The Tufts community was shocked last week to learn that its leafy green campus topped a list of the 50 most dangerous colleges in the country. The blogosphere, Twittersphere and local media went crazy as university officials tried to save face.
The statistics in the recent report by the news website The Daily Beast account for crimes reported to campus and local police from 2006 to 2008 at both Tufts' Medford/Somerville and Boston campuses; the website uses the data and delineations of the federal government's National Center for Education Statistics. During that period, one murder, 36 forcible rapes, 100 robberies, 119 aggravated assaults, 174 burglaries, 49 car thefts and one arson occurred at Tufts, The Daily Beast reported.
These statistics present an extremely skewed and inaccurate appraisal of the safety of Tufts' campuses and result from flawed methodology.
The Daily Beast acknowledges in its report that Tufts' campus in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood resulted in the university's poor performance. Yet another page of the same report lists Tufts' location as just Medford/Somerville, which — while accurately reflecting the site of the university's primary campus — incorrectly implies that all the reported crimes occurred at that campus.
The report also fails to distinguish between crimes that occurred on campus and those that occurred on public property adjacent to campus, a differentiation that becomes extremely pertinent when dealing with campuses in urban centers. Lumping these two statistics together results in a very inflated portrayal of the crime rate at the Boston campus. For example, only one robbery actually occurred on the Boston campus from 2006−08, according to a 2009−10 Tufts Department of Public and Environmental Safety report, but The Daily Beast ranking takes into account 87 others on adjacent property.
Of the 100 robberies The Daily Beast lists, only five actually occurred on the Medford/Somerville campus, as opposed to in adjacent areas in Medford, Somerville or Boston, according to the university's 2009−10 report. Of the 119 aggravated assaults, only 11 occurred on the Medford/Somerville campus.
Rather than measuring the safety of American college campuses, The Daily Beast merely regurgitates the crime data that colleges report to the federal government without taking into account the accuracy or completeness of the data it analyzes. As a result, the ranking penalizes schools that report crimes that occur blocks away from their property and rewards those who are less thorough in their reporting.
Illustrating how such poor methodology could manifest itself in the opposite manner, Long Island University's Brooklyn campus came in third on another list released by The Daily Beast last week: the 50 safest schools in the nation. Crime in the Flatbush area where the campus is located is notoriously frequent. But the school miraculously reported zero murders, rapes, robberies, assaults and car thefts. Those statistics seem to have more likely resulted from Long Island University's failure to adequately report crimes that occur on nearby property than from a crime−free stretch of Brooklyn surrounding the campus.
If The Daily Beast sought to highlight the failures of safeguarding campuses across the country, its ill−reasoned process of punishing colleges like Tufts that thoroughly report crime statistics is counterproductive to this aim.
On Thursday, Tufts' executive vice president, Lisa Campbell, told the Tufts community in an e−mail that the Tufts University Police Department now has access to more precise Boston crime statistics. Moving forward, she said, the university "will be able to exclude extraneous geographical areas from [its] reports to the [U.S.] Department of Education."
Cutting out areas of Boston that are far removed from the Boston campus is a fine step toward improving the accuracy of Tufts' crime data. But the university must take care not to remove areas that are relevant to the Tufts community from its crime statistics merely to satisfy the requirements of an ill−conceived public ranking.
While doing so would help the university avoid embarrassing misinformation from appearing in the media, it would also be a step backward from improving safety on campus.
