Tucson Opinion: On-campus murders reflect American tragedy

Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her bed by a fellow student at Lehigh University in 1986. As Lehigh’s president, I worked with Jeanne’s parents and others to design a campus memorial to honor their beautiful daughter. It also seemed important for us to understand how this could happen in such an apparently safe environment. What went wrong? Where is the accountability? At root, the president bears that responsibility, which was quickly and openly acknowledged, but both the parents and the Lehigh community needed better answers.

Jeanne’s assailant was a popular sophomore from Newark who unaccountably boasted of his crime to his shocked roommates. They turned him into the authorities promptly, but not before he had joined his little brother (a high school senior) at the President’s House for a minority student recruiting event the evening after the murder.

As frustrations and recriminations grew, Jeanne’s parents took their concerns public. Lehigh University and her president were vilified on one of America’s most popular national television interview shows of that era. Any attempt to offer a public defense seemed unkind, so we just absorbed the criticism.

I attended Jeanne’s memorial service, bracing myself for the indictments, both personal and professional, coming directly from her father, including the false declarations that Jeanne’s murderer was less academically qualified for admission than his victim.

First, the Pennsylvania state Legislature and then the United States Congress passed “Clery Laws,” which require all universities to publish annual reports on campus crime. Even today, the University of Arizona files such annual reports, which can be quite detailed.

Almost 16 years later, three members of the University of Arizona Nursing faculty were shot to death by a deranged student, who then took his own life. We were all living in the shadows of the 9/11 disaster, and as the University of Arizona president, I tried to calm the fears of the community while sharing their grief.

How could this happen? The University of Arizona campus is an open, public space, virtually impossible to lock down. With as many as 50,000 people on campus for the university president to oversee, genuinely feeling responsible for their public safety, that president can no more prevent all crime on campus than the mayor of Casa Grande can keep his city of the same size free of crime. Nonetheless, both mayors and university presidents feel a profound responsibility for public safety.

While every act of public violence elicits a response intended to improve public safety, the national reaction to the unprecedented assault on New York’s World Trade Center was most dramatic. At the University of Arizona, we created campus-wide response teams with training protocols and practice sessions. We were spared the violence that flared on many campuses in this critical time, but over the span of 24 years in two university presidencies, I have had to deal with murder and suicide as the most painful aspects of the job.

Even now, well into my retirement at 86, I suffer for my colleagues and their families in these tragic moments of mortal violence. At the University of Arizona, we recently lost to senseless murder a distinguished and beloved member of our faculty, Professor Tom Meixner, in a violent crime that, in retrospect, surely could have been avoided. How could this have happened? Why is campus violence still such a serious problem?

I am so consumed with sadness and anger about these questions that I’m not the best source of answers. As a country, we can’t even agree on sensible gun safety regulations or mental health protocols to reduce violence in America. How can we address problems of violence on campus when we haven’t yet found the wisdom or the courage to face the larger problems of murder in America?