Abstract
Only someone with a sick sense of humor would have used the term “Ivory Tower,” at least in its modern meaning, to describe the university during the first several hundred years of its existence. The criminologist Thomas Bernard, for instance, once offered this charming account of undergraduate life from medieval times: “The students of Paris attacked and slew passersby, carried off the women, ravished the virgins, committed robberies and broke into houses.” This disorder led to the creation of “colleges.” In fact, the college originally was an organizational unit for controlling the conduct of students. This idea was later transplanted to the United States, where universities strictly regulated every aspect of students' lives. So, by design, universities were to be quiet places. The “Ivory Tower,” first applied to a university context in the 1700s, thus eventually came to mean a place of the mind that was disconnected from the real world and its grubby concerns. But the Tower as such was a relatively recent invention and now—seemingly all of a sudden—pieces of the ivory facade have broken off, revealing to all that the crime problems are still there.
What brought on the scrutiny? This is the subject of John Sloan and Bonnie Fisher’s book, The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower. Their book looks into the emergence of campus crime as something that was socially constructed by competing interest groups. Until relatively recently, campus crime did not exist as a nationwide social problem. Of course, there were plenty of anecdotes and occasional news stories, plus the odd movie like Animal House, but there were no systematic large-scale efforts to make universities deal with campus crime. In fact, campus authorities were under no obligation even to report crimes that took place. Then, beginning in the 1980s, things began to change. Given that universities have been around for 800 years, and that—anecdotally, at least—a constant over the centuries is that students have been a headache for the authorities, what was so special about the 1980s and 1990s?
To answer that, the authors dedicate individual chapters to the major campus crime problems perceived as facing colleges and universities and how they came to be: violence, sexual victimization, and binge drinking. But regardless of who the claims makers were or what the specific problem was, there was a basic social construction pattern common to all. With the advent of electronic media, and accompanied by traditional print media, several distinct groups at last were effective at bringing widespread public attention to crime at the universities, create the political will for legislation, bring court action against universities, and eventually force university administrators to act. Campus security has not been the same since.
Critics of this book may, of course, object to the idea that campus crime is a problem that has to be socially constructed. After all, crime is real. Its incidence and effects are tangible and measurable, and so to claim that campus crime is merely a social construction gives license to university administrators to ignore real problems. Plus, the idea falsely promotes the authors as objective and reasonable at the expense of the advocates, who necessarily are portrayed as well intentioned (maybe) but also a little bit unhinged. Perhaps, notwithstanding the pooh-poohing of Ivory Tower academics, the advocates might actually have it correct after all. This criticism misses the mark for a couple of reasons. First, Sloan and Fisher do not condemn the work of the claims makers, who are often easy targets for academics. How can they? The authors concede that there is not enough information to formulate anything like a comprehensive assessment about the veracity of the claims makers. Rather, they criticize the lack of will to study campus crime in depth. This is the crucial problem. At present there is only the pressure to do something, whether in reaction to vocal advocates or in anticipation of legal liability, which usually means appeasement rather than a considered response. But how able advocates are, and the cost of satisfying them, may bear little relation to how serious a problem is. Advocates, for good reason, do not necessarily want to hear this. 1 Without good data, administrators quite possibly are misallocating resources, ignoring some serious problems and possibly making others worse.
Sloan and Fisher, because of their voluminous and award-winning work on campus crime over the past couple of decades, feature very prominently in the massive growth of our empirical knowledge. Before their survey of campus crime in the 1990s, there was not a whole lot of information about the scope and nature of victimization on college campuses. This book helps place what knowledge we have, and its limits, into a historical context. For these reasons and more, the book should be required reading for anyone with a stake in campus safety. This is not to say that everyone would necessarily agree with the information presented here, but an awareness of the context in which campus safety decisions take shape could well improve the quality and usefulness of the work of advocates, the decision making of administrators, and more accurately address the concerns of students and their families. The book is very accessibly written and could be used for undergraduate courses on violence, victimization, and social problems.