Getting an Education of Another Kind: The Importance of Screening University Personnel

April 2009

IN THIS ISSUE

— A Unique Trust: the Need for Background Screening of Administrative Candidates at Universities
— An Ounce of Prevention vs. A Pound of Cure: Reasons to Run Background Checks
— In the next issue

Welcome to the April 2009 edition of our newsletter! In this issue, we’ll examine cases of fraud and unacceptable conduct by university personnel that should have been detected and prevented in advance. We’ll also look at the main reasons many universities do not screen senior administrators, faculty, and even graduate student applicants.

A UNIQUE TRUST: THE NEED FOR BACKGROUND SCREENING OF ADMINISTRATIVE CANDIDATES AT UNIVERSITIES

“The unexamined life is not worth living for men.”   –Socrates, according to Plato’s Apology, 38-a5.

Life is itself a process of continual examination, as Socrates knew, but the genesis of that process truly begins at our nation’s universities, as young minds learn how to question what they see and delve into new areas of thought. Nowhere else is such trust placed in the hands of employees, tasked with teaching young people how to think and challenge themselves to be successful. When that employee can be trusted to do the job well and not be a disruptive force, the students flourish, the research gains the right kind of attention, and the university raises its profile and its endowments. But when the faculty member happens to attract negative attention – either due to actions taken on campus or embarrassing facts about the person’s past surfacing while in the university’s employ – the reputational and actual harm can be deeply damaging. In these instances, the old adage that an ounce of prevention is far preferable to a pound of cure has never been truer.

Unfortunately, the academic landscape is littered with people given significant measures of trust by universities who abused that trust and damaged their employer’s reputations for years to follow. Whether the case of the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who admitted in 2007 that she had lied about having degrees at not one, not two, but three schools — 28 years after she was first employed by the school — or the shooter in the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre who had been accused of stalking and declared mentally ill by a court, the consequences of not checking out relevant personnel are simply too great to ignore.

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION VS. A POUND OF CURE: REASONS TO RUN BACKGROUND CHECKS

University campuses are incubated communities, with many functions of the business world, but often fewer of the accountability issues and consequences for bad behavior. Whether an administrator who has served for several decades or a tenured professor, there is a tendency to protect one’s own on campus. That trust is exactly what criminals and fraudsters prey on, whether an associate dean in over her head in debt and looking for an easy way out or a professor with a history of inappropriate behavior around students of the opposite sex, the risks to the university and student body can be severe if such “problem cases” are not caught in time. Recently, a medical school student in Sweden who falsified his records to hide the fact that he was a convicted murderer was admitted to a second medical school after the first dismissed him. Such cases also exist within the United States, and may be more prevalent than anyone expects.

So, given that, why do only ten percent of colleges conduct background screening on students seeking to live on campus, and possibly fewer screen the administrators in positions of authority? One possible reason for the latter is opposition from employee trade groups such as the American Association of university Professors, which said in a statement that it saw some need for background investigations, but without compromising the privacy of a candidate. “The privacy of a candidate [for employment] should be compromised only as necessary in order to secure information that may ensure that applicants are qualified to meet the particular obligations of specific positions,” the AAUP said in March 2004.

This position seems a bit spurious, as many of the relevant records – criminal history, civil judgments, sex offender registries, etc. – are openly accessible to members of the public. A seasoned fraud examiner can synthesize all of the relevant public records to create an accurate profile of a candidate’s past without infringing upon privacy rights, painting a picture far more complex than a credit check can provide.

IN THE NEXT ISSUE

In the May issue, we’ll examine the nuances of conducting asset searches both within the United States and abroad – including some jurisdictions that have made their names by not giving up the very information you’re seeking.