Effectiveness of college threat assessment teams is debated

IOWA CITY, Iowa — As the fall semester began, communications professor and campus jester Kembrew McLeod organized a parody news conference to poke fun at the University of Iowa’s governing board, expecting annoyed administrators might show up.

Instead, a detective with the campus threat assessment team was there waiting for him.

McLeod said the sending of a detective was at once intimidating and absurd, while public safety director David Visin said it was appropriate, noting administrators had received a phony email inviting them to the news conference from someone posing as a university consultant.

Either way, this much is clear: Eight years after the Virginia Tech massacre led many colleges to form threat assessment teams to identify troubled people and step in before they turn violent, these panels are a work in progress, and their effectiveness and fairness are a matter of debate.

In some cases, critics say, the teams have been used to harass students and professors who posed no threat of violence or to retaliate against critics of the college administration. Lawsuits and embarrassing public relations incidents have resulted. Critics say the teams can have a chilling effect on free speech on campuses.

Supporters of threat assessment teams say they make campuses safer in an age of mass shootings. They say these teams do the vast majority of their work in good faith and are duty-bound to check things out when they raise alarms — which is what happened with McLeod’s satirical, off-campus news conference, according to Iowa officials.

At the news conference, a group of performance artists called The Yes Men pretended to be university cost-cutting consultants. McLeod said the detective asked what they were up to and directed him to call the university president’s office to explain that the event at a public library was “just art.”

“I’m not a lone gunman or a terrorist. I’m just a goofy professor with a satirical idea,” said McLeod, who is known for dressing as a robot to ask national politicians questions.

Threat assessment teams consist of administrators from several departments who meet regularly to discuss individuals of concern and decide how to respond. They look at a wide variety of cases, such as troubling social media comments and students who seem to be in crisis. A team’s response can include encouraging someone to get mental health treatment or calling in the police to investigate.

Supporters say they believe the teams have thwarted violence on college campuses, but they acknowledge they can’t necessarily prove it — in part, because privacy laws require that most of their activities remain secret, but also because it is difficult to establish why something didn’t happen.

“Prevention is invisible,” said University of Wisconsin-Stout police Chief Lisa Walter.

Many teams were set up after it was learned that Virginia Tech administrators had many warning signs about student Seung-Hui Cho but failed to connect the dots and intervene before he killed 32 people in 2007.

But perhaps half the teams nationwide still do not have policies that spell out how they are supposed to operate, said Brian Van Brunt, who trains college administrators as president of the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association.

“You have schools that are overreacting. You have schools that use this as an Orwellian, ‘1984’-style monitoring, sometimes in a nefarious or over-authoritarian manner rather than what we teach,” he said. “As soon as you give people the tools to watch, you can run into overzealous individuals.”

Missteps can prove costly in legal expenses, bad publicity and damage to reputations.

In July, Valdosta State University in Georgia paid a $900,000 settlement to a former student who was deemed a “clear and present danger” by the school president, who was angry with the student for protesting construction of a campus parking ramp.