The Clery Act

The Clery Act had its origin in 1990 when the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990 was established, amending the Higher Education Act of 1965. The Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act was created after a student named Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in a residence hall at Lehigh University in 1986. The Act required higher education institutions that received federal funding to report crime statistics, notify the campus community of threats, and compile and distribute an annual campus security report to the campus community, prospective students, and employees. In 1998, the Act was further amended and renamed the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (the “Clery Act”) in her memory. In 2008, following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 reauthorized the Higher Education Act of 1965, and included the Clery Act requirements, which were amended based on lessons learned from the Virginia Tech incident. This amended version of the Clery Act includes new regulations related to emergency response, emergency notification, timely warnings, missing student notification, fire safety reporting, and hate crime reporting.