U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week reinstated a fine against Virginia Tech for failing to notify students in a timely manner about the 2007 campus massacre.
Then-undergraduate Seung-Hui Cho shot two Virginia Tech students in the early morning before going on to kill 32 individuals in total. It is the early-morning shootings that the Department of Education has highlighted as a violation of the Clery Act, which requires universities to warn students in a timely manner when campuses are in danger.
The Department of Education last year initially fined Virginia Tech $55,000 under the Clery Act. In March of this year Ernest Canellos, administrative law judge for the Department of Education, overturned the fine, accepting an email sent out about two hours after the first shooting as a “timely warning.” Last week Duncan overturned his colleague’s ruling.
“It is alarming that [Virginia Tech] argues that it had no duty to warn the campus community after the Police Department discovered the bodies of two students shot in a dormitory, and did not know the identity or location of the shooter,” Duncan said in his decision. “Indeed, if there were ever a time when a warning was required under the Clery Act, this would be it.”
The amount the school must pay is still under review, according to Duncan’s decision.
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger would recommend appealing Duncan’s decision, said Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker in a statement. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, however, will have the final say in deciding whether to officially appeal the ruling. Cuccinelli spokesman Brian Gottstein said the attorney general disagreed with Duncan’s decision but had not yet decided whether to appeal.
Duncan overturned another part of Canellos’ decision by ruling Virginia Tech did not follow its own internal policies for warning students. Virginia Tech’s policy states the university police will send out Clery Act warnings, but the police were not equipped to send out the warning the day of the shooting so another office sent the warning instead.
Virginia Tech maintains that it reacted in a timely manner to the incident and that the act’s language is ambiguous.
“The federal government has never defined a timely warning and continues to hold universities accountable even when a university’s actions are well within the department’s own guidelines,” Hincker said in the statement.
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