{"id":156154,"date":"2026-04-03T08:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T08:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/156154\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T08:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T08:33:09","slug":"foundationally-changed-campus-safety-the-lafayette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/156154\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Foundationally changed campus safety\u2019 \u2013 The Lafayette"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jeanne<\/a> <\/p>\n

Photo by Andreas Pelekis<\/a> for The Lafayette <\/p>\n

Jeanne Clery\u2019s murder resulted in changes for campus crime reporting standards.<\/p>\n

Forty years ago, on April 5, 1986, Lehigh University freshman Jeanne Clery was raped and killed in her dorm room by another student.<\/p>\n

Clery\u2019s parents sued the university, alleging their daughter would not have attended Lehigh had they known about dozens of unpublicized violent crimes committed in the years before her death. Furthermore, they lobbied for policy changes requiring schools to publicize information about campus safety.<\/p>\n

Those policies eventually formed the Clery Act, which established crime reporting standards for every higher education institution in the United States.<\/p>\n

Daniel Carter, a campus safety consultant and former director of public policy for the Clery Center, said Clery\u2019s murder \u201cfoundationally changed campus safety in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt set a pattern in motion where campus safety is talked about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

At Lehigh, the university\u2019s police department unveiled a memorial in honor of Jeanne Clery on March 24. The memorial, located in the police department training room, focuses on Clery\u2019s legacy as an \u201calways present, always genuine\u201d friend and classmate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just seemed to me that it was really important to preserve the memories of Jeanne and who she was as a person,\u201d said Jason Schiffer, the associate vice president for campus safety and the chief of police at Lehigh.<\/p>\n

Schiffer added that Clery Act training for Lehigh\u2019s campus police includes personal stories of Clery.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to humanize the reality that this isn\u2019t just a formalized law where we\u2019re looking to check boxes,\u201d Schiffer said, adding that Lehigh \u201cabsolutely has an obligation\u201d to honor Clery\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think an incident like this could ever happen on a college campus without leaving a profound impact on everyone,\u201d Schiffer continued. \u201cIt\u2019s so special that Jeanne\u2019s parents turned this tragedy into something that\u2019s made college campuses safer for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clery\u2019s parents\u2019 advocacy originally called for reporting and transparency standards, according to Carter, the former public policy director. It began with a simple brochure, encouraging college applicants to mail questions about crime statistics and campus safety practices along with their application materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people they were asking didn\u2019t even have answers themselves,\u201d Carter said. \u201cTour guides, admissions officers, didn\u2019t know anything about these things, or what little they did know was not a comprehensive picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buoyed by overwhelming bipartisan support, President George H.W. Bush signed legislation that became the Clery Act on November 8, 1990.<\/p>\n

The modern iteration requires colleges and universities receiving federal funding to publicly report information about crimes reported on campus. Schools must publish annual security reports, maintain daily crime logs and issue timely warnings about serious or ongoing threats to the community.<\/p>\n

The act now also encompasses guidelines for how an institution should provide disciplinary proceedings and information to victims in cases of dating and domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking.<\/p>\n

Several institutions have been penalized for violations of the act, including Michigan State University and Penn State University for staff sex abuse scandals, and Liberty University, which was fined a record $14 million in 2024 after investigation into its sexual misconduct policies.<\/p>\n

Lafayette College was one of the original members of what is now called the Clery Center, the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that helps organizations ensure compliance with Clery Act rules, according to Director of Public Safety Jeff Troxell.<\/p>\n

Troxell wrote in an email that Public Safety regularly meets with the college\u2019s Clery Compliance Committee, made up of campus stakeholders, as well as the Pennsylvania Clery Compliance Committee, composed of other institutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo by Andreas Pelekis for The Lafayette Jeanne Clery\u2019s murder resulted in changes for campus crime reporting standards.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120],"class_list":["post-156154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}