Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Colleges Consider Criminal Checks

To admissions officers, Curtis Dixon probably seemed like a model student – the type of person that the University of North Carolina-Wilmington wanted to attract to its campus.

According to media reports, Dixon told officials that he had been home-schooled his entire high school career. He had scored a 1070 on the SAT and boasted a laundry list of extracurricular accomplishments.

But Dixon had a secret. He had a criminal history, a conviction for larceny on his record. Although UNCW’s admissions application asked about applicants’ criminal records, Dixon lied on the application forms. Admissions officers didn’t know and Dixon was admitted to the university’s freshman class in the fall of 2003.

On May 4, 2004, police say that Dixon raped and strangled a fellow student, Jessica Faulkner, in his college dorm room.

He committed suicide while awaiting trial in December.

Some experts, like S. Daniel Carter, senior vice president of Security on Campus, a non-profit campus watchdog group, say that incidents like the one at UNCW last year could be repeated elsewhere – even at a university like Georgetown.

While some colleges, including UNCW, ask prospective students about their criminal histories, few actually verify applicants’ responses. But that trend is changing. Today, an increasing number of universities probe into students’ pasts in an effort to make their campuses safer.

But the majority of Georgetown students have never had their pasts vetted by administrators.

At Baylor University, officials perform background checks on prospective student athletes. They also require them to obtain three character references.

Colorado University at Boulder asks applicants whether they have prior felony convictions and spot checks its applicants. In the United Kingdom, most university applicants are required to reveal any past criminal convictions. Many universities across the United States perform background checks for students studying certain specialized fields, like criminal justice.

Georgetown’s undergraduate admissions applications do not ask applicants whether they’ve been convicted of crimes and university officials say that accepted students are not run through background checks.

According to Jaime Briseno, a senior associate director of admissions, the admissions office “has never felt the need” to ask applicants about their criminal backgrounds.

“My experience has been that the primary concern is the steps the university is taking to safeguard students from non-university outsiders,” he said. “A student’s guidance counselor or teachers would disclose in their recommendation forms if there were academic or other problems.”

Briseno said that unlike many schools which have implemented background checks, Georgetown students come from across the nation, and around the world, making background checks difficult to coordinate.

“Would you do it for part-time or full-time students or exchange students too?” he asked. “It would be a matter of getting a release of information for 15,000 applications and that would be very difficult to do.”

He added that the majority of Georgetown’s peer institutions, universities like Harvard, Boston College and Yale, do not check into applicants’ criminal histories.

But according to Carter, knowledge of a student’s prior record may help to prevent campus violence in the first place.

Carter said that all admissions applications should query prospective students about past convictions and added that background checks could be as easy as requesting “that an applicant waive any confidentiality which may exist in their prior disciplinary records.”

“Decisions will need to be made on a case by case basis to determine if an ongoing threat may be posed,” he said. “Once a student has been both accepted and indicated their intention to actually attend an institution, then a background check, both criminal and disciplinary should be conducted.”

Advocates of background checks believe that basic background checks would allow universities to determine the best ways to protect students. If admissions officers at UNCW had diligently checked into students’ pasts, Carter said, Faulkner might never have died. And a second killing might never have struck UNCW.

Barely a month after the Faulkner murder, tragedy hit UNCW again. On June 4, 2004 Christine Naujoks, a woman enrolled in a summer school program, was found slain in her apartment.

John Peck, a former UNCW student, committed suicide after authorities identified him as Naujok’s killer.

Dixon and Peck shared one important similarity – they had prior criminal convictions.

Peck had been suspended from UNCW on May 24, 2004, after administrators discovered that he had been convicted of sexual assault in 2001. They had not realized that a violent sex offender was attending the university until three years after Peck’s conviction.

Checks into Dixon and Peck’s lives would have revealed not only criminal convictions but also fractured relationships and a history of lies. Both lied extensively on their applications. UNCW administrators verified their GPAs and SAT scores but took them at their word when they claimed to have no criminal convictions.

That’s something that according to Carter “simply makes no sense.”

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