[Senate Hearing 110-867]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 110-867
SECURITY ON AMERICA'S COLLEGE CAMPUSES
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
APRIL 23, 2007
__________
Available via http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate
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Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TED STEVENS, Alaska
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
BARACK OBAMA, Illinois PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri JOHN WARNER, Virginia
JON TESTER, Montana JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire
Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
Kevin J. Landy, Chief Counsel
Beth M. Grossman, Senior Counsel
Brandon L. Milhorn, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Robert L. Strayer, Minority Director for Homeland Security Affairs
Asha A. Mathew, Minority Counsel
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Lieberman............................................ 1
Senator Collins.............................................. 2
Senator Warner............................................... 13
WITNESSES
Monday, April 23, 2007
David Ward, Ph.D., President, American Council on Education...... 4
W. Roger Webb, President, University of Central Oklahoma......... 7
Steven J. Healy, President, International Association of Campus
Law Enforcement Administrators; Director of Public Safety,
Princeton University........................................... 10
Russ Federman, Ph.D., ABPP, Director of Counseling and
Psychological Services, Department of Student Health,
University of Virginia......................................... 14
Irwin Redlener, M.D., Director, National Center for Disaster
Preparedness, Associate Dean for Public Health Preparedness,
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University........... 18
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Federman, Russ, Ph.D., ABPP:
Testimony.................................................... 14
Prepared statement........................................... 63
Healy, Steven J.:
Testimony.................................................... 10
Prepared statement........................................... 57
Redlener, Irwin, M.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 18
Prepared statement........................................... 72
Ward, David, Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 4
Prepared statement........................................... 39
Webb, W. Roger:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 44
APPENDIX
Sheldon F. Greenberg, Ph.D., Associate Dean, School of Education,
and Director, Division of Public Safety Leadership, Johns
Hopkins University, prepared statement......................... 79
Jeff and Debbie Shick, parents of David Shick, a student killed
on campus, prepared statement.................................. 83
Sheila Matthews, National Vice President and Co-Founder,
Ablechild, letter dated April 20, 2007, with attachments....... 86
Responses to Post-Hearing Questions for the Record from:
Mr. Healy.................................................... 94
Dr. Redlener................................................. 98
Mr. Webb..................................................... 101
SECURITY ON AMERICA'S COLLEGE CAMPUSES
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MONDAY, APRIL 23, 2007
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph I.
Lieberman, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Warner.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN LIEBERMAN
Chairman Lieberman. This hearing will come to order.
Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for being here.
Today, for the first time since the awful outburst of
violence and death on their beautiful campus last Monday,
students at Virginia Tech are returning to their classes. But
neither they nor the rest of our country, including, of course,
the Members of this Committee, can return to where we were
before that terrible tragedy, certainly not the families and
friends of the 32 people who were murdered in Blacksburg,
Virginia. Our hearts go out to them and our prayers do, as
well.
This afternoon's hearing is not about what happened at
Virginia Tech last Monday. It's about what we can do together
to prevent anything like it from ever happening again on any
other American college campus. Virginia's Governor, Tim Kaine,
has appointed a commission that will thoroughly investigate and
review the events of last Monday, and that is the best place
for such a review to be carried out.
We have convened this hearing not to investigate but to
educate, to help answer the questions that so many college
students and faculty, their families, friends, and surrounding
communities are asking in the aftermath of Virginia Tech. Are
America's colleges and universities doing enough to maintain
security? What are the best ways to do that? What methods and
technologies does experience tell us have been most effective
in keeping college communities safe? How can campuses be more
alert to the needs of emotionally troubled students and the
dangers that they may pose?
How can those students best be helped before they hurt
themselves or others? Are there Federal laws or programs that
should be changed to help America's colleges and universities
maintain better security on their campuses?
In short, we are here to begin a discussion after Virginia
Tech to make sure that together we are doing everything we
possibly can to prevent any other campus and any other students
and their families from experiencing the nightmare and loss
Virginia Tech experienced last Monday.
I thank the witnesses who have come here on short notice,
and I look forward to their testimony with confidence that
their considerable and relevant experience will be very helpful
to this Committee.
Senator Collins.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLLINS
Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As you mentioned,
our hearts go out to those who died or were wounded or who lost
family members or friends in that terrible campus attack of a
week ago. Their pain reminds us that there are more than 4,100
colleges and universities in this country with more than 16
million students. And as Cornell University's Director of
Campus Security has warned, ``This type of thing could have
happened anywhere.''
Unfortunately, history confirms that statement is true.
Killers have targeted students of all ages, not only in our
country but in Great Britain, Israel, Russia, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere. The murderers have ranged from disturbed individuals
to terrorist squads, and their weapons have included guns,
rocket grenades, and explosives.
Sadly, this threat is not new. Eighty years ago this May, a
disgruntled school board member in Michigan blew up that town's
school, killing more than 40 people, most of them children.
As we will hear today, colleges and universities defy easy
answers for law enforcement officials and first responders.
Typically, these institutions contain many buildings and
hundreds, even thousands, of students, teachers, staff, and
visitors who are moving about freely and who, at larger
institutions, are likely to be strangers to one another. Campus
safety officers confront the daunting challenge of defending
campuses that are largely open to anyone who chooses to walk
in, whether it is a troubled student with a gun or a terrorist
with a suicide belt.
Our college campuses, when one starts to think about it,
are in many ways attractive targets for those who intend to
harm Americans. Besides educating our most precious resource,
our sons and our daughters, research universities can house
nuclear reactors, anthrax research facilities, and stocks of
dangerous materials that could cause injury and death if seized
by the wrong hands. Tens of thousands of people gather on
college campuses in stadiums to enjoy concerts or sporting
events.
Although campus security is primarily a State, local, and
institutional responsibility, the Federal Government plays a
role in strengthening security through the Department of
Homeland Security, the Department of Education, the Secret
Service, the FBI, and other agencies. It is our hope that
today's hearing will shed light on what the Federal Government
can do to help bolster the security of the 4,100 colleges and
universities across the Nation.
We should also consider the issue of campus security in the
broader context of homeland security. As potential targets for
mass murderers, educational institutions have vulnerabilities
similar to those of shopping malls, theaters, and
transportation hubs--that is, large numbers of people and
relatively open public access. And not even a police state
could guarantee security at the thousands of sites like that
across this country.
But we can do more in a free society to identify best
practices, to disseminate them, to help with their
implementation, and to assess their effectiveness. As my good
friend, the University of Maine Public Safety Chief, Noel
March, has pointed out to me--and I know that he speaks very
well of one of our witnesses today, Mr. Healy--the
International Association of Campus Law Enforcement
Administrators is now cooperating with the Department of
Justice on developing a National Center for Campus Public
Safety that would work toward those goals. We can work with our
first responders to ensure more effective responses. Campus
communications systems could be improved to allow for more
effective alert.
Detecting and preventing threats to campus communities,
while being duly mindful of personal freedom and privacy
issues, is also at least as important as being ready to mount
an effective and rapid response to an attack. And that is an
area that this Committee has also spent a great deal of time
on. Perhaps we can promote better use of homeland security and
community policing techniques to identify potential threats
more effectively, as well as providing more mental health
counseling and intervention.
As a member of the Senate's Bipartisan Mental Health
Caucus, I am keenly aware of both the terrible effects of
serious mental illness, but also of increasingly effective
means of treatment. One of the difficult issues that we all
need to wrestle with is whether or not the laws and the
regulations that are needed to protect sensitive medical
information make it too difficult to share vital threat
information with campus law enforcement officials.
But perhaps our greatest service to our colleges and
universities would be to make sure that they are integrated
into emergency preparedness and response planning for all
hazards. For if schools are better prepared for natural
disasters and terrorist attacks, then they will be better
prepared to deal with the random and senseless acts of violence
like the one that visited such awful sorrow on the families and
friends of the Virginia Tech victims.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Senator Collins. We
will go to the panel of witnesses now.
Again, I thank you for coming on relatively short notice.
This is an extraordinarily experienced and diverse panel.
While you are addressing a committee of the U.S. Senate, I
wanted to ask you to have it in your mind or to speak as if you
were addressing the parents and students that we have met in
the last week, that probably each of you have come across in
the last week, who have asked, ``Are we safe on our college
campus? And is there more that can be done to make sure that we
are?''
We are going to begin first with David Ward, Ph.D. Dr. Ward
is currently President of the American Council on Education
(ACE). From 1994 to 2000, he served as Chancellor of the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, during which time he was
responsible for managing the university's response to a number
of crises, including a stampede of students at a football
stadium. ACE represents approximately 1,800 accredited degree
granting colleges and universities and higher education related
associations. Dr. Ward, we are grateful that you are here, and
we look forward to your testimony now.
STATEMENT OF DAVID WARD, Ph.D.,\1\ PRESIDENT, AMERICAN COUNCIL
ON EDUCATION
Mr. Ward. Thank you, sir. Chairman Lieberman, Ranking
Member Collins, and Members of the Committee who may eventually
join us, I want to thank you for this opportunity to testify
today about the important and timely issue of emergency
preparedness on our college and university campuses.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Ward appears in the Appendix on
page 39.
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Let me say at the outset the security of students, faculty,
and staff is a preeminent concern of every college and
university president, and my association is essentially a
representation of those presidential roles in higher education.
On the other hand, the strength of the presidency is
reflected in the team that they lead. And many of the other
testimonials you hear today will be from the people who are, in
a sense, in the trenches developing the plans and providing the
expertise the presidents rely on. But ultimately it is the
judgment of presidents that often is determinative of the
response and the planning that goes on.
The events of September 11, 2001, certainly changed the way
campuses, as well as the rest of the country, view the issue of
security. Four years later, the devastation wrought by
Hurricane Katrina challenged the survival of our institutions
in New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta as never before. And
of course, last week's tragedy at Virginia Tech has put these
issues at the forefront of our Nation's consciousness
tragically once again.
In thinking about this topic, I think it would be useful to
put the issue of emergency planning as it relates to colleges
and universities in some context and to identify those factors
that make securing our campuses particularly challenging. We
are not, in a sense, a firm. We are not a defined entity in
space. And I think we need to keep reminding ourselves how
complex they really are.
Not only are universities complex, but they are also open
by design. The campus that I supervised in Madison covered, in
its various sections, almost 10,000 acres. It enrolled 42,000
students, employed 16,000 people. And on any given day, there
were thousands of visitors either attending extension classes
or other functions on campus. This mobility is a characteristic
that is equally pronounced on campuses with a large number of
commuter students so that the community is in constant motion.
Knowing where they are at any time is extremely difficult. And
the campus itself is multi-centered.
Colleges and universities are complex places with a great
number and variety of facilities--dormitories, dining halls,
classrooms, offices, power plants, laboratories, field houses,
and stadiums. In Madison, we had 600 buildings, a hospital, a
medical school, a research park, a nuclear reactor, an 80,000-
seat football stadium, and a 17,000-seat fieldhouse, just for
starters. So they're really more like small towns than they are
even like a shopping center or an airport.
Colleges and universities also have large numbers of
faculty and staff. In many places they are the largest
employers in the area. Their defining characteristic is that
they serve a population--and this, I think, is important--that
consists predominantly of young adults whose attitudes and
behaviors often differ significantly from workplace employees
or even elementary and secondary school students.
From my own experience as chancellor, I can tell you that
crises can happen when you least expect them. I think crisis
management has become one of the defining skills that all
chancellors and presidents surely now need to have.
In my case, as has been mentioned, I faced an unexpected
challenge of dealing with a post-game crowd surge at a football
game that resulted in 70 students being treated for injuries in
our hospital, 15 of whom were, in fact, so seriously injured
that it was thought that we might not be able to save all of
them. They were all saved by the enormous and effective
treatment at our university hospital by our trauma surgeons.
But we did use that incident to spur improvements in our
communications plan, upgrade the stadium facilities, and
augment medical and security staff at such events.
Without any hesitation I can tell you that the safety and
well-being of students, faculty, and staff is a subject that
keeps all presidents up at night, whether the campus sits on
the San Andreas fault like the University of California at
Berkeley, on a coastal floodplain like Dillard University, or
in Lower Manhattan like Pace University which, in addition to
its main campus, had classrooms in one of the World Trade
Center buildings.
While all campuses engage in serious emergency preparedness
and contingency planning, there is no question that security
efforts were dramatically stepped up on all our campuses
following September 11, 2001. The same kind of increased
scrutiny will take place now, as well, as each of our colleges
and universities tries to make sense of the unspeakable tragedy
at Virginia Tech by sharing the kind of research and
information that will be gathered in its wake and using it as a
means to help avert future disasters.
A careful planning effort is, of course, one of the key
reasons why our Gulf Coast institutions accomplished the smooth
evacuation of all of their student and faculty when Hurricane
Katrina struck. Over 120,000 students were able to register at
other institutions within 2 weeks of that disaster.
In contrast to the extensive death toll caused by the storm
throughout the region, the evacuation and reregistration of
more than 100,000 students and faculty from 30 institutions was
achieved without a single loss of life and is an unheralded
success story of that particular disaster.
Even as the tragic events of the past week were unfolding,
many campuses around the country took immediate steps to place
their own institutions on a heightened state of alert. Why? As
the campus chief at the University of Texas said, ``A concern
for every law enforcement official in the Nation right now is
copy cats.''
We will continue to learn more about what added security
measures campuses intend to take to bolster their own planning
and prevention efforts, but they have each begun the task of
re-examining the needs of their campus. Rice University is
attempting to work with residential college leaders to identify
students who appear to be under extreme stress so that they can
be referred to counseling. This is truly one of the great legal
challenges of our campuses.
The University of Memphis plans to build a system that will
act as a schoolwide intercom. The University of Iowa is
weighing a similar outdoor system. The College of the Desert
has a new phone system that allows it to quickly send out
announcements to every phone on campus and a backup loudspeaker
system when phone contact is not possible.
Nearer to home, at Johns Hopkins University, 100 smart
cameras have been installed on campus that are linked to
computers which will alert campus security and Baltimore City
Police when suspicious situations arise.
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement
Administrators, who we will hear from, is the professional
association and accrediting agency which has been instrumental
in developing best practices, training materials, and guidance
for the campus community in matters of security. We support
their recommendation to take the next logical step toward
strengthening campus first responder capabilities.
In the end, it comes down to planning. It is essential that
every campus have an emergency plan in place that identifies a
core response team, a communications plan, and a way to
implement the movements of emergency and other staff in a
variety of scenarios.
No one wants to consider the unthinkable. But in our post-
September 11 world, all of us must consider it and plan for it.
This includes college and university presidents. We have
already made great strides to upgrade campus security and
ensure that our world-class institutions remain safe places to
live, learn, and innovate. The thing we have to remember is
that we cannot rest on our laurels; as the events of Virginia
Tech have shown, there is always some new and tragic episode
around the corner.
And ultimately, I believe, there are two big problems that
we face. One of them is that we are, by nature, rational
communities and the worst disasters are, in fact, the result of
levels of distress in human beings that are often not
susceptible to rational treatment. And how we deal with this
challenge where the predictability of so many things on the
campus we can plan for, but the unpredictable, which is often
built in to some of these human tragedies, is very hard to
cater for.
And finally, not only are our college campuses extremely
complicated, very large, and almost different from any other
institutional form, but they are also very different
themselves. The plan that might meet the needs of a small
liberal arts college, great research university, a community
college, something that is in a downtown setting or in a rural
setting, all will require some subtle differences in how they
develop their emergency planning. One size in our response will
certainly not fit all.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Dr. Ward. That is a
very good beginning to the discussion.
Our next witness is W. Roger Webb, who is currently the
President of the University of Central Oklahoma, a public
university of approximately 16,000 students in the greater
Oklahoma City area.
Mr. Webb is testifying on behalf of the American
Association of State Colleges and Universities, which
represents over 400 public 4-year colleges and universities.
Of real interest to us is that before being a college
president, which Mr. Webb has been for 20 years, he was the
Commissioner of Public Safety for the State of Oklahoma and a
member of the State Highway Patrol.
Thanks very much for being here. We look forward to your
testimony.
STATEMENT OF W. ROGER WEBB,\1\ PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL
OKLAHOMA
Mr. Webb. Thank you, Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Member
Collins.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Webb appears in the Appendix on
page 44.
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Thank you for this hearing and thank you for your opening
statements which very well, I think, set out the issues that we
face today.
Let me tell you about an experience that I had just last
Friday, which drove home to me the significance of these
issues. I was walking across our campus during the noon hour,
and I ran into a campus tour of approximately 25 students, many
of them there with parents. They were checking out our campus,
making decisions about where to go next fall.
As the tour guide introduced me to the group, he asked are
there any questions of the president? One lady, a mother,
quickly held up her hand and said, Mr. President, we are
seriously thinking about your university for next year. But I
have one question for you. And that is will Amanda be safe on
your campus?
Mr. Chairman, that is the question that parents all over
America are asking today as they prepare to send their sons and
daughters off for what should be the best 4 years of their
life.
She did not ask me about the library. She did not ask me
about our wireless campus. She did not ask about any academic
programs. She was, first of all, concerned about the safety of
her daughter.
I entered academia after 12 years in law enforcement, the
last 4 years serving as Commissioner of Public Safety for
Oklahoma. Perhaps this makes me one of the few college
presidents in America who once carried a badge and gun and now
serves as a university president. Hopefully some of the
experience that I had living in both worlds, law-enforcement
and higher education, will provide me some insight as my
colleagues and I deal with these very complex issues involving
campus security.
College administrators today are facing many competing
priorities. One is the mind set of law enforcement which says
that to curb crime, to prevent violence, we need a greater
police presence. The academicians say no, we cannot do anything
to chill the open and free environment that we have that is so
important to a quality education. So this is a debate that
often carries over in budget decisions that presidents and
senior administrators must make about how to spend the money.
Do we invest more in cameras and equipment, in police
personnel? Or do we put more money over in the chemistry
department?
For years those of us in the heartland thought that we were
pretty well immune to mass violence and acts of terrorism.
Twelve years ago just last week this erroneous assumption was
shattered when Timothy McVeigh ignited a Ryder truck loaded
with fertilizer and racing fuel and brought down a Federal
building, taking the lives of 168 innocent women, children, and
men, seriously injuring over 500 more in a blast that was heard
and felt on our campus 18 miles away. No one had ever thought
about a truck becoming a weapon of mass destruction. Neither
had law enforcement planned on hijacked airplanes flying into
buildings and becoming instruments of death, nor a one-room
Amish schoolhouse becoming a killing zone.
Certainly September 11 should have been a wake-up call for
all of us to the potential of mass violence and even the threat
of terrorism on our campuses. But in reality not much has
happened on most college campuses in this country in terms of
increasing our level of security.
Just one week ago our world again was turned upside down by
this tragedy that occurred when an individual became a weapon
of mass destruction with two handguns when he walked into a
dormitory and a classroom on one of the great campuses in
Blacksburg, Virginia.
In the aftermath of all of this the spotlight is shining
squarely today on college presidents and senior administrators,
and that question is before us, how safe are our campuses?
Most universities have a campus police system and certified
officers, and Mr. Healy represents a great association. They do
a great job with their campus security. Most of our campus
police, they do a good job on the routine day-to-day operations
of the campus, crowd control, preventing theft, dealing with
small issues. But they are challenged in that rare case when
there is a major crisis.
This is why partnerships between the local campus police
and the city, State, and Federal Government is so important. So
when an event happens, we can quickly bring in the experts who
are experienced in dealing with these major situations, can
take over the jurisdiction on our campuses.
Colleges and universities are experiencing another
challenge, and that is the significant rise in the percentage
of students who are coming to our campus already diagnosed with
mental illnesses. In coping with this, the universities have to
balance the privacy rights of the individual student against
protecting the entire student body. This is a particularly
complex task.
Because of this challenge, we must have professional
counselors on staff. And as presidents, we must fund those
counseling staffs adequately to handle those students as they
come to our attention. All university personnel, particularly
faculty and staff, need to be trained to be able to report
signs of troubling behavior.
So often these students are crying out. They are reaching
out to us, and we do not hear them and we do not see them. But
when they are identified, the hope is that the students will
agree to be treated.
It is in those cases when they do not agree to voluntarily
submit themselves to treatment that we have this quandary. The
threshold is set very high as to when we can forcibly remove
that student from the college campus. This is the gray area.
This is a problem area that campuses are having to deal with.
It is one of those difficult situations. And our goal has to be
to discipline the disruptive behavior, not disparage the
individual.
There are severe limits on sharing of information, sharing
information with other campuses who these individuals may
transfer to. We transfer problems from campus to campus and do
not even know it. Sharing information with parents. So
certainly issues should become a focus of a national debate on
when we can lift this protective shield of privacy and help
deal with these troubled students.
There are issues about communication that we have talked
about in recent days. How can we best communicate with students
on our campus?
Chairman Lieberman. Mr. Webb, if you need a little extra
time, go ahead and take it. I notice you are moving your pages
because the clock is moving. So if you need a few extra minutes
to finish your statement, go ahead.
Mr. Webb. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am concerned about the communications methods that we
have. There is a lot of debate about that. We have to use all
forms of communication. We have to use old media and new media.
We know that the students communicate differently. We can use
those social networks, MySpace and Facebook and text messaging.
But for those commuter students and those non-traditional-age
students, perhaps who have not reached campus when a crisis is
alerted, we need to go back to the old-fashioned radio and TV
announcements, the alarm systems, the flashing alarm systems
for those students who may be hearing impaired, the old-
fashioned kind of intercom system, the voice-activated alarm
systems where we can tell students what to do when there is a
dangerous situation on our campus.
Many States now are already reviewing their campus
security. I know the Governor of Virginia has started that. Our
own governor, Governor Brad Henry of Oklahoma, created a task
force last week. He asked our chancellor, Glen Johnson, to head
that task force. Every college and university in our State will
be reviewing our security plans.
And then on May 30, there will be a national summit on
campus security that will be held at the University of Central
Oklahoma. And we will have national speakers there. This will
be sponsored by our State Regents for Higher Education, by our
American Association of State Colleges and Universities
(AASCU), the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of
Terrorism, and the University of Central Oklahoma.
After Columbine, there was a number of Federal dollars that
were dispersed for materials. There are some good materials out
there. They need to be reviewed and updated, and they need to
be distributed to our campuses once again.
One great source I mentioned is the Memorial Institute for
Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), a trust that was created after
the Oklahoma City bombing. It is the top website in the world
on terrorism. I would suggest that the Department of Homeland
Security may help MIPT put together a link on campus security.
And then, of course, AASCU is also a great clearinghouse for
that.
There are other experiences out there that we can look to.
I have cited them in my written remarks, the University of West
Florida for hurricanes, California State University at
Northridge, Sonoma State, and there are others.
Mr. Chairman, I cannot guarantee that Amanda will be 100
percent safe on our campus. I can say that this campus and
campuses across America are among the safest places that she
could spend the next 4 years of her life. Much to do with
Amanda's safety will be the decisions that she makes while she
is on our campus. But we need her and we need the eyes and ears
of every faculty member, every staff member, to help us to be
able to identify individuals who may be troubled and may need
some help. And I would suggest that we all use that safety
mantra on the New York subways that if you see something, say
something.
And finally, Mr. Chairman and Senator Collins, I assure you
that every college, every university in America, and every
parent in America will appreciate any help, any assistance, any
guidance that this Committee can provide us.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, President Webb, for the help
you have provided us in your testimony this morning.
Our next witness is Steven Healy. He is the President of
the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement
Administrators and Director of Public Safety at Princeton
University, where he has served since 2003.
Chief Healy, thank you for being here, and we look forward
to your testimony now.
STATEMENT OF STEVEN J. HEALY,\1\ PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL
ASSOCIATION OF CAMPUS LAW ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATORS; DIRECTOR
OF PUBLIC SAFETY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Healy. Thank you and good afternoon Mr. Chairman and
Senator Collins.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Healy appears in the Appendix on
page 57.
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As you mentioned, I am the President of the International
Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA),
an association that represents the campus public safety
executives at 1,100 institutions of higher education and more
than 1,800 members. I am also the Director of Public Safety at
Princeton University.
IACLEA joins with you in mourning the loss of so many
students and faculty at Virginia Tech last week. Our shared
efforts to advance campus public safety must acknowledge and
honor the students and faculty who perished and were injured
one week ago today.
This tragic event has heightened the urgency of our
continuous efforts to enhance campus public safety at the more
than 4,000 institutions of higher education serving 15 million
students. I thank and commend the Committee for holding this
important hearing.
This afternoon I hope to accomplish three goals. First, I
want to assure the Committee and the American people that
vigorous efforts are underway to develop and implement best
practices in campus public safety. With our partners, such as
the International Association of Chiefs of Police, College and
University Policing Section, and several Federal agencies, we
are committed to enhancing safety and security on our Nation's
campuses.
Second, I hope to paint a picture of the complexity of this
very critical mission.
And finally, I hope through my testimony that we can
identify additional ways to supplement our current efforts.
Campus public safety continues to evolve into a complex
responsibility. Our officers must be trained and equipped to
deal with a variety of issues. These include community
policing, crime prevention and control, alcohol and substance
abuse, sexual assault, dating violence, students with mental
health issues, and campus crime reporting compliance.
Colleges and universities are traditionally open and
accessible environments that reflect our free and democratic
society. We must balance that openness that is the center of
American higher education with the need to protect students,
faculty, staff, and visitors. We must assure the safety of our
students in the classrooms and in their dormitories while
protecting facilities critical to business, health, and
national defense. We do this while fostering an environment
that is conducive to learning, teaching, and research.
There are a number of critical safety issues facing
colleges and universities today. At the top of the list are
issues related to high risk drinking and the use and abuse of
illegal and prescription drugs. In the year 2001 alone more
than 1,700 students died from unintentional alcohol-related
injuries. The problem has reached devastating levels, and
campus public safety agencies are key partners in addressing
these critical challenges.
Homeland security, of course, is also a priority on our
campuses. It is no secret that campuses have many elements that
make them attractive targets for terrorism. These include
international communities, sensitive research materials,
controversial research projects, and sporting venues that
accommodate tens of thousands of spectators. These realities
prompted FBI Director Mueller to identify campuses as soft
targets for terrorism.
Campus public safety is provided in a variety of ways. Some
institutions have sworn armed officers with full police powers
while others have non-sworn unarmed officers. We work within
different governing structures and under an array of Federal
and local laws.
Given this complexity of the campus public safety
environment, I am able to report to you that we are continually
vigilant to the issues of safety and security on our campuses.
That said, we must continually review and when necessary
enhance our policies and procedures to address new and emerging
challenges.
I would like to discuss areas where we are leading the way.
I have submitted additional materials that supplement my
comments and welcome the opportunity to further speak with
Committee members about these important issues.
Since 2004, grant support from the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security has enabled IACLEA to develop a variety of
training programs and resources for campus public safety
agencies. Thousands of our officers and first responders have
attended these training programs. We are currently delivering a
command and control course that has trained more than 700
command-level officers in its first year of operation.
The multiagency response at Virginia Tech last Monday
underscores how important it is for our campus public safety
agencies to exercise and train with their law enforcement
partners outside of campus. IACLEA, together with Texas A&M
University, has developed a Threat and Risk Assessment Tool to
assist campus executives in performing an assessment of their
vulnerabilities and implementing solutions. In doing so, the
capacity of the university to prevent, protect against, respond
to, and recover from catastrophic events is enhanced.
IACLEA has also partnered with the Department of Homeland
Security and the FBI to produce a lessons learned white paper
based on the experiences of the Gulf Coast campuses during
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This widely distributed white
paper sets forth specific recommendations to enhance campus
preparedness.
Of course, we also offer educational workshops at our
annual conferences and other training venues.
While we currently reach nearly half the traditional higher
education institutions, we need to ensure that all colleges and
universities are committed to and have access to high-quality
information, best practices, and training. Greater Federal,
State, and local support for campus public safety agencies--
both public and private institutions--would provide additional
opportunities.
Campus public safety agencies are not explicitly recognized
as potential recipients of Federal funds administered by DHS
and the Justice Department. This presents a major challenge in
many States when decisions are being made about the allocation
of formula grant funds. We urge Congress to consider creating a
dedicated funding stream to strengthen public safety on our
Nation's campuses.
In late 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services convened a National Summit
on Campus Public Safety. The summit brought together nationally
recognized experts on campus public safety, campus risk
management, and emergency preparedness. A consensus
recommendation was the need for a National Center for Campus
Public Safety to support research, information sharing, best
and model practices, and strategic planning.
Tomorrow I will be meeting with representatives from the
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and the National
Center for Campus Public Safety Advisory Board to further
develop the framework for this center. A national center would
serve as an invaluable resource for all those who have a stake
in campus public safety and thus, the success of our colleges
and universities.
In summary, Mr. Chairman, Senator Collins, and other
Members of the Committee, adequately protecting our Nation's
colleges and universities relies on important partnerships.
There are very critical relationships that we must continue to
develop and nurture on our campuses and with our Federal,
State, and local partners. These partnerships are developing
but must be stronger. In light of the tragic events at Virginia
Tech, we will work with the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service to
expand previous studies of middle and high school-aged shooters
to take a deliberate, campus-focused look at rampage shooting
incidents at colleges and universities. This examination and
the lessons learned from it will surely result in the
identification of best practices.
IACLEA will also work with the national associations of
higher education and our other partners to adopt a four-point
risk management strategy that we believe may help us prevent
future tragedies. I have outlined those four points in the
statements provided to you.
Of particular interest is the need for mass notification
systems that have the appropriate capacity, security, and
redundancy. These systems must be capable of reaching our
community members using several methodologies including
landline and cellular phones, text messaging, and e-mail. I
believe this approach will address potential gaps that may
exist on some campuses and establish a framework for addressing
future challenges.
In closing, for the past 49 years, IACLEA has worked to
advance campus public safety. We understand the vital role our
colleges and universities play in ensuring democracy throughout
the world. We will continue to be an advocate for the 30,000
public safety officers who serve over 4,000 unique communities.
Thank you for your commitment to this important issue. As I
mentioned at the beginning of my statement, advancing campus
public safety is a shared responsibility and requires efforts
from all of us.
I would also like to thank the Department of Homeland
Security, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department
of Education for their support, along with many State and local
agencies who are our partners. These partnerships are vital to
fulfilling our promise to ensure that every campus community
remains safe and open.
I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this
conversation.
Chairman Lieberman. Chief Healy, thanks very much for some
very constructive thoughts, which we want to discuss further in
the question-and-answer period.
I want to welcome Senator John Warner, our friend and
colleague from Virginia. Senator Warner, before we go to the
final two witnesses, would you like to offer an opening
statement?
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR WARNER
Senator Warner. I thank you for that courtesy, Mr.
Chairman. I think at this moment I will just listen to the rest
of the testimony, and in my time I will take a question or two.
Chairman Lieberman. Very well. Thank you. I am very glad
you are here.
Our next witness is Dr. Russ Federman, Director of
Counseling and Psychological Services, Department of Student
Health, University of Virginia, where he has served since 2000.
Dr. Federman, we welcome your presence and your testimony.
STATEMENT OF RUSS FEDERMAN, Ph.D., ABPP,\1\ DIRECTOR OF
COUNSELING AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES, DEPARTMENT OF STUDENT
HEALTH, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Mr. Federman. Thank you. Distinguished Senators, Senate
staff, members of the media, and all others present today, as
clinical psychologist and Director of Counseling and
Psychological Services at the University of Virginia, I am here
today to try to provide you with an overview of the current
state of mental health issues and responses on university
campuses across the country.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Federman appears in the Appendix
on page 63.
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According to the Department of Education, there were 17.3
million students enrolled in over 4,500 colleges and
universities nationwide in 2004. The Chronicle of Higher
Education projects 2007 enrollment figures at nearly 18
million.
From the 2006 National Survey of Counseling Center
Directors, which surveyed 376 directors across the country, we
see that 8.9 percent or one in every 11 students has sought
counseling or psychological help within the past year. When we
take this 8.9 percent and apply it to the current projected
enrollment of 18 million, it yields a total of 1.6 million
students having sought counseling or psychological help during
the same time period.
Since 2003 the American College Health Association has been
conducting the National College Health Assessment. The most
recent 2006 survey involved the largest randomized sample since
the survey's inception, and that included 94,806 students from
public and private universities across the country. The survey
reports some striking data.
Within the past year, 94 out of 100 students reported
feeling overwhelmed by all they had to do; 44 out of 100,
almost one-half, have felt so depressed it was difficult to
function; 18 out of 100, or close to one out of every five,
reported having a depressive disorder; 12 out of 100 had an
anxiety disorder; 9 out of 100, or one out of every 11,
reported having seriously considered suicide within the past
year; 1.3 percent actually did attempt suicide. That's 13 out
of every 1,000 students.
If we have 18 million enrolled students, this means 234,000
suicide attempts every year, 19,500 every month, 642 attempts
per day. That is staggering.
Why stop suicide? Well obviously, it saves student lives.
But we also know that some students become suicidal before they
become homicidal, before they act on their murderous wishes.
In the past 10 to 15 years, we have seen a significant sea
change with university counseling center work. More effective
psychotropic medication, improved education of primary care
providers in childhood and adolescent disorders, and gradual
destigmatization of treatment allow for enrollment of far more
students today with pre-existing psychiatric disorders than we
would have seen 10 or 20 years ago. The traditional university
counseling center has become the university community mental
health center, where we are faced with high volume, high risk,
and very serious illnesses.
The kinds of mental disturbances which yield extreme
violence are rare. Individuals with this level of disturbance
typically experience a degree of impairment that is
inconsistent with requirements of university life. Given the
ongoing interactions with peers, faculty, and residence life
staff, when a student's functioning deteriorates within a
university setting, the student's aberrant behavior is usually
observable and distressing to others. In most instances,
university faculty, deans and administrators, in addition to
university mental health professionals, are notified of these
instances and appropriate attention and limits are brought to
bear upon the individual.
Counseling centers have received increased resources over
the last 10 years in an effort to keep up with need. But the
gradual expansion of resources has also corresponded with ever
increasing student enrollment. From the National Director
Survey, we see that in 1996 we had a ratio of one clinical
staff per 1,598 students. This past year, in 2006, we see a
ratio of one per 1,697. We are not getting ahead of the curve.
If anything, we are beginning to slide behind.
With limited resources, counseling centers are usually
directed toward crisis intervention, stabilization, and brief
treatment approaches. Many students may need more than brief
approaches. And when resources are stretched to meet the
greater needs of more acutely disturbed students, this consumes
important hours that could be used to treat a larger number of
students.
University mental health clinicians devote considerable
time toward consultation with administrators, deans, faculty,
staff, and parents creating an interconnected web of support.
Although confidentiality laws generally prevent university
counseling centers from sharing confidential information
without the student's permission, in most instances students
are willing to provide this permission as they recognize the
helpful intent of our efforts. It is said that it takes a
village to raise a child. My experience is that within
Divisions of Student Affairs, the village is a very interactive
one where students' well-being is our primary concern.
Today's hearing exists against the backdrop of a tragic
event, the recent shooting at Virginia Tech. What we must keep
in mind is that this was one incident. Its proportions were
greater and more tragic than we have ever witnessed on a
university campus, but it was one incident. The frequency of a
mentally disturbed student perpetrating senseless violence on a
university campus can almost be counted on one hand. The
Virginia Tech shooting does not bring our attention to large
numbers of students falling through the cracks. In actuality,
it was an extreme exception to the norm, and as such, it
illustrates that university officials, in collaboration with
mental health professionals, are doing an exceptional job in
managing those mentally ill students who do represent a threat
to university communities.
The most obvious challenge faced by university counseling
centers involves funding to adequately meet the increasing
demand for mental health services across the country. Those
resources currently available do allow us to be responsive to
high needs students. However, this capacity is quite variable
from one university to the next. Most university counseling
center staffs are overworked. During peak times of the
semester, we are all barely able to keep up with the influx of
new students.
Furthermore, as long as resources are consumed with
clinical treatment and case management, university counseling
centers cannot do an adequate job with the preventative work of
outreach and education. Most directors feel they are only
scratching the surface with regard to the delivery of truly
effective preventative educational services. More truly is
needed.
We are also faced with the dilemma of how university
communities can best work together to identify and manage those
students with complex mental health needs. The issue of
communication among campus officials pertaining to disturbed
students is a complex one. Mental health licensing laws
prohibit clinicians from communicating about patients without a
signed release.
To those who are not regularly engaged in mental health
work, the limitations of patient confidentiality may seem
frustrating and counterproductive. However, from the point of
view of the patient, confidentiality is one of the salient
factors that allow them to reach out in the first place.
Students need to be able to express their most disturbing and
frightening thoughts without fears of unwanted consequence. If
students perceive confidentiality as permeable and easily
dispensable, then large numbers of students will not come for
help and our ability to protect the community will become
further diminished. Confidentiality saves lives.
Confidentiality does not place more lives at risk.
Confidentiality is essential to good psychotherapy.
Having said that, it is clear that university officials
also need to be able to communicate to one another, and
sometimes with parents, when student threat of harm reaches a
threshold where the university community is no longer safe.
Here lies the rub.
Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA)
is intended to protect the confidentiality of student records
and define under what instances parents can have access to
student information and grades. Access is given ``in connection
with an emergency to appropriate persons if the knowledge of
such information is necessary to protect health or safety of
the student or other persons.''
This definition is vague and is left to the interpretations
of individual universities. A more liberal interpretation which
does allow for open communication of high-risk issues comes
into direct conflict with mental health ethics and licensing
codes pertaining to confidentiality. Unless imminent danger to
self or others is at hand, then clinicians' capacities to
communicate with other university personnel or even patients'
families are limited. If and when we do choose to breach
confidentiality in order to address issues of safety, then we
risk violating mental health and ethics codes. Essentially, we
are faced with circumstances where we are damned if we do and
we are damned if we do not.
The complex interplay between students' rights to
confidentiality, university personnel's need to communicate,
families' inclusion in this communication, and the inherent
conflicts of our health care, educational, and confidentiality
policies need serious consideration and review.
We need to get ahead of the curve with resources devoted to
mental health. The cost of university education is more than
many families can bear. We cannot simply add to tuition or
support fees as a solution.
In 2003, during the 108th Congress, members of the U.S.
Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives introduced
bipartisan legislation that was designed to help campus
counseling centers provide mental services and meet the
increasing needs of students. Provisions of this important
legislation were included as part of the Garrett Lee Smith
Memorial Act, a law named after Senator Smith's son who
committed suicide.
The Campus Suicide Prevention Program exists now as a
competitive grant program administered by the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration. Funded at $5
million, it is a small program but one whose value has become
more evident in the past few years.
While the Campus Suicide Prevention Program did integrate
many of the important provisions of the Campus Care and
Counseling Act, it did not provide the authority that would
allow campus counseling centers to expand their staff,
internship, or residency slots, an option that would ensure
greater availability of clinical services.
Further, the authorization of appropriations was capped at
$5 million.
The Campus Suicide Prevention Program must receive an
increase in appropriations. The use of funds must be broadened
to allow centers to strengthen long-term staffing.
New funding for student outreach, education, and prevention
is absolutely necessary. We must join the academic community in
teaching students about healthy lifestyles which truly are the
strongest protective factors against depression and other
mental illnesses. Educational efforts must also extend to
involve student peer connections. Students know students. They
know when students are doing well and they typically know when
they are not doing well. We need to do a better job of
partnering with students and utilizing their own awareness of
their troubled friends in bringing those students to our
attention and in facilitating appropriate help.
The legislature needs to attend to the important intersect
of HIPAA, FERPA, and confidentiality codes. Greater consistency
between laws and policies are needed.
Within recent years, we have also seen numerous initiatives
and foundations created in response to the growing awareness of
university mental health issues. Research endeavors and policy
initiatives such as those being conducted by the Association of
University and College Counseling Center Directors, the Jed
Foundation, the National Research Consortium of Counseling
Centers in Higher Education, and the Center for the Study of
College Student Mental Health are all essential to our
understanding and response to student mental health issues. And
we need more.
In closing, I appreciate the Committee's attention to these
pressing problems. We face urgent challenges and unmet needs.
Our university students are our Nation's future, and we must
ensure they receive the help they need.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Dr. Federman.
You touched directly on some Federal laws there and funding
programs, and I will want to come back and talk to you some
more about that in the question and answer period.
Our final witness this afternoon is Dr. Irwin Redlener, a
pediatrician by training. Dr. Redlener is President and Co-
founder of the Children's Health Fund. He is also Director of
the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and Associate
Dean for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University's
Mailman School of Public Health.
His recent book, ``Americans at Risk,'' explored the
Nation's lack of preparedness for large-scale disasters,
including the vulnerability of soft targets such as schools.
Dr. Redlener, we welcome your testimony now.
STATEMENT OF IRWIN REDLENER, M.D.,\1\ DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CENTER
FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS, ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
PREPAREDNESS, MAILMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
Dr. Redlener. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you,
Senator Collins and Senator Warner.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Dr. Redlener appears in the Appendix
on page 72.
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Thank you on behalf of a lot of Americans who are depending
on this kind of leadership to demonstrate how concerned the
country is officially about the events that occurred like the
one in Virginia last week.
I am sure that it is the collective hope of this entire
panel that we provide you with insights and perspectives that
may help you meet some of the challenges that will help make
institutions of higher learning, and schools in general, be as
safe and secure as possible.
I really want to focus on some specific recommendations
that I think might be appropriate for consideration. The first
is I want to emphasize the point that has been made before,
that, by and large, American schools and colleges and
universities are safe places. I think the statistics bear that
out, even though the emotional impact of these horrible events
seem to belie the reality. The fact is that most schools and
campuses are entirely safe. And Amanda should be happy to go to
your university.
But like all other places and institutions they are subject
to an array of hazards and risks and accidents. And the
millions of children who go to these campuses and the parents
who send them there need to be sure that we are doing
everything we can collectively to make sure that these children
are safe.
That said, we do many things in our country and our
society, like wearing seat belts in cars and keeping smoke
alarms in our homes and taking proper precautions at the
workplace, all preventive public health strategies that are
instituted to help make sure that people are safe wherever they
are. Similarly, I think all of the efforts that you have heard
discussed today do require a ``public health approach'' to make
sure that we have done what we can do.
What this means is that sufficient attention and resources
need to be devoted to establishing and sustaining a prudent,
smart, all hazard approach to campus safety without
compromising a primary commitment to education, and without
undermining the sense of an open and free campus.
It is a difficult balance, I should say, to keep this
perspective of trying to make sure that campuses are safe,
while underscoring the importance of core values.
Second, it is my strong opinion that tragedies like what
occurred at Virginia Tech or Columbine or other sites are not
about movie violence, video games, Goth culture, or even, in
most cases, anything resembling reality-based revenge. These
events are about people with extreme, potentially intractable
and violent psychiatric disorders. The prevention of these
catastrophes is therefore about sophisticated detection,
appropriate intervention, and doing everything possible to keep
instruments of mass destruction out of their hands.
This is a difficult task, to be sure. But it is also
essential that we do what can be done to reduce the possibility
of more Virginia Techs in the future.
Third, like any card-carrying public health doctor, I
believe in prevention as the first priority of action. There
are things that can be effective in preventing, perhaps not
all, but some of these terrible tragedies. But when prevention
fails, all of our response and mitigation strategies and
systems must be ready, capable of dealing with extreme life-
threatening situations.
So my recommendations will be in two categories. First,
improving our ability to prevent catastrophe; and second,
enhancing our capacity to respond effectively to save lives.
My fourth observation, though, is that prevention and
response strategies involve a wide range of players from
government at all levels to community responders, campus
officials, students themselves, and concerned family members.
It is very important therefore to understand the roles of each
of these sectors because they are different. They need to be
coordinated; they need to be integrated. What the Federal
Government needs to do is very different than, say, what State
governments or campus authorities need to do.
So, I am going to limit my comments to those actions which
I think might be helpful for Federal consideration.
Finally, I believe it is also essential to raise the
specter of a potential disaster which could become a reality at
some point in our Nation's future. I am referring to the
possibility of a planned terrorist attack on one or more of
America's softest targets, our schools and college campuses.
These places, like hospitals and public spaces in the
workplace, are known as soft targets because access is
relatively simple, absolute security is virtually impossible,
and the potential for terror-induced, high degrees of society-
wide grief and reaction are assured.
In fact, the question of children as targets of terrorism
was addressed at a national conference we held at Colombia in
the fall of 2005. Our concerns were driven by a well-
established history of terror organizations explicitly
attacking children throughout history and in many parts of the
world. We are painfully aware of the horrific 2004 attack on a
school in Beslan, Russia, where more than 150 children were
slain before the perpetrators could be neutralized by
authorities. Although this attack was clearly the work of
Chechen rebels, there was a continuing suspicion that Al Qaeda
was somehow involved in the planning, if not the execution, of
the assault. Our concern, of course, is that the possibility of
a Beslan-style attack on a U.S. school or campus cannot be
dismissed.
Other realities that have gotten our attention include the
fact that in late 2001, a planned attack on an American school
in Singapore was thwarted by counterterrorism officials.
In the fall of 2004, an Iraqi insurgent captured in Baghdad
was discovered to have had detailed plans and layouts of
schools in five States.
And perhaps most unsettling have been the writings by Al
Qaeda leaders who have articulated a kind of Jihadist mandate
to attack U.S. citizens in general and children in particular.
Among the more notable and chilling examples of these threats
was written by Sulieman Abu Gheith, a key bin Laden lieutenant
subsequently captured by coalition forces. But his writings
included quotes like the following, ``We have not yet reached
parity with America. We have the right to kill 4 million
Americans, 2 million of them children.''
All of this suggests that the United States cannot afford
to be sanguine about the dangers facing our children and young
people, and we need to be sure that efforts to prevent,
mitigate, and respond to strategies encompass a wide range of
potential hazards including, as I have just mentioned, non-
domestic terrorism.
So as to my specific recommendations, I want to start with
a couple of comments about what needs to be done as far as
prevention is concerned. With respect to the prevention of
major school violence or campus shootings, there are at least
three major unsolved challenges that really impede our ability
to make progress here.
The first is that while the responsibility for responding
to emotional and psychiatric concerns of students rests
predominately with campus staff and, to a certain extent,
parents of affected students, there are seemingly serious and
pervasive gaps in our knowledge about best practices to most
effectively manage individuals with disorders that can result
in the most egregious consequences in terms of violence against
oneself or others.
On the other hand, a great deal is already known about the
identification of such individuals who might be at significant
risk of committing violence in school. In particular, I want to
remind us that the U.S. Secret Service, along with the U.S.
Department of Education, completed a major analysis of all
shootings on U.S. campuses prior to 2002. That document, which
is superb, resulted in guidelines with respect to
identification of high-risk individuals in schools for whom
urgent intervention is needed. We do not need to reinvent that
particular piece of work. It is called the Final Report of the
Safe School Initiative and is a very sophisticated analysis,
with clear recommendations for actions at the local level and
in schools.
Second, and I debated whether to say this or not, but I do
want to note without prejudice or any political considerations
that there are major inconsistencies with respect to State and
Federal regulation of gun purchases that have created gaps in
the ability to interdict purchases of weapons by individuals
with serious psychiatric problems. These legal and legislative
loopholes in gun purchase regulations represent a significant
threat to soft target populations in schools and college
campuses and other public spaces.
The third unresolved situation or issue is that although,
as Dr. Federman pointed out, many students will allow reporting
of psychiatric problems to their parents, some, who may be the
most dangerous, will not allow it. This is a problem that we
have to face and solve because these are, in fact, adult-aged
students who have rights as individuals to either give or deny
permission to talk about their mental health conditions to
anyone they wish.
The Federal strategies, I think, to address these issues
could potentially include the following six recommendations.
First of all, as Chief Healy pointed out, I think there is a
great need for a national dialogue and a conference. I suggest
that this be a federally funded, national conference on the
state of knowledge regarding identification and intervention
strategies likely to be most effective in the prevention of
campus violence.
The caveat here is that we do not just rehash the work that
has been already done by the Secret Service, Department of
Education, and other places.
Chairman Lieberman. Dr. Redlener, can I ask you, I would
like to hear the other five, but do them as briefly as you can.
Dr. Redlener. I understand.
The second recommendation, already mentioned, is a new
research center on this subject.
The third is that we take a very hard look at multiagency
coordination in the counterintelligence community and make sure
that they are tracking any potential evidence that someone is
planning an attack on a U.S. school. I am not sure the extent
to which that is happening effectively.
There are other issues that I think I am just going to
leave to my written response and testimony. But I would say
that closing critical loopholes in Federal and State gun
purchase laws would be a reasonable thing to do.
And finally, I will conclude by saying that a Federal
grants program to establish six to 10 diverse university and
public school model programs designed to identify and manage
instances of potential extreme violence would be very useful as
sources of information and direction for the country.
I hope that the terrible event at Virginia Tech is really a
wake-up call and not just a snooze alarm, which seems to happen
over and over again. We have an event, we get aroused, we have
meetings, we have hearings, and then we fall back into
complacency. It is my hope, and I think all of ours, that we
are going to see a new, intense focus on preventing violence in
our schools and campuses.
Thank you.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Dr. Redlener. We certainly
agree with that last statement.
Ms. Van Syckel. Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, may I have a
moment? I do not mean to be disrespectful, but I am a parent of
a child who was violent and suicidal in school, and it is
important that we did ask the Committee if our organization
from Connecticut and New Jersey could come and at least testify
and speak with you before this panel.
Chairman Lieberman. Let me ask this----
Ms. Van Syckel. We are parents. We are just as important.
Chairman Lieberman. I understand. I did not know that. I am
going to ask you to wait to the end. If there is time, we will
hear you today.
I want to assure you this is not the last hearing we will
hold on this subject.
Ms. Van Syckel. My daughter did not just become violent and
suicidal within the school. She was a danger to herself and
others.
Today we are mourning a young man in our own community, and
we will be burying him tomorrow. This hearing should not even
be held today until parents could also participate and not just
schools and not just the mental health community.
Parents care. We love our children. They matter. They are
not anecdotes. And we are the ones that refuse to give up our
children. Not the government. Not the mental health community.
And not the schools. It is we, the parents, who care for and
love our children. Please give us our parental rights back so
we can save lives.
Chairman Lieberman. We will definitely hear you, if not
today, at a future hearing. I promise you that.
Let me just ask you to stop for a moment because one of the
Members----
Ms. Van Syckel. That is what we see in our schools every
day.
Chairman Lieberman. Understood, and we will come back to
you.
Senator Warner, I know, has to leave for other pressing
business, and Senator Collins and I are going to yield to him
for the first round of questioning.
Senator Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I thank
Senator Collins.
We discussed on the floor the desire of you and Senator
Collins to have this very important hearing, and I am pleased
to have attended. And I commend you, and I think we have drawn
on a very distinguished panel to help initiate our study.
We bear in mind, however, that the primary responsibility
for education rests with the governors, the State legislatures
of our 50 States and territories, and we must be careful that
the Federal Government recognizes that only in rare exception
should we ever try to depart from our role as advisers, helpers
in funding, and so forth to direct and mandate to all 50
States.
There may well be an area here, particularly with the
mental health and the dichotomy between Federal and State law,
in which we can be of service and perhaps others.
But this was an important hearing, and I was privileged
last Tuesday to join with the greater Virginia Tech family.
I want to pick up on one phrase that you used, Dr.
Federman. I am a graduate of our university. As I look back on
a long lifetime that I have had, perhaps one of the happiest
chapters was my education at both Washington and Lee University
and the University of Virginia. And to listen to your opening
comments was very chilling about the problems that confront our
educators and indeed those on campuses today.
So Mr. Chairman, I say my intention is to take that public
testimony and draw it to the attention of the Secretary of
Education. I think other committees and other areas of the
Congress should take a focus on that and see what we can do to
help.
But you said partnering with the students. If I came away
with one impression on last Tuesday, it was the magnificence of
that student body of close to some 10,000 or 12,000 in one
auditorium who were perfectly disciplined, emotionally. Yes
saddened, but nevertheless secure and with the determination to
go on and move forward. And that they have done, with the help
of the parents and others.
But I come back to the point, a very simple thing. Chief
Healy, I listened to you very carefully. We have to look at
what is in hand by way of technology to try to alert students
to this type of problem. I have had a lot of experience with
the military and have been posted overseas in years gone and in
areas where there is high risk and so forth.
A simple alarm system to be put in place on campuses,
tested occasionally to make sure it is secure, just a siren
that would simply alert students there is a problem, go to your
other resources to determine the specificity of the problem,
Blackberries or whatever the communication may be. Then let
them draw on their own instincts. Because these youngsters
today are good, tough, and solid citizens, and they recognize
the world is not perfect. And as wonderful as these campuses
have been and hopefully always will be, there is some element
of risk.
So look at what is at hand now and let us think for the
best. These students will help us. I think we should partner
with them here on the Committee and get their views maybe in
the next panel of witnesses. Thank you very much.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you very much, Senator Warner,
for taking the time. I know you made a special effort to be
with us. I appreciate it.
Let us go to the panel of witnesses. I want to pick up on
something that Senator Warner said in terms of the environment
in which this is happening. It is chilling to hear about the
increase in mental health problems among college students. It
is probably a subject for a separate hearing as to why that is
happening.
But just in brief, I wonder if Dr. Federman or either of
the college administrators would want to testify, what is going
on?
Mr. Federman. I ask myself that same question every day. I
do not think I have a simple answer for you. I know that the
university environment, particularly with a top tier university
like the University of Virginia, is a very stressful one.
When I mentioned the statistic that 94 out of 100 students
feel overwhelmed by all they have to do, that is real. I recall
statistics that say that 60 percent of students work at least
part time. And so you combine the academic challenges, the
part-time work, and simply the transitional stage that late
adolescence represents where they are not adult and yet they
are not the child and the kind of transitions they experience
from one day to the next where the ground is not necessarily a
stable ground and where the intense feelings they are
experiencing and the new challenges combined with all the other
external stresses just represent a very vulnerable time of
development.
In tandem with that, you have much more effective
psychotropic meds so that you have more students attending
universities today. And I really cannot say with certainty that
the incidence is greater. What we are seeing is more. But are
we truly seeing more students with mental illness now or are
they simply being better identified and more readily coming for
help? I do not have an answer for that, but it is a question I
ask myself much of the time.
Chairman Lieberman. In preparation for this hearing, I
looked at a 2006 National Survey of Counseling Center
Directors, which I believe you referred to, in which they
examined 13 years worth of data.
I was interested that they concluded not only that the
numbers have gone up but the complexity and severity of mental
health problems seen in counseling centers at colleges had
increased significantly over that period of time. Obviously,
having anxiety or depression is one thing. Having the number of
students who are at a point where they may do damage to
themselves or others is quite something else.
Is it fair to say that the latter category, in your
experience or your knowledge of the literature nationally, has
also gone up? That is, those who are more severely stressed to
the point of doing damage to themselves or others?
Mr. Federman. Yes, I can definitely support that, though I
can do so anecdotally. I do not have hard data to support that.
But if you look at the survey you are looking at, I believe
something like 92 percent of directors believe that within the
last 10 years they are seeing more acute and more serious
psychopathology. So this certainly corresponds with the
perception of folks on the front line.
Chairman Lieberman. President Webb, have you noted that in
the years you have been a university administrator?
Mr. Webb. We have this phenomenon, Senator Lieberman, a
number of clinical psychologists actually recommend to some of
their patients to go to college and enroll because of the
counseling centers that are there and the environment that is
there. So we are getting a lot of referrals to our campus for
people who are coming in with problems.
And an issue that we have, and on many campuses, we may
have one counselor for well over 1,000 students. And for a
counselor, and these gentleman are experts, to do his job, it
takes a lot of time to develop a rapport and trust with that
student, particularly if you have a student that is in danger
of doing harm to himself and others, to develop that kind of
confidence where you can recommend that the student voluntarily
submit himself to counseling.
And it is that gray area where the student may not have met
the threshold where you can actually site enough to force that
student to leave campus.
This puts the university and the counseling center in a
real dilemma. If you move too quickly, you are subject to
liability under Federal law. If you wait too long, you also
have a situation where you can endanger your entire college
campus.
So this is an area which I think we all recommend that we
need dialogue and we need guidelines as to how to act.
Chairman Lieberman. I agree.
Dr. Ward and Mr. Webb, who represent two organizations of
colleges and universities, what are the best practices with
regard to setting up a system on a college campus that would
identify those who are not simply suffering from anxiety or
depression, serious problems obviously, but who are capable of
doing damage to themselves or others? What is the way in which
parents should expect the colleges that they send their kids to
to be able to identify students who may really be a danger?
Mr. Ward. Two comments. First of all, I want to just
amplify the observation about the numbers of students being
treated. I think 20 years ago either the parents, the students,
or the universities would never have admitted some of these
students. It is our capacity, in effect, to meet these needs
that is making it possible for the students to attend. So some
of the increase is a reflection of the coping capacity that we
have developed even though it may be inadequate. It is true in
other disability areas where we are now obviously meeting the
needs of the disabled in decisive ways that we would not have
met 20 years ago.
To come back to the second question, I think it is the
question of a communication structure that allows the cross-
wiring of evidence of behavior that is potentially threatening.
As I mentioned in my oral remarks, we are a very diffuse
community, very departmentalized, in some respects very
individualistic. The social networks have to be created by the
campus itself in some ways that are not naturally there like a
family.
So I think one of the challenges is whether there is a
failsafe reporting system and some one point at which the
amplitude of these findings can be really addressed. I think it
is the fact that you have different parts of the enterprise
knowing a little bit but perhaps nobody knowing the whole. And
I felt frequently, when it came to my attention as a college
president, I was not well qualified to make that judgment. I
was given the pieces. I would need to call in everyone, and it
usually means you need a meeting of these people. You cannot
rely on that one person.
So I do not think we have a communication structure that
allows the complete filtering of the diffuse kinds of evidence
that is available unless you have a lead person--maybe it is
from the student counseling area--who is so convinced this is a
problem that they are prepared to take this all the way. But I
do think there is a weak communication structure for sharing
the evidence.
Chairman Lieberman. That is not anything we can or should
mandate by law, but it is certainly something that the
university community itself should try to organize itself to
do. I hear you and it sounds like an understandable problem but
one----
Mr. Ward. We must address.
Chairman Lieberman [continuing]. That needs to be addressed
or else people are put in peril.
Chief Healy, on your college campus or generally on college
campuses, are the law enforcement people, the chiefs or
representatives of campus police, brought in on any regular
basis in discussions with academic officials or counselors in
discussing students who there is some reason to be concerned
may be a danger to themselves or others? And would you
recommend that be so if it is not so now?
Mr. Healy. Mr. Chairman, one of the points in the four-
point strategy that I mentioned in my prepared comments is that
we definitely need to have a methodology, a structure for an
assessment team. I believe that there are many colleges and
universities that currently use that approach. I know for a
fact that the University of Maryland has a very good assessment
team approach where individuals from student affairs, mental
health counseling, public safety, and other concerned groups on
campus come together on a regular basis.
Chairman Lieberman. To talk about individuals?
Mr. Healy. To talk specifically about individuals that they
believe, through whichever avenue the information becomes
known, present a threat. I think we have to have a structure
for that, a best practice that we can recommend to
institutions. Because I think you will see different approaches
at every single institution. There is not a universally
accepted or best practice that you will find across
institutions.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks. My time is up for this round.
Senator Collins.
Senator Collins. President Webb, let me pick up on the
point that Senator Lieberman was just making about
communicating information about troubled students.
You have a very unusual background for a college president.
In fact, I wonder if you are unique in the country, of having
been a law-enforcement officer who went on to be a Commissioner
of Public Safety, who went on to be a college president.
Because of that background, you bring an understanding of law
enforcement as well as the academic world that it is very
helpful to us as we struggle with these issues.
I think one of the most difficult issues that you all
confront is balancing the need to protect the privacy of a
troubled student versus the security of your campus. And in a
way that same kind of dilemma is one that this Committee
wrestles with all the time, whether we are talking about
screening at airports or the provisions of the Patriot Act. How
do we strike the right balance between personal privacy and
freedom versus security in a world of terrorism?
We have heard about Federal laws today that restrict the
communication of information, restrict it for very good
reasons. You want to encourage students to get help, and if
they feel that confidential medical information is going to be
shared with either their parents or with university officials,
they may not get that help. The Family Educational Rights and
Privacy Act of 1974 was mentioned. One that is more familiar to
many of us is the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), which restricts sharing of medical
information.
What is your assessment of current laws? Are we striking
the right balance?
Mr. Webb. Senator Collins, you have touched on issues that
keep many of us awake at night. It is knowing when to act, at
what point in time, where do you go to get answers?
It takes more than just seeing a student who is different
or a student who is odd, a student who is a loner, to be able
to identify that student and pull that student out. Differences
make our campuses beautiful and wonderful.
It is when the law enforcement officer or when the
counselor sees the student and in their mind and in their gut
they recognize that this is a troubled student that is
dangerous. But yet, the student will not agree, cannot consent
to allow himself to be removed from campus or to receive
treatment.
I think we may need to look at some kind of intervening
authority, perhaps as we did in the Patriot Act, where we can
go to a third party, perhaps a court or judge, where the
university can get authority to at least temporarily isolate or
remove this student for further assessment rather than just
leave him on the college campus until something erupts.
This is an issue for which we need the help of the medical
profession, but we struggle with this issue because there are
huge liability considerations. And this hesitation that may
happen on the part of law-enforcement, on the part of our
campus counselor or president, can result in serious
ramifications to the student and to other innocent people on
our campuses.
Senator Collins. Dr. Federman, do you want to comment?
Mr. Federman. Yes. I would like to say that I think what
you are talking about does exist. But it exists uniquely on
different campuses, not uniformly. To use our campus as an
example, if we have a student where we perceive typically
through behavior that they represent danger to the community
and that individual is not amicable or open to receiving help,
our dean of students has the authority to initiate an interim
suspension and to require a psychological assessment at that
point with recommendations then given to the dean as to how to
best proceed with the student.
But the point is that it is not uniformly done across
campuses. It is something we have put together in recent years,
and I think many universities would be better off to have
something like that in place.
Senator Collins. But you also described it as often being a
no win situation, that there is a risk of being sued.
Mr. Federman. Correct.
Senator Collins. And it just strikes me as a terrible
dilemma.
Mr. Federman. You've got it.
Senator Collins. In these cases, and without going to the
details of Virginia Tech, which is not the purpose of this
hearing, but oftentimes in these cases there are warning signs.
There are people who identified the student as being very
troubled and in need of help.
Mr. Federman. The more we can educate the university
community as to what to be attentive to, what to be mindful of,
what the resources are. Going back to Senator Warner's comments
about partnering, I do not want to partner just with students,
but I want to partner with the whole university community such
that we become a tightknit web, a tightknit support net such
that when students are in trouble the community takes
responsibility to bring that information forward to appropriate
individuals. Once we have that information at hand, then we can
begin to look into it further and take appropriate action.
Senator Collins. Chief Healy, one of the sources of
information that I learned about in preparing for this hearing,
and which Dr. Redlener mentioned in his statement, is the work
that was done primarily by the Secret Service in 2002 which
seeks to identify warning behaviors. It does a profile of
someone who may be prone to violence. It strikes me as
enormously helpful work.
And yet, I am wondering how prevalent is the knowledge of
this document? Could you give us your impression, as the head
of the law enforcement association, are campuses generally
familiar with the work done by the Secret Service that might be
so helpful, as Dr. Federman mentions, to identifying troubled
individuals who need help now?
Mr. Healy. Senator, I believe that most institutions'
campus public safety departments are aware of this document. It
is listed as a resource on the IACLEA website. Keep in mind
that all institutions do not belong to our association, so
unfortunately they may not have access to it although it is
publicly available.
When we had the shooting at Dawson College in Montreal back
in September at the beginning of school, there was a lot of
interest in our association and in colleges and universities
around the issues of active shooters. At that time, we widely
distributed that report along with a number of other resources
that are, again, publicly available resources that speak to the
issues of active shooters.
You are right, that is an absolutely wonderful document.
Every institution should have access to it. One of the things
on which we are going to work with the U.S. Secret Service is
to refresh the information that is in that report and to take,
again, a campus-focused look because that study was primarily
geared toward incidents of violence that occurred in K through
12 institutions. We do believe that there are some distinct
differences between active shooter situations in K through 12
institutions versus those situations in colleges and
universities.
Again, I think that is a good starting point, but I believe
it needs to be refreshed, updated as appropriate to be more
applicable to us in colleges and universities.
Senator Collins. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, Senator Collins.
Dr. Federman, let me come back to you because I am
interested in the effect of Federal law or law generally on
what you can do on the college campuses to protect the
community.
In the case that you described, where you have a procedure
at UVA, where the dean can initiate suspension proceedings and,
if I heard you correctly, require some kind of psychiatric
consultation, that is done without a court order, I presume?
Mr. Federman. Correct.
Chairman Lieberman. What is the premise for it? In other
words, is it that the student does not have an absolute right
to remain at school and so you are creating, as a condition of
the right to remain, a requirement that they seek some
counseling?
Mr. Federman. No. What I would say is that it comes out of
some mild but helpful coercion. Here is how the process runs.
At UVA, and at most universities, there are specific standards
of conduct. They may be called different things. At UVA, they
are standards of conduct. I think there are 12 of them.
The second one has to do with individuals who pose a threat
to the health and safety of the community. And that could
involve themselves, as well. They are part of the community.
And if one is behaving in such a way where they are in
violation of that standard of conduct, then they come under the
purview of the judicial process. The dean of students can say
to the student, I am going to bring forward charges that you
are in violation of standard number two. And if that is the
case then this is the process you will proceed through.
An alternate to that would be that we do an interim
suspension and, during that time where you are not attending
classes, you proceed with a psychological assessment. You get
that recommendation back to me and then we look at your
situation and decide where we go next.
Chairman Lieberman. Very interesting. So it is a negotiated
settlement?
Mr. Federman. Correct.
Chairman Lieberman. If the student does not accept the
offer of a negotiated settlement, then presumably the
university would initiate judicial proceedings?
Mr. Federman. Correct. And one outcome of that could be
removal from the university.
Now keep in mind that just because you remove someone from
a university community, it does not protect the community. As
we all have been discussing this afternoon, these are open
communities. Someone can be removed and come back to that
community even with more anger than they had prior to the
incident.
Chairman Lieberman. That is a very powerful sobering point.
So that exclusion from the student body is not ultimate
protection from someone who is truly violent.
Mr. Federman. The situation is not resolved at the point
the individual is removed.
Chairman Lieberman. Chief Healy, you wanted to add
something?
Mr. Healy. I just wanted to add that there is also a second
alternative available in most States where law enforcement
officers have the authority to involuntarily hospitalize
someone wherein usually the term is for approximately 24 to 48
hours and they are forced to undergo some psychiatric
evaluation.
I would like to point out that this alternative is
obviously limited to those institutions who have sworn law
enforcement officers with the appropriate authority. But it is
another alternative.
Chairman Lieberman. That does not require a judicial
proceeding.
Mr. Healy. It does not.
Chairman Lieberman. Many States give law enforcement
officials the right to do that for a preliminary consultation.
Mr. Healy. Absolutely.
Chairman Lieberman. Let me come back because apart from the
general education, and this panel has been really wonderful at
this, we naturally have a special concern about the impact of
existing Federal law on the goal that we all have, which is to
protect the safety of our college campuses and the people who
live, work, and study on them.
I am interested in hearing a little more detail about how
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
affect your pursuit of safer campuses. These are complicated
questions. I do not minimize that. But to the extent that you
have thoughts about it today, if you had the capacity to
single-handedly amend either of these laws, what would you do?
Dr. Ward, do you have any thoughts about it?
Mr. Ward. Yes and no. I think it is kind of technical. I
think my colleagues mentioned earlier in the division of mental
health, it depends on the particular case. One of the
challenges, I think, that makes it difficult is that generally
parents are involved until the point of the student arriving on
the college campus in whatever condition was pre-existing. If
an alienation occurs between the parent and the student at that
point, the university community has no capacity to replace that
connectivity. And if the student then, in effect, makes it
impossible for us to draw on that resource, which I believe in
some cases we should, maybe for medical reasons, maybe not in
others. But that, it seems to me, is very difficult.
By the way, these crises are not just suicidal. I think the
issues of alcoholism on campus, which precede--in almost every
case I dealt with, the student was an alcoholic before arriving
on campus. This was not something created as a freshman on the
campus but something which went back. And how the parent, in a
sense, was aware of that and certainly that distance was now
created. And yet there were times in which I could not have the
family reengaged.
But I do think that there is some set of what one might
call medical details here as to whether that is or is not
desirable. And that is what I think makes this quite difficult
is that you need an assessment team. I was frustrated because I
often needed seven or eight people in the room with me to make
these decisions. The decisions were so eclectic and individual
when you were getting down to this level of disruption, which
is relatively rare, that this is a great challenge.
And whether the laws were, in the end, an obstruction, they
were always there in my general counsel. The general counsel
was always there saying if you do that you will be sued. So
that was one voice in the room that felt very strongly that
there was a vulnerability for liability.
Chairman Lieberman. That is the dilemma right there. If
there is something you should do which you think is in the
interest of the safety of the people on the campus and your
lawyer tells you you may be sued for doing it.
Mr. Ward. You tend not to do it.
Chairman Lieberman. Yes. And then you may be erring on the
side of caution which is on the side of creating a peril.
FERPA, as I understand it, says that a college student older
than 18 has a right to withhold his own information even from
his family, or maybe most particularly from his family. And
HIPAA also obviously protects the privacy of health
information. Although my understanding is that both statutes
have exceptions that allow disclosure of information in the
event that the individual is a threat to the health or safety
of the community. Dr. Federman.
Mr. Federman. Let me clarify that. If a student represents
danger to self or others, as a licensed clinician my obligation
is to ensure that student's safety. And typically that means
getting him or her into a nearby hospital. Once there, they are
safe, at least for the day or two that they are there.
Chairman Lieberman. And everybody else is, too.
Mr. Federman. Alright. Contacting student's parents is not
a part of bringing about that rapid resolution of threat and
safety. And I absolutely understand that parents want to be
informed. I have two adolescents, one of them at college. If he
was hospitalized, I want to know.
But the reality is I would be informed if his or her life
were in danger, if they were in a coma, if they were seriously
ill in critical condition, I would be informed. But once we get
somebody into a psychiatric unit and they are contained and
protected, then our obligation to communicate beyond that
stops.
Chairman Lieberman. Understood, but let me just ask you
because you talked about it a little bit in your prepared
testimony, if you could rewrite HIPAA or FERPA, what kinds of
changes would you make? Are you prepared to answer that today?
Mr. Federman. Sir, I am not.
Chairman Lieberman. Please think about it because these are
very important questions. We want to respect the privacy of
individuals and yet, ultimately, I think we have a greater
responsibility to protect the safety of the community.
Mr. Federman. What I would strive to do is to write them in
such a way that they do not clash, that we have more internal
consistency between policies such that they fit together in a
way that one policy works seamlessly--
Chairman Lieberman. Because you deal with this every day,
and I know this is not the normal expertise, this is lawyering
and legislating, but I think you can do a great public service
if you have the time to try to do some of exactly what you said
now for us, which is to see if you can better connect these
values and these statutes.
Dr. Redlener.
Dr. Redlener. The one clarification, especially with FERPA,
is that it might be helpful to look at the language very
closely to see specifically what kinds of conditions are
critical where a college or university might need to make a
decision but is constrained by potential liabilities. Under
certain conditions there could be liability protection if the
university can establish by very clear criteria a situation of
significant danger to the students or others.
So in other words, maybe it would be going to a judge and
getting a court order, provided the college meets certain
criteria, they are then protected from legal liability.
But the other quick point to make about this----
Chairman Lieberman. That is a very interesting idea which
we ought to consider.
Dr. Redlener. Not all universities and colleges are located
near an appropriate mental health facility that can accommodate
a student or anybody with this kind of psychiatric condition.
In fact, one piece of the larger context is that the expertise
to deal with these kinds of problems, where we are talking
about potentially really serious implications, may not be
available or accessible. Putting somebody in a general
community hospital for 24 hours when they are having a major
psychiatric break does not do much except buy a very little bit
of time.
Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Dr. Redlener, very helpful.
Senator Collins.
Senator Collins. Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Redlener got exactly to the issue that was going to be
my final question to this panel. And that is as I listen to the
testimony, it strikes me that it is going to be hard to define
more precisely the public safety exception or the health
exception to the two laws that we have been discussing because
you cannot possibly come up with all of the scenarios to define
that more precisely, which is why it is not defined more
precisely.
Therefore, it seems to me the answer is, just as Dr.
Redlener was suggesting, that perhaps we should look at some
sort of liability protection because when you hear Dr. Ward say
that your fear is always that you are going to be sued and you
have the general counsel in the room saying well, you can do
that, but there is a risk of litigation. Then you do not do it.
You are going to err on the side of not being sued. And most of
the time everything is going to work out fine. But there are
those small number of cases where it is not, it is going to
lead to catastrophe.
So it seems to me if we could perhaps look at providing
some sort of limited liability protection in cases where a
certain process is followed. You cannot stipulate all of the
circumstances, but a process is followed. So then you can make
the decisions without fear of being sued.
I was going to ask that as my final question of the panel.
I think I still will, although we already know Dr. Redlener's
reaction to it. But let me start with you, Dr. Ward, and just
go across.
Mr. Ward. I think you have summarized quite effectively. I
kind of like the solution at the end. I always refer to the
combination of the lawyers and the doctors who have helped me
out in these situations.
But I do think, as a college president, the thing that most
struck me about this was how well most things worked most of
the time. It was extreme events, unpredictable, frequently not
following any rules. I think if you might describe them, they
were eclectic. The preconditions, even if they were there,
would not have predicted the violence or the negative outcomes.
So one of our challenges here is that we may have systems
that are capable of dealing with 90 or 95 percent of the
situations, and we want to make sure that when we tinker with
the system to deal with these extreme events, we do not disrupt
a system that is meeting needs which are serious but not in the
sense of the savage or horrific nature we are dealing with.
And from those events sometimes we can learn a great deal.
But the specifics of that event may not be as generalizable as
the general practices that meet the needs of most students. I
think that strategically, as you deal with crisis management,
all of the crisis management I was involved in, I think the
five that I remember most and still remember, and they are
seared in my mind, I still have difficulty both anticipating
why we did not anticipate. And even the lessons that followed
from them, in a sense, might never have prevented those
specific actions.
And yet there were many other actions that were problems
for us that we resolved. There were systemic solutions to them.
I think extreme events present us with such extraordinary
challenges in coming up with generalizations. In many cases,
the most successful way of dealing with extreme events is
usually good judgment and great leadership rather than the
systems. They are so unusual.
So I think we can stretch ourselves to take as much
advantage as we can, but there is a limit to how far we can
stretch in dealing with the unpredictable. I think there is an
underlying sanity for the rest of society in trying to
recognize that the degree to which we control extreme events is
extremely small, and it is extremely frustrating to us.
Senator Collins. Thank you. President Webb.
Mr. Webb. Dr. Ward and the other panelists have spoken
effectively about the many mental health concerns that we have
on all of these campuses. And they are real and they deserve
this discussion and dialogue.
But I would hope that the Committee and the Homeland
Security Department will not overlook the issues that we have
from a law enforcement standpoint, just a basic security
standpoint of training that our campus police officers need.
Mr. Healy's association is an excellent one. They provide
excellent training for campus police officers. But every
college campus is not 55,000 students. You have those
institutions with 5,500 students that are not that well manned,
and we need support from the standpoint of training.
Quite frankly, college presidents and senior decisionmakers
need training on threat assessment and critical incident
management planning. We need associations like our own AASCU
and ACE and others to perhaps help us with forums to get the
president and decisionmakers to know what to do when you have a
crisis.
One of my deans approached me last week and she said I am
not sure I know what to do. If a gunman comes into my building
and holds a class hostage, what are the protocols? We have a
code of conduct and protocols, but she needs training and our
faculty members need training about what to do in times of
emergency. So I would urge that there also be some
consideration to--and I am not talking about great sums of
money--but we need a lot of training out there on our various
colleges across the country about how to deal with these crises
that I am afraid in the past we felt like we were immune, we
were invincible on the college campus to these issues.
Senator Collins. Chief Healy.
Mr. Healy. Yes, ma'am. I would just echo President Webb's
comments. And I think really what he is talking about is
greater levels of relationship building, partnerships between
all of the higher education associations. For example, we need
to work with NACUBO, that is the business officers association.
And we need to work with ACE to assist in providing that
training to a wider group of the campus community. Really what
we are talking about here is our efforts to further engage with
community policing and making sure that we have the appropriate
resources to develop these training programs and then to
deliver them in a very significant way to ensure that they
reach all 4,200 institutions across the country.
On the issue of FERPA, I would just say the one issue that
we would obviously like to see is much greater flexibility in
the public and personal safety exceptions that are currently in
FERPA so that we can share information. One of the other things
that President Webb mentioned was what about sharing
information from institution to institution. So when someone
leaves Princeton and goes to Central Oklahoma, they are not
bringing those problems and I can share that information so
that they can make a sound admissions decision.
Senator Collins. Dr. Federman.
Mr. Federman. Personally, I would sleep better more nights
if I knew that we had some liability protection. But I also
want to point out that we are really looking at dual liability
here. It is not just the liability of breaching
confidentiality. But what we have seen in some recent high
profile court cases, such as the Elizabeth Shin case at MIT or
several years prior to that there was a case at Ferrum College
where university officials were found liable for not taking
sufficient action to get an individual help or to protect him
from his own impulses.
So we really do face dual liability, either--going back to
what I said, you are damned if you do, you are damned if you do
not.
The choice I'm often faced with is: Am I more willing to
face suit due to breach of confidentiality or due to lack of
activity which then results in someone's death? Most of the
time I choose the latter. But we face it every day.
The other point, before I end here, is to say that often in
these kind of processes the devil is in the details. If we put
together processes where we must be cleared in order to proceed
and communicate with parents, families, or other individuals,
we need those processes to be very quickly implemented. We need
efficacious processes because often we need to act quickly. You
may get information and within a couple of hours you may need
to contact individuals, and you do not necessarily have time to
convene panels and have case review. That could take several
days.
Senator Collins. That is a good point, as well. Dr.
Redlener, any final comments?
Dr. Redlener. Yes, Senator Collins. The key thing is what
you originally said as you framed the question to us, which is
that the drivers for liability protection must be a prescribed
process. They cannot be assessment driven because of the
variability of potential situations that are so specific.
But the truth is that we have other examples where that
kind of liability protection has already been worked out. I
would suggest looking at, for example, the child abuse laws
where children can be involuntarily taken from families. Many
times, as a pediatrician, I know that parents may deny medical
care in circumstances that are life threatening to the child,
and we can get court override of that denial. These kinds of
events are protected from legal liability.
So I would look into what exists out there in related
areas, but keep it process-driven.
If I could just have a final thought. I know we did not
have a chance to discuss this in detail, but I hope that you
all, on this particularly vital Committee, are making sure that
the intelligence/counterterrorism apparatus is clearly focused
on the possibility of people out there planning to harm our
children in a Beslan-style way. My conversations with the FBI
and other officials have not been comforting in the sense of
authorities actually paying sufficient attention to this. I
think there is an extreme vulnerability for American children
and young people, and I hope we can make sure that they are
paying appropriate attention.
Senator Collins. Excellent point. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I just want to thank the panel for absolutely
terrific testimony, very thoughtful. You bring such expertise
to our hearing today.
I also want to commend the Chairman for holding the hearing
and our staffs for identifying such excellent witnesses. So
thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, Senator Collins, as always,
for the partnership that allows us to go forward.
I do want to ask one or two more questions because although
some of you in your opening statements focused on what I am
about to ask, and there was a little bit of a response in the
last question, it is interesting that we spent more time today
talking about how to help troubled students and identify them--
and some of the problems with law that limits your ability to
deal with troubled students--than we spent time talking about
what happens when that all fails and, either from a troubled
student or, God forbid, a terrorist, violence breaks out on
campus.
Dr. Ward, you raised this in your opening statement, and
President Webb you spoke about it some just a moment ago. It is
a very difficult process. How do you train a university
president to be a crisis manager? Because you, President Webb,
of course, come to the job with very unusual capabilities. A
lot of university presidents come because they are academics.
So what I am saying is that in the midst of the multiple
demands on university administrators, to raise money, to
oversee an academic program, there comes this crisis management
capability, very difficult.
The same is true, Chief Healy, I think President Webb
talked about it. But what can we do? And again, I do not know
that there is any role for government, perhaps it is up to your
association to set some standards for the training of campus
police, particularly in smaller institutions which do not have
the resources and therefore may not have the training for their
personnel.
I noted that one of the individuals my staff talked to said
that 90 percent of colleges have an emergency response plan on
paper. But some questions remain as to whether those plans are
as robust and actionable as they should be.
What do you think, Chief Healy? The crisis has begun. Are
most college campuses in America ready to respond?
Mr. Healy. Mr. Chairman, I think that I speak with
confidence that I support the idea that most colleges and
universities have plans. Have those plans been exercised? Have
they fully been evaluated? I would say there is probably as
many answers as there are institutions, 4,200. Every
institution has engaged in this emergency management and
planning exercise with a different level of energy.
And I would say that if there is one thing that I would
love to be able to accomplish is to ensure that with our
partners such as DHS, that we develop the capacity to help
institutions exercise their plans, to run those plans. There is
some of that capacity that currently exists at the States where
they will get assistance to help them set up an evaluation, and
then to grade that evaluation, and therefore the institutions
know what they need to do to enhance their plans.
But I think that we are a long way from being able to say
with any surety that all institutions know how those plans will
play out in the case of an emergency situation.
Chairman Lieberman. Let me ask you to respond to a question
that Senator Warner raised, and I am going to ask you,
President Webb, to do the same. This, after all, is the
Homeland Security Committee. We have dealt with the subject of
communications during a crisis in very intense and direct ways.
Obviously, in a terrorist attack, one of the great tragic
shortcomings on September 11, 2001, was that the emergency
responders, firefighters, and police could not communicate with
each other. The same happened in a different way in Hurricane
Katrina.
I do not know whether your organization has a
recommendation on this, but what are the best practices?
Senator Warner said maybe there ought to be an audible siren or
lights flashing, which is the first indicator to students of
today to go to their cell phones or BlackBerries. But what do
you recommend in this regard?
Mr. Healy. Sir, what we recommend is obviously systems that
are multi-faceted. And so what Senator Warner mentioned was the
alarm, the giant voice kind of systems that have been around
for many years. I believe that we cannot discard those. But I
also believe that we need to have additional levels of
sophistication.
I spoke briefly about mass notification systems that are
capable of reaching our community members using a number of
different methodologies: Landline phones, cell phones,
BlackBerries, text messages, or e-mail messages. Whatever
system one has. I am fortunate that at my university we have
such a system. But it has to be able to reach all community
members using whatever methodologies those members are willing
to give us.
We have talked a lot about mass notification systems over
the past week. What people fail to realize is even if you have
a system that can reach a person's cell phone number, their e-
mail, maybe two e-mails, a text message, a BlackBerry, or
whatever device they have, they still have to be willing to
give you those numbers. So that is an additional challenge that
we have to face at our institutions. How do we encourage
primarily students and some staff and faculty members to give
us cell phone numbers so that we then are able to reach them in
an emergency situation?
But this technology is evolving. There are several systems
out on the market. Unfortunately, there are also a number of
fly-by-night companies that have come about as a result of this
tragedy. And so we have to really encourage our institutions to
be very thoughtful about how they go about selecting a system
that will really be one of the primary ways that they will be
able to warn members of the community or to give instructions
to those members as well.
Chairman Lieberman. President Webb, what would you add to
that? What kind of communication system should a college or
university have after the crisis begins?
Mr. Webb. There must be multiple forms of communication,
new media, old media. Chief Healy mentioned the text message
and the cell phones and the Internet and the campus websites
and just being aware of the new ways that students communicate
with each other. That method has to be used.
But the old forms of communication are also good, too. We
have fire alarm systems in every building. We are having an
audio capability placed in every one of those fire alarm panels
where we can give audio, we can voice-activate messages to
students as to what to do, evacuate the building, stay in the
building.
Throughout the Midwest, and I suspect on most college
campuses, we are used to storms. We are used to tornadoes. We
do have sirens. And we need alarms, and we need flashing alarms
that also alert for hearing impaired students. So we have to
communicate in multiple ways.
How can we get the attention of the college presidents and
the decisionmakers? I am proud that our governor, Governor
Henry, is saying to every college and university in Oklahoma,
take a look at your emergency response. Let us review it. This
is your responsibility. And perhaps more than anything that
this Senate panel can do, the respective governors can do that.
And I am sure that is happening in many States around the
country.
Chairman Lieberman. Dr. Ward, do you have a final word?
Mr. Ward. One, is I think you are asking about the college
president's role. I do think that team leadership is now
required. It really is an executive role. And so if the chief
executive does not know how to tap specialized talent and
create leadership of value from the specialists, it will not
work, particularly at large universities.
The second thing is that professional development, which
did not use to be a big part of either the pre-presidential or
the presidential experience, is now increasingly valued by
presidents. All of the associations have both short and longer
courses, which you call programs, to provide both pre-
presidential experience of what they may face and then actually
when they are in the presidency, case studies of what would go
on.
The most popular sessions at our annual meetings now are
actually crisis management where people recall from each other
the case studies of what they did. I would say in post-
September 11, 2001, there is probably almost a quadrupling of
interest as an agenda issue in these issues. Whether we are at
the point where we are effective yet, I do not know. But there
is an exponential increase in interest and I hope competency in
dealing with these things that has occurred in the last 4 or 5
years.
Chairman Lieberman. That is interesting because going back
to something that Dr. Redlener asked or said, you would say
that what you are finding at your meetings is that people,
college administrators, college presidents, are taking
seriously the possibility that their campus might be the target
of terrorism?
Mr. Ward. And of a natural disaster. Or even a health
disaster. Those are, I think, on the minds of everybody.
Chairman Lieberman. OK. Do you have any other questions?
Senator Collins. No.
Chairman Lieberman. I thank you very much. I echo what
Senator Collins said. On short notice you have come in, you
have brought tremendous experience to this table. You gave us
some very helpful suggestions about some programs that we might
better support with funding, including programs that relate to
suicide prevention, perhaps even supporting some of the
national center ideas that you have suggested, Chief Healy.
And you invite us, I think the situation invites us to take
a new look, a thoughtful look at both the two laws we talked
about, FERPA and HIPAA, and to try to deal with this question
of fear of legal liability that may inhibit a college
administrator from taking action that otherwise he or she would
take, and not to be punitive against a student, but in the
interest of campus safety.
I will say in that regard, to say the obvious first, that
we all know that life is full of risks. And at any time in
history, no one could say that we are perfectly safe,
particularly unfortunately post-September 11. We all live with
that reality.
But relatively speaking, I think each of you have given me,
and I hope anyone else who has listened to the hearing, a
reassuring sense that overall our college and university
campuses are safe places to be. Not that we couldn't do more to
try to prevent the kind of extreme acts of violence that we saw
last week at Virginia Tech. But by and large, compared to other
places in our society, college campuses are safe. I thank you
for that reassurance.
We are going to leave the record of this hearing open for
15 days if any of you would like to file additional comments or
we would like to ask you further questions.
In the meantime, I thank you all for a very important
contribution to public dialogue and maybe, in some sense, to
our Nation's recovery in a constructive way from the trauma
that happened not just at Virginia Tech but to the whole
country last Monday.
Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:45 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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