Excellent post.
I will add that walking around a campus- if you can- is often revealing. Colleges invest tens of millions of dollars in enhanced security systems. And then you see the fire door of a dorm propped open with a cinderblock, because “it’s too hard” for guests to swipe an ID every time they want to visit a friend- so they enter through the back, an unlocked and unsecured entrance.
Well- how else is a college going to prevent non-students from wandering the halls of a dorm and grabbing a wallet, a laptop, etc. unless they have a security system?
Or your kid does an overnight and observes empty or near-empty security vans driving through, across, around campus all evening. That either tells you that the campus is so safe that everyone walks everywhere. Or it tells you that students have a false sense of security, that the culture discourages using the omnipresent blue lights, vans, guards, walking escorts, etc. even when students SHOULD be using them.
Is there a “motherly” Dean who says things like “if you press charges, this will haunt you for the rest of your time on campus”, or does the administration support students who want to report a sexual assault when they were too inebriated to give consent? Does the college make sure that it is following local laws (some municipalities have banned sales of kegs in addition to liquor laws) or are there events where the grad students can pour for undergrads? And my least favorite tactic- the college “agreeing” with local law enforcement that campus is off-limits except for a mass casualty event or natural disaster. So the campus police are in charge of campus. This both distorts the crime statistics (if a kid is mugged walking from the chem lab to the dorm, but it’s on a main road which “counts” as the town, not campus, is it really a mugging?) AND makes it harder for prosecution. There will be zero effort made to follow protocol w/r/t chain of evidence, securing a physical location, interviewing eyewitnesses, etc. So cases get dismissed which would have been successfully prosecuted because the “rent a cops” aren’t in the business of criminal justice. Campus police and security guards do many things well. But they aren’t trained the way a local police force is.