The Court applied the “Lemon test,” which was developed by the U.S. Supreme Court to analyze establishment clause cases.  This third prong of the test was applicable to this case: whether the state statute fostered “an excessive government entanglement with religion.”

The Court held that the delegation of power to Davidson College was a violation of the First Amendment.

However, the opinion may not be all bad news for Davidson College:

1) The Court didn’t seem convinced that Davidson was a religious institution for Establishment Clause purposes but felt bound to conclude that it was because of past NC Supreme Court precedent.

2) In North Carolina, a unanimous decision (such as this case) by the Court of Appeals precludes an appeal as a matter of right to the NC Supreme Court.  The Court of Appeals went out of its way though to urge the Supreme Court to grant review of this case.

This certainly is a case worth following for institutions across the country–while it isn’t controlling precedent on other states, it could be influential if and when other states take up similar issues.

A 2007 federal report developed in connection to the Virginia Tech shootings recommended a joint report by the above agencies regarding violence on campus.  The report, “Campus Attacks: Targeted Violence Affecting Institutions of Higher Education,” has just been released.

From a Department of Education press release:

Accordingly, the three agencies initiated a collaborative effort, the goal of which was to understand the scope of the problem of targeted violence at these institutions in the United States.

In total, 272 incidents were identified through a comprehensive search of more than 115,000 results in open-source reporting from 1900 to 2008. The findings are pertinent and far-reaching, and the incidents studied include all forms of targeted violence, ranging from domestic violence to serial killers.

This is a useful report for institutions to read, with some interesting statistics.  Here’s a passage from the report’s conclusion:

For this paper, researchers relied on open-source information to capture the nature and magnitude of violence affecting America’s colleges and universities. Therefore, the observations and recommendations are necessarily limited, and readers should be cautious to avoid drawing broad-based conclusions. What is offered here, then, is not the end of the process, but a preliminary look at the scope of this issue. Several of the key elements explored included the attackers’ intent with regard to target selection, interpersonal relationships, personal stressors, and triggering events. Each of these elements seemingly played a significant role in the offenders’ decision to commit an act of violence. In nearly three-quarters of the captured incidents, the offender appeared to have targeted one or more specifically named individuals. Only in a small percentage of the cases was there some indication that random persons were also targeted along with specific individuals. Hence, understanding what leads an offender to exclusively target random individuals remains a complex and difficult challenge.

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This program highlights several of the key changes to the Clery Act made by the recent higher education reauthorization bill. In addition, it covers an interesting development in New York related to the Clery Act that could have implications for institutions in other states.

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