OPINION

Don’t let sexual predators shop for colleges

Oregon newspapers

Both the University of Oregon and Oregon State University are changing their admissions procedures with the goal of maintaining safe campuses.

But the two universities, both of which have dealt with high-profile sexual assault cases recently, are taking very different approaches.

OSU now requires transfer applicants to disclose whether they’ve been kicked out of another school, and barred from re-enrolling, in the past seven years for sexual assault or other serious misconduct. If they have, OSU won’t admit them.

The UO is asking both freshmen and transfer applicants if any school since ninth grade has taken disciplinary action against them for academic or behavioral misconduct; if they’ve had a protective, restraining or stalking order against them, and if they’ve ever pleaded no contest or been found guilty of a misdemeanor or crime.

UO Director of Admissions Jim Rawlins says the new questions aren’t meant to keep anyone out of UO. Answers, which will be kept confidential, won’t disqualify an applicant on the spot. Rather the goal is to help both applicants and the university, he said. The UO might, for example, encourage or require a student to go through some form of counseling before arriving on campus.

Only about 3 percent of the 10,000 people who have applied to the UO since the admission forms were changed in August have answered yes to one of the questions, Rawlins said. None was turned down as a result.

OSU is taking a more hardline approach. Its previous policy was to reject transfers if it happened to find out that they had been barred from re-enrolling after being expelled or suspended by their previous school. In reality, this seldom happened.

It’s easier, however, to refrain from volunteering information than to lie outright, OSU vice president Steve Clark said, which is what applicants would now have to do. Applicants also are likely to understand the university has a mechanism in place for following up on these questions, he said.

And OSU is requiring students to state whether they were barred from re-enrolling not just at their last school, but at any school they attended in the past seven years.

By going from a passive to an active approach, requiring applicants to make disclosures, OSU intends to send a clear message: It will not tolerate sexual assault or other serious misconduct, including racist attacks.

OSU isn’t expecting to reject a lot of transfer students because of the new policy. But transfer students make up roughly 20 to 30 percent of OSU’s enrollment, the university calculates, and if another school never wants to see that student again, OSU doesn’t either.

OSU will offer an appeals process for any students who feel they’ve been unfairly denied admission under the new policy. OSU officials said they don’t know of any other schools that have implemented a policy as broad based as theirs.

On a more limited basis, Southeastern Conference presidents and chancellors earlier this barred their member schools from accepting student-athletes facing discipline at another SEC school for domestic violence or sexual assault. The goal was to prevent students from escaping discipline by transferring.

But since OSU announced its new policy on Monday, the university has heard from heads of several other Pac-12 schools, some thanking OSU for taking a stand aimed at combatting sexual assault, others asking for more information.

And the Pac-12 board of directors, which consists of the presidents of all Pac-12 universities, plans to put OSU’s policy on its agenda, Clark said.

Both UO’s and OSU’s new policies are steps in the right direction when it comes to tackling the problem of sexual assaults and other serious offenses on campus. When universities accept students, they also accept the responsibility of taking reasonable precautions to keep them safe — a standard that has not always been met in the past.

OSU in particular has come up with an approach that may work well to stem the problem of students who have a history of sexual assault simply moving to another school for a repeat performance when they are kicked out of one school.

But if only OSU is willing to put up such a barrier, the tide of repeat offenders will simply flow to other schools. The interest being shown by other schools in the Pac-12 conference is encouraging. But a zero tolerance approach to sexual predators will work only if colleges and universities take this seriously, and adopt a united front.

— The Register-Guard, Eugene, Dec. 4

Get ready for big bills from PERS

Lawmakers are upbeat about last week’s revenue forecast, which predicts the state’s income will increase slightly, because the Legislature won’t have to back away from spending increases approved during this year’s session. But while the current two-year budget is sound, the state is facing a massive hole when legislators start work on the next budget in 2017.

That’s because the Oregon Supreme Court struck down significant portions of Public Employee[s] Retirement System reforms enacted in 2013. The result of that ruling, as The Oregonian reported last week, is that the pension system’s unfunded liability has nearly doubled, and is likely to exceed $20 billion by the end of this year.

The bills don’t start coming due until 2017, but they are coming, and the result will not be pretty.

The state’s public employers combined will need to come up with $800 million in pension contributions in the next biennium starting in 2017, $860 million in 2019 and $930 million in 2021, The Oregonian reported.

That means, among other things, that school districts won’t have as much to spend on teachers, school days and reducing class sizes, cities and counties will have less for police officers and firefighters, and state agencies will have to lay off staff or leave positions unfilled.

But we’re not hearing much discussion of addressing this reality starting in the 2016 legislative session, because the PERS bill won’t come due until the following year. Lawmakers are not fond of facing budget shortfalls until they absolutely have to, which is one reason the state tends to lurch from crisis to crisis with periods of calm in between.

Local governments and school districts are being warned to prepare themselves for the hit to their budgets starting in 2017. Lawmakers, too, should prepare, by resisting the urge to spend that increased state revenue in 2016 and instead bank it for the following year, when there will be less to work with.

An initiative petition backed by unions and others intended for the November 2016 ballot would increase taxes on large corporations, raising an estimated $2.5 billion a year — enough to cover the increase in PERS costs and still provide more money for schools and other public services. Whether that is a good idea is a topic for another day; signatures are still being collected.

But regardless of whether new revenue is raised, Oregon’s pension system still has years of increasing costs ahead of it, and state leaders should prepare for that now rather than later.

— The Mail Tribune, Medford, Dec. 6