article “A Rape on Campus,” which alleged a gang rape at a UVA fraternity. The case resulted in a jury finding defamation and awarding damages.
- Legal Developments and Articles Referenced
- Additional Legal Concepts and Entities Referenced
Read the full transcript here
Scott Schneider
Hello and welcome to Campus Docket, a Volt podcast about the legal challenges reshaping higher education. I’m Scott Schneider, attorney and adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, and I’m joined by Eric Kelderman, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Each episode will unpack the key legal developments that matter to higher ed leaders, from student rights and faculty contracts to DEI lawsuits and government oversight. Campus Docket is produced by Volt, the go-to news source for higher ed leaders and decision-makers. Remember to visit volt@voltedu.com and subscribe to Campus Docket on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. Let’s get into this week’s show.
Eric Kelderman
Hey everybody, welcome to Campus Docket. I’m Eric Kelderman, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. And today, of course, along with Scott, we have a special guest: John Graff, a partner at Hirsch Weinstein Roberts, higher education specialist. And he’s going to join us to talk about what’s really become a central issue for higher education in recent years, which is campus safety issues and how do we report those issues not only to the federal government but to parents and students. But before we get going, we have to do our icebreaker today, which is, John, did you know about this?
John Graff
I did not, but I can’t wait to see what it is.
Eric Kelderman
We ask you a really sort of humiliating personal question that you have to share with the world. No, just kidding. No, it’s usually, I thought today, given the death of Rob Reiner, horrible, horrible, tragic death of Rob Reiner and his wife, I thought we’d talk about what’s your favorite Rob Reiner film? Oh my god, so many to choose from and from an amazing sort of variety of genres. What’s your favorite, John?
John Graff
Uh, probably Princess Bride.
Eric Kelderman
Hard to beat that. How many times do you think you’ve watched it?
John Graff
Oh, probably half a dozen. Since I was a younger guy. We just watched it with our kids last year, last holiday season. Great, great movie.
Eric Kelderman
Yeah, really tragic event. Absolutely. But I speak of watching with kids, I remember watching, you know, at the time my son sort of entered middle school, I would pull him aside and we’d watch like great classic movies like that and Monty Python hits, things like that. That was great memories for that. Scott, what’s your favorite Rob Reiner film?
Scott Schneider
You know the answer to this.
Eric Kelderman
Do I?
Scott Schneider
Damn, come on, this is easy. This is Spinal Tap, man. Come on.
Eric Kelderman
Oh, okay, of course. Of course. I should have guessed that. Absolutely. Classic, man. It really was groundbreaking in terms of, you know, setting the stage for numerous mockumentaries that came along that Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest participated in.
Scott Schneider
We need to do a Chronicle of Higher Education mockumentary.
Eric Kelderman
That’s been made! There’s a Wes Anderson film called, what is it? Is it The Paris Review or something like that, The French Dispatch? What is that one with… where it’s like a publication that’s hosted in Paris? That’s basically The Chronicle of Higher Education. Mine is actually, and this is one I’d forgotten he directed, but Misery.
John Graff
No way. With Kathy Bates?
Eric Kelderman
With Kathy Bates, right.
John Graff
He directed that?
Eric Kelderman
Yeah. It’s a startlingly good movie and you will not sleep for a week after watching that. Thinking about the, thinking of our protagonist, he’s confined to the room, right? And she’s got his feet tied to blocks and then she breaks his legs, right? It’s horrifying. Yeah, but I mean, you think about the range of great Rob Reiner films and just amazing and of course, like I said, a tragedy. And we want to talk to you—we want to bring it back to the real world, reality.
Scott Schneider
Yeah, can I set up John a little bit here? I hate to butter him up, man. He has an enormous ego, which troubles me. But I think in the all of America, this vast country, Eric, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this or not, like John’s probably the foremost expert on the Clery Act and campus safety, how do you maintain campus safety? And I don’t know, Johnny used to be a cop. And the way we met is he arrested me. No, that’s a total joke. Eric bought it hook, line, and sinker. But no, I mean, when I have really difficult Clery issues, John is, you know, my go-to and I know I’ve referred my fair share of clients to John as well.
I wanted to kind of, you know, the Reiner thing is interesting to me and certainly tragic. There was a tragic shooting last week or this weekend, I guess, at Brown University. I know it’s one of the areas that for me, it consumes a lot of my time in terms of process and risk management and students, you know, who present with like really at-risk profiles. I kind of just get your kind of sense of things, John. I don’t know all the specifics about what happened at Brown. I was also going to pivot and talk a little bit about the Kirk shooting as well. But what’s the state of the campus safety architecture? I mean, outside of Clery and we can talk about that. Do you have any big-picture thoughts about how things are looking?
John Graff
I think overall, campus safety, campus policing operations have come a very long way in the last, you know, 10 to 20 years. Last 5 to 10, really. You see more and more campus police departments operating very closely to the way that a municipal law enforcement agency would operate. And in particular, it’s their tactical operations, their tactical readiness, which you didn’t use to see in the old days.
That’s just an unfortunate reflection of where we are in society, you know, in 2025, last 5, 7 years, and the very tragic uptick of active shooter incidents on campus. You can’t operate a campus safety operation in 2025 and not have that tactical readiness. You know, the exchange of intelligence has changed over the years. You have more police departments participating in joint task force operations—whether that’s anti-crime or narcotics type operations. You know, more sharing intelligence through fusion centers, which is just sort of like a hub—it’s usually run by like a state police department or, you know, some regional task force that they all feed in information that might be relevant to a campus or to an issue, a crime issue or safety issue more generally. They dissect that information and then they feed it back out to the departments that participate in the fusion operation. So, we’ve come quite, quite a long way.
Eric Kelderman
Can I ask a question about that, John? Which is, one of our reporters did a piece on this a number of years ago about how, like other police departments across the country, campus departments have benefited from sort of picking up military hardware that might be used or surplus, whatever, right, for tactical operations. And I guess I wonder, is it just sort of a… they acquired this because they could, or was there some sort of rationalization that these campus police departments made for having, for building up their infrastructure and their capabilities in this area? In other words, did they think that crime on campus was escalating to the point that they needed to be sort of fully operationalized in this area?
John Graff
Um, what a great question. I think it depends. It depends on the location of the department, depends on the school that they’re trying to protect and serve, and certainly it depends on the types of issues that are confronting the school, you know, the crime and safety issues. You know, for example, you might have a campus police department in a part of the country where the campus is actually—that law enforcement unit is the most robust law enforcement unit in the area, you know, geographically. And so a department like that, you know, particularly where you’re in a region where the university or the college is essentially the town’s economic engine, it’s the region’s economic engine, you’re going to have a larger department with more capabilities and oftentimes those capabilities are deployed off-campus. And so some of those resources that are being utilized by those campus departments are actually helping to secure areas around the campus community, not just on campus.
Some of it relates to grant funding, you know, departments will apply for certain grant funding for equipment, asset acquisition. And so you’ll see some purchases and enhanced capabilities around grant receipt. And some of it is crime-driven. You know, all of it, though, all of it is really intended to facilitate, as I said before, a greater tactical readiness. You have Division I sports operations in large stadiums—100,000 people, 90,000 people. You have large basketball communities descending on campus—9, 10, 13,000 people in an arena. You really need to be able to handle anything that comes your way. You will be working oftentimes in conjunction with local and state law enforcement, but oftentimes the readiness really is hovering around the lead-up to those events, not just the events themselves when you’re getting those additional law enforcement assets on campus. You can’t operate a large campus in 2025 without the ability to provide a full-service police response.
Scott Schneider
Can I offer up some perspective to some history? You know, this isn’t, John has alluded to this. You know, prior to the 60s, I mean, you never had the idea of having police on campus was, you know, just like an absurdity. And in the late 60s, early 70s, I mean, there’s a book to be written about this probably if there hasn’t already been one. You start getting, you know, student protests connected to Vietnam, civil rights, campus unrest. And at that point, the 70s and 80s, you get a lot of state statutes which for the first time start creating these vehicles for universities to create their own police departments, which if you take a step back, I mean, it’s a pretty remarkable thing to do. And certainly at the time, there was a lot of tension there—like in particular, what does a university know about running a campus police department? You know, this seems way far afield from what universities historically have done. And then in the 90s we get the Clery Act and that really cements in a significant way these institutional obligations around maintaining campus safety.
And then, you know, I can just remember there were these very spirited debates not that long ago, maybe last 5, 10 years, about do we need campus police? Should they be armed campus police? Do we have concerns about them targeting, you know, racial minorities disproportionately? And it really got caught up, the whole conversation about campus policing got caught up in the broader conversation nationally about defunding police generally and all that. And now we’re at this point where I don’t hear that conversation ever happening anymore. And John, I’m kind of curious if you see it the same way. And is this just a cycle where maybe in 5 or 10 years we’re right back going, “Hey, did the pendulum swing too far? Do we have too many cops on campus? Are they overly weaponized?” and all that sort of stuff. And if you think any of my history is off, feel free to push back on that.
John Graff
No, I think you summarized it nicely, Scott. I think that, you know, after the George Floyd incident, we saw this pendulum swing, right? And it was away from having a robust presence on campus. There was a lot of defund talk, a lot of defund effort. Some schools did disarm or disband. Some schools, after they did that, wound up having to go back to campus law enforcement because of some incident that would have occurred on campus. There was a swift reaction to that incident, but I think a lot have come back to a—desire is a strong word, but an acceptance of law enforcement on campus simply because of the active intruder reality. I think people have come to realize that, you know, the concerns that people had as campuses were arming up and as they were becoming more operationally ready and capable, you know, the concern oftentimes was, “Well, what if one of the cops shoots a student?” And it’s a legitimate, fair concern, except that that’s unlikely to happen, whereas you are more likely to have violent crime happen on campus and if you don’t have an ability to respond to it timely, then your concerns are much different than they thought they were going to be when you were disbanding your police department in the first place.
Scott Schneider
Yeah, and we don’t know the facts on the Brown case. I don’t know if it was someone internal, is it someone on a BIT team radar? For folks who aren’t steeped in this, can you talk a little bit about, you know, the work and it’s not just campus law enforcement does, but student affairs, everybody working together to kind of minimize the risk of something like that happening on campus, especially when it’s, you go back to Virginia Tech, it’s someone who is a student at the university who’s on the institution’s radar? I’m kind of curious to paint the picture for the audience about what that looks like.
John Graff
Bad people who want to do bad things will do bad things, right? It’s just a question of when, where, and to whom. So, no matter how robust your platform is, your Clery compliance, and I’m not a huge believer that all of Clery compliance translates to safety. A lot of it is consumer transparency, right? There are some features of it, like the timely warning, that really are designed to facilitate timely decision-making in dire circumstances. But there’s no platform in the world that’s ever going to eliminate the risk of crime.
So, now that we’ve addressed that, when you reference BIT teams like a behavioral intervention team, right, the way a school works together and sort of the foreseeability of something like what happened at Brown, we don’t know really what happened there. We do know that one person I think was taken into custody but was subsequently released, you know, so one would argue possibly cleared at that point, right? Because law enforcement’s not going to let an active threat walk out the door typically. Most schools that do safety well will have some sort of threat assessment mechanism committee that comes together, behavioral intervention team or threat assessment team. They’re exchanging information about what they’re seeing in real-time. They’re communicating among the dean of students folks, student affairs folks like residence life and student conduct and counseling services, career services, etc. And then they’re also exchanging information with the faculty and with campus law enforcement. And the idea is that folks come together when somebody registers on somebody’s radar. That somebody who had that radar registration is supposed to start feeding information into the system, and we all get together and we talk, we try to reach an assessment as to whether this person needs some help. Are they a threat to themselves? Are they a threat to other people? And if they are a threat to self or other people, what do we do about it?
Higher ed, in my experience, tends to do that pretty well. It really has a core component on campus that genuinely cares about students. You talk to some of these folks in the dean of students operations all over the country, they genuinely believe they can make a difference and they are. They absolutely are. And so we’ve come a long way in the threat assessment capability. You know, can higher ed prevent all of it? No. Are some things going to be unforeseen? Absolutely. Will some people just snap and something bad happens? Yes, that’s going to happen from time to time. And that goes to the second part of your original question, Scott. You know, what we will ultimately learn about the Brown situation, who knows? I think the most pressing concern is just that there’s an assailant out there that hasn’t been caught. And, you know, unfortunately, that’s sort of a reality of some of the evolution of these types of incidents and we’re probably going to see more of that over time.
Scott Schneider
And John, I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re like a new lawyer in higher ed, you’re going in-house, John does the talk at NACUA. I think I did it for a couple years and then they—well, me.
John Graff
Well, they bumped me for you first, and then they rehired me.
Scott Schneider
But can I ask, you mentioned this and this is, I’m going to get in trouble for saying this. We have the Clery Act, which creates a lot of institutional compliance obligations. I think if, the reason I’ll get in trouble is for saying I think campus safety would be better served by scaling some of that back and focusing more on especially timely warning and emergency notifications and all that. Can you paint the picture just generally what Clery requires, number one, for people who don’t know? Just really broadly. And number two, I kind of want to get your sense of what Clery compliance has looked like from the federal government’s side for the last, I don’t know, 10, 15 years.
John Graff
Generally speaking, high-level Clery, the Clery Act is a campus crime transparency law, campus crime reporting law, right? It requires that schools on an annual basis disclose in what they call an annual security report statistics regarding certain types of crime on campus or in certain locations that a campus controls and uses in furtherance of student education or student programming. Clery, you know, it’s a one-time-a-year publication. It publishes anonymized statistics about incidents. It doesn’t really provide an apples-to-apples comparison between one campus and another. It gives you no data usually in terms of whether there’s any relation between a suspect and a victim. There are a lot of weaknesses in the ASR reporting. It really is a very high-level, high-altitude flyover of campus crime.
The Clery Act also requires that schools publish what’s called a daily crime log. That is a real-time snapshot of crime in and around a campus and it’s got to be updated every couple of days and made available to the public. Anybody has a right to inspect a daily crime log. It’s a key source of information for journalists and advocacy groups. Clery Act also requires that schools publish a huge brochure, and this gets to the concern I think that your question hits on, Scott, a huge booklet of disclosures about safety features on campus and policy for X, Y, Z, A, B, C, and it just goes on and on. The document, as far as I can tell, I think on average we’re looking at 50, 60, 70-page documents at this point. Some are 100, 110 pages. And so lots of institutional money is spent on compliance with what at the end of the day are ultimately sort of bureaucratic obligations. And so we’re very focused on not getting it wrong so we don’t get audited, we don’t get the big fines, and there is a diversion away from focusing on the things that, you know, we probably should be focused on.
That said, I’ve never worked with a department where somebody has said, “Well, I spent too much time on bureaucracy today, I’m not going to send out that timely warning to the community.” The people who work in that space, you know, they’re quite dedicated professionals. And very importantly, the Clery Act requires a series of emergency notifications called timely warnings or emergency notices that are supposed to be blasted to the community right away when campus law enforcement or emergency management becomes aware of a serious situation where you need to make some rapid decisions about your own safety. How was that for a flyover?
Scott Schneider
It wasn’t as punchy as I would have made it, but it was B+ work. Well, Scott also, you know, he gave me a nice intro. Scott is himself a preeminent Clery expert and so if I’m being judged by you at a B+, I take that as a compliment. Eric wants to intervene in our Clery lovefest with his own question.
Eric Kelderman
I wanted to… we talked a little bit about the effectiveness of Clery as sort of a, you know, the notifications and the campus safety issue. I’d like to hear about what you think of it as a sort of consumer protection issue. How much do we know about who’s reading these reports and how much it informs parents, students, and others about the safety on campus? A lot of, I think, you know, when we think about the big Clery fines in recent years, right? We think about Michigan State, right, for instance, or Penn State with the sexual misconduct issue. But is anybody reading these? Do we know how much it impacts people’s decisions about where they go to college?
Scott Schneider
Can I say, give one anecdote on this? This is my favorite thing to do. So, I think I’ve taught now in universities, at Tulane and now at the University of Texas. And I literally in every class I teach, just because I find this amusing, I ask students prior to enrolling at this university, did you or anybody in your family review the university’s Clery report or campus safety report? And I have never had a single hand go up and say yes. 15 years. So John, with that anecdote as backdrop, what do you think?
John Graff
Well, I’ll piggyback off of that anecdote and say that when I was in college, you knew it was October 1 because the mailroom was littered with Clery reports all over the floor, and recycling wasn’t even a huge thing back then. And so, you know, the school was required to distribute them, they distributed them in your campus mailbox, students would take them out, throw them on the floor and go do their thing. And so, as insensitive as that may have been to the recycling effort back then, the reality is that people don’t have the time to read a lengthy report about things that mostly don’t impact them. The number of blue phones on a campus makes no difference to me, you know, when I’m making a decision. I have a daughter who’s about to go off to college. Scott, you’ve been down this road already before me. I don’t care how many blue phones you have on campus, I want to know that the police are accessible, right? At the end of the day. And so it’s that kind of thing that I don’t think people care about as much.
John Graff
I don’t think people read these to make determinations about where they’re going to send their kids to school or where a student decides to go. And like I said, you can’t have an apples-to-apples comparison between one school and another simply because data is anonymized in those ASRs and you don’t know the quality of the compliance effort between one school and another. My colleague here at HRW, Alicia Warden, and I, we track statistics in different regions and what we’ll notice is, you know, there’ll be an uptick or a downturn in statistics from one year to another but we never know why that is. We never know if it was better reporting or, you know, different enrollment or anything like that. And so I don’t, at the end of the day, I don’t think it serves that much of a consumer transparency effort, I really don’t.
Scott Schneider
Yeah, I know one year one of my clients who was just fastidious in complying with the Clery Act got a press piece, you know, “It’s the most dangerous campus in America or one of the top 25.” And I was like, “I know a little bit about this campus and I’m going, that can’t be true.” And I’m like, “Where did you get the information for the story?” and it was from the campus crime counts which they just did a really good job, I think, of tracking the information whereas there were peers who were in much more challenging situations from a safety perspective who had zeros on their campus crime counts and I go, “They’re not, they’re just worse at compliance, it’s not a safety issue.”
So, it’s interesting. Hey, can I pivot though on this? I think what has been interesting from my perspective about the Trump administration is they’ve taken all of these kind of compliance obligations that institutions have, whether it’s Title IX, more notably Title VI, and really pursued—you know, it sort of weirdly defies convention. The first Trump administration, you know, really focused on those Title IX regs, but there were no like, “Hey, you’re out of compliance with Title VI and now we’re pulling your federal funding.” And so what I’ve said is, like, in a lot of ways what people on the left activists on the left have been asking the Department of Education to do for like 50 years, which is like start fining, start pulling funding. And here you have the Trump administration using those tactics obviously to very different ends than I think people on the left were advocating for.
And one of the things I’ve said is, like, once you open that Pandora’s box, a new administration with new priorities will use that playbook towards a different end and you start getting this compliance, we go swing back and forth from one extreme to the other. But I noticed out at Berkeley, I saw the Secretary of Education, I think, announce that they’re going to do a Clery compliance review of basically a protest, I think around Charlie Kirk. I don’t know all the facts on that either, but I was kind of interested in your thoughts on this because typically what I have found, and Eric alluded to this with Clery compliance prior to the Trump administration is, it almost always felt as an add-on to something that had already happened. Penn State, Michigan State, and now we’re going to fine you and it always took a very long time to reach some sort of resolution. Do you think this administration’s about to change that?
John Graff
Great question. I don’t know. I don’t know if the length of time will change, although I can envision some pressure being applied internally in the government to get to quicker results simply because those outcomes are going to, you know, cater to campaigning initiatives at some point, you know, that’s what people want to hear. And interestingly, you know, we’re not seeing—for a while we were seeing these Clery reviews that were being undertaken in response to, you know, physician-patient issues on campus—the big ones, right? You know what I’m talking about. Now we’re seeing them around, Scott, you mentioned before, not necessarily Clery, but we’re seeing Title VI investigation activity, we’re seeing Clery activity, but it all sort of plays toward a political theme, right? And I think that what we’re seeing at Berkeley, I can’t tell—we don’t know enough about it. I can’t tell whether there were legitimate safety concerns that may have been ignored that have become the subject of this focus. What I do know is that when the government issues a statement that it’s investigating and then cites a prior violation at an institution and has this sort of warm-up, this sort of politically charged preamble or warm-up to the announcement of the investigation, it does make you wonder: is this politically motivated or is it genuinely a situation of concern for safety on campus? Or maybe it’s a hybrid of the two? I just don’t know.
Scott Schneider
And do they change process? I mean, do you get like, hey, the turnaround on this is now going to be two weeks and we’re fining you, you know, an enormous amount of money? It’ll be interesting. Hey, can I just ask you about that too? And you push back if you think I’m being an idiot here, which I know you have no problem doing.
John Graff
You did give me a layup there.
Scott Schneider
But the tactics that Trump is using, if you get AOC or Gavin Newsom in or somebody with a different set of compliance priorities, are they going to say, “Well, we won’t do those sorts of tactics like cutting funding?” Or to me, it will be like the states that have largely been targeted here, you know, the kind of red state public institutions, I go, am I wrong to think we’ve opened up a Pandora’s box where now with a new administration, new priorities, man, compliance or even trying to figure out what compliance looks like is going to be like a very challenging situation unless we reset norms in some way, which I don’t know that there’s any appetite to do.
John Graff
Wasn’t that the danger? You erode process, you erode rights. And as you said before, Scott, anybody can use that erosion to their advantage. And so I don’t… it’s sort of like when the 2020 Title IX regulation changed, right? And it codified, you know, more due process rights. It took that Sixth Circuit standard and it just applied it to the entire country, right, in terms of cross-examination rights, etc. You’re not going to see an administration come in and say, “Well, we’re going to give respondents less protection in these processes going forward because, you know, we really want to engineer certain outcomes or whatever it might be.” So, in that we had two radically different political parties in control of Washington as this whole process has unfolded. So I don’t think that you’re ever going to see any party voluntarily say, “Well, we didn’t like the way Trump enforced it, we’re going to just not be as fast, we’re not going to be as thorough,” whatever it might be. I think to your point, I think we’ve entered dicey terrain and I don’t think that there’s walking this back.
Scott Schneider
Yeah, and I just, you know, I’ve taught this class, I taught a Law of Higher Education class. There’s some great books, Amy Gada wrote a great book on this. But this is part of, and it’s punctuated now, but it’s part of a history, there used to be a lot of deference given to decision-making at academic institutions, certainly pre-1950. And you start to see this get eroded in court decisions. I mean, if you think about Title VII initially, Title VII didn’t even extend to higher education institutions. That’s how much deference was given to them. And you see this slow and steady erosion of deference and look, I’ve criticized the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter as another step along the way. But man, this like takes it to a whole other level.
And I’m kind of curious, do you, like in some of my conversations, and it depends on the school and their financial means, do you have anybody who’s going to you and going, “We need to rethink our relationship with the federal government here. I mean, if this is going to be like one day we have all this funds and then to open them up, we gotta pay $50 million to the federal government so they get off our back. We need to rethink our relationship.” Or is the participation in Title IV and grant funding just too important for the financial safety of those schools?
John Graff
I think colleges and universities as businesses have become too big to fail. And because of that, I don’t see a school pushing back and saying we don’t need your money. Enrollment will go down.
Eric Kelderman
I met with a college president last week, I won’t say who because it was a background conversation, but this is a relatively small rural institution in a state, a generally red state, and this person told me that they were in fact considering what their future might be. Now they don’t have a big research portfolio, but I do think that this is becoming a conversation that some institutions can and will have with their boards about their future because the back-and-forth swing of the policy pendulum has become a little too much for some of them.
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Eric Kelderman
I also wonder about Clery as a penalty issue and the way I’ve always seen that is, because the hammer of Title VI and Title IX is too big, right? We’ve got one solution which is we pull all your funding or we have some sort of, you know, resolution agreement that may or may not mean anything in the long run, right, in terms of, so I’ve always seen it as a way for the government to say, “Well, look, we can’t pull your funding but we can ding you on these other things, right? And we can make a statement about your failure here without bringing down the big hammer.” And I wonder about that, we talk about this in the accreditation world too, which is accreditors have really one great big hammer, which is revoke your accreditation and you lose all your Title IV funding, and that’s a problem. We’ve seen that as an issue and I wonder about the future of enforcement in this area and whether, Scott alluded to this earlier about people on the left have seen the lack of sort of penalties on institutions as a failure of the civil rights laws, right? That in some ways the laws are set up in a way that protects the institution in the long run without real, you know, you can enforce some change through these voluntary agreements but it’s very hard, you know, to really make something stick in the long run. Penn State didn’t face in the long run any NCAA penalties, all those were revoked in hindsight.
What are the conversations about ways to make this better? In what way can we enforce the civil rights laws in a way that doesn’t wipe out the institution but also has some impact going forward? I think from the activist point of view, that’s a real shortcoming here.
John Graff
Yeah, and I think one of the things, the biggest club that the Department of Ed has in enforcement, it’s not actually the discontinuation of federal funding in my view, or the massive fines that they are starting to levy for Clery violations. It’s actually the brand damage to an institution. And that’s where I think they’re able to probably force the most meaningful change if they are trying to actually change civil rights compliance and advance progress in that regard. But folding in the concerns that I’m hearing raised in Scott’s questions, it’s not all of it is about civil rights compliance or compliance with the law. We are just in higher ed, we’re stuck in a back-and-forth between the right and left right now and I don’t really know how meaningful progress is made in that domain.
Eric, your observation about the president that you spoke to is a perfect example. You’ve got schools who are saying, “This is becoming so frustrating, every time a new administration comes in, I’ve got a whole another set of compliance obligations, I’ve got to fund this to the tune of three, four, five, seven million dollars and I’m also trying to provide a first-class education.”
Scott Schneider
Can I just say one thing? I gave a talk at NACUA, their conference, and it was about crisis communications. One of the things I said is what, when I first started in this space, I remember my boss saying, “Hey, you know, our reputation is, you know, just important.” And I think they meant in the most, not a trivial sense, I mean, people’s confidence and all that. And one of the things I’ve noticed, I think, in doing this for a long time is I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think these brands, I hate to say this, I mean there’s, these are pretty resilient brands. I mean, you talk about the Penn States and Michigan State and schools that have been through the ringer over the years, they seem to come back pretty quickly. And I think that’s getting, I think the attention span of folks, especially, there’s some really interesting research on this, it’s almost impossible, you know, some of these brands, the impact is minimal.
Whereas if the administration comes in and says we’re freezing a billion dollars in federal funds unless you do X, Y, and Z and fix this, antisemitism, whatever the case may be in a different administration it may be a whole other set of priorities, man, that’ll get folks’ attention. I think part of my crisis communications talk, maybe Eric you disagree with this, is I’m not sure anymore what a crisis is and it feels like the attention span for what constitutes a crisis is this short and that all of these universities, with some exceptions, are pretty resilient creatures. What Trump has really I think hit correctly is: you want to get compliance or your version of civil rights compliance, freeze up the money. That’s what makes a difference. And again, that it comes from a Republican administration is just so weird, but once you open up that Pandora’s box, subsequent administrations will do the same thing. I think the targets will be very different.
Hey, let me ask one more question. I’m kind of curious because this is one that comes up a lot. One of the best things I think that is going on, at least with the schools I’m working with, is kind of, “Hey, we really want to recommit to free speech.” We think having diverse views on campus, having our faculty, and I know it’s under a lot of pressure certainly from state legislatures and arguably from the federal government right now, but we think academic freedom is important, we think having robust diverse ideas on campus is important. And part of that, and this has been going on for 20 years, is the appetite to bring provocative speakers to campus. That’s always the test of in, Charlie Kirk was that at some level. And there’s a way of thinking about what happened and I’m glad this honestly hasn’t captured a lot of attention, which was this was a university base like compliance failure, safety failure, I don’t know if that’s true or not. But in that climate, you know, where I think more and more schools are going to be bringing, we’re going to get back to this point where we’re bringing these provocative speakers, I see Milo is back, right?
People have very strong opinions about what’s happened in Israel and Gaza and all this sort of stuff. What does planning look like for that? Like I have had clients, a school, an organization on campus will go, “We want to have this speaker here.” And the school is going, “Okay, we want that speaker to be here. But here are the rules that you need to abide by so that we can provide a safe and secure place where this doesn’t spill over into violence.” And when I’m talking to them, I go, “I’m 100% on board and this is the responsible thing to do.” And then you’ll have politicians come in and go, “Oh my god, you’re trying to monitor who’s speaking.” I mean, do you see it the same way that bringing these provocative speakers is both: this is what universities do, but in this climate where we have a responsibility for campus safety and it feels like everybody has guns, there’s due diligence that has to be done there. Am I crazy for thinking that?
John Graff
No, I think you’re 100% correct. And we also are at a time in society where using violence to curb speech has grown in its acceptability in the minds of many. There was a study on this a few years ago where some undergrad students were surveyed, they were asked, basically, if the speech is offensive enough to you, do you think using violence is okay? And an alarming number of students responded yes, it’s okay. And I look at that and say: if that’s the mindset that’s coming to these events to disrupt, we have to up the safety game in a big way. With respect to the Charlie Kirk shooting, that’s a tough venue, right? You’re outdoors, you’ve got three or four thousand people in attendance. I don’t know what the exact security measures were to make sure that the people sitting on the ground and on grass didn’t have weapons, I assume that there were some. This was a rooftop shooting incident, you know, there was a similar type incident when Trump was on the campaign trail. So, I think schools are probably going to have to take a very hard look at what the venues are for these events and seeing if there’s something that they can do to contain exposure and so maybe it’s instead of having it on a field, it’s having it inside an arena.
Eric Kelderman
I also wonder about the budgetary issues involved here. Like at what point do universities say we can’t have this speaker because this costs above a certain amount and we can’t, we simply can’t provide that level of security if it costs a half a million dollars, right, or whatever, right? We could set some arbitrary number. But certain institutions are just going to run into limits on what they can do in terms of securing safety for certain speakers.
John Graff
That’s a very legitimate concern in my view, at the same time we’re a stone’s throw away from somebody saying you’re using that to censor, right? You use the cost of security to censor because, you know, this guy’s more provocative, we can’t have him come because he’s too expensive. So, it’s a no-win situation really.
Scott Schneider
Hey man, in other than what we talked about, what’s kind of, I wanted to close with this, what are you seeing? I mean, what’s, I know you do as much work in higher ed as anybody and what are the things that are taking up your time right now?
John Graff
Right now, it’s, most of it is crisis management, crisis communications. It’s a big part of my practice, has been for a long time, but it’s gotten bigger over the last probably four or five years. And it is, it’s typically a response to a safety issue on campus. It could be a high-profile sexual assault, might be something involving athletics. Everybody is worried about the shooter concern right now and everybody should be concerned about it. So, it’s typically in the crisis management space.
Scott Schneider
I won’t put you on the spot, but there’s an interesting story involving a football coach or former football coach that’s gotten a little news play lately. Talk about resilient brand, let’s talk about the University of Michigan for a second. And Michigan State as well, two of the biggest high-profile institutions in the country that you could look at and have seen scandal after scandal after scandal for the past five years, 10 years.
John Graff
Yeah, Scott was commenting before on the resiliency just across the board. And yes, the brands are of all of the big schools are very resilient. It doesn’t mean they don’t feel the pain, and it doesn’t mean that a hit on the brand doesn’t affect the good people on the ground who are trying to do the work and the comfort of, you know, parents who are sending their students to the schools. And so, you know, I think we’re going to continue to see, and the government has hit, they know this, right? And they’re using, they’re using concern about the brand and you can see it all over the UVA case, right? They’re using concern about the brand to try to strike a nerve and it’s working, you know, to an extent. But I think that brand management reputation protection, that’s never going away in higher ed for good cause.
Scott Schneider
Well, thanks John. We really appreciate your time and all your expertise.
John Graff
I do want to say thank you to both of you guys. Eric, I’ve been a long-time reader of yours. Scott and I have been friends for forever. So it’s a real privilege to be invited to spend some time with you guys today and love the podcast.
Scott Schneider
It’s always a pleasure to see John.
John Graff
Well, I think you guys are doing something very special with your podcast. Like I said, I do enjoy it and I think, you know, you’re willing to have hard discussions that dissect both sides of an issue and that is what higher ed needs right now. They need to keep having those dialogues. So, bravo to you both for your part in that dialogue.
Scott Schneider
And look, I hope Eric gets a pay raise so that he can afford a heater in his house because apparently what he’s wearing there, what is it like 7 degrees in your home, sir?
Eric Kelderman
No, you know, I think it’s an age thing. I think as my thermostat, my internal thermostat has gone down as I’ve gotten older and so I don’t know why I get, when I’m sitting for too long, I get cold. I think it’s an age, it’s hell getting old, guys. I’m telling you.
John Graff
Well, it’s only like 20 here, so it’s not very warm here but…
Eric Kelderman
It’s 58 here! So anyway, let’s leave on that note. Hey John, good seeing you, buddy.
John Graff
Likewise, guys. Thanks so much for having me.
Scott Schneider
All right, see ya.
There you go. Well, look, thanks for tuning in to Campus Docket. You’ll find links to everything we discussed today including related cases, articles, and a full transcript in the show notes and on voltedu.com. Be sure to follow Campus Docket wherever you get your podcast and while you’re there check out Trusted Voices and Higher Voltage, two more podcasts in the Volt lineup that look at higher ed through different lenses. On behalf of the Volt team and my friend Eric Kelderman, thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.
