by Kimball Bennion | February 19, 2010 | Montana Kaimin
In the wake of a professor’s shooting rampage that killed three colleagues last week at the University of Alabama, University of Montana administrators say its criminal background check policy used for hiring faculty and staff may not be perfect, but they do not fear for people’s safety.
The policy for conducting checks on a job candidate’s criminal history has been in place since 2003 and was reviewed and approved by Bob Duringer, UM’s vice president for administration and finance.
A candidate’s name is run through nine different databases throughout the United States before the candidate is considered for employment, Duringer said. The databases are maintained in such places as the Office of Public Safety, the local and county authorities, other states, the state Department of Corrections and the National Sex Offender Registry.
“This is a very comprehensive check,” Duringer said.
But Duringer was also quick to warn that any background check would not produce risk-free results.
Since the tragic shooting in Alabama, questions have risen concerning the criminal and psychological history of Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained neurobiologist who is the suspect in the shooting. In 1986, Bishop shot and killed her 18-year-old brother. She claimed it was an accident. Since Bishop was never charged, the incident went unnoticed until investigators started probing into her past after the shooting.
The criminal record of a job candidate at UM would include only incidents in which the candidate was formally charged. That’s one of the reasons Duringer said the system is not perfect.
“You can’t protect yourself from that,” Duringer said.
It is also illegal to delve into mental health records or juvenile records.
Jim Lemcke, director of the Office of Public Safety, is in charge of performing the initial check. If he found any discrepancy, he would bring it up with Betsy Hawkins, director of human resources. The two would then discuss whether the applicant’s record would be enough to rule out the possibility of employment.
Hawkins said that decision is made on an individual basis.
“We look at the position that they’re going into,” Hawkins said.
If the position involved handling money, for example, a previous offense of theft or embezzlement wouldn’t reflect very well, Hawkins said. But the mere existence of a criminal record wouldn’t automatically rule out an applicant.
“There’s no silver bullet,” Hawkins said. “I think you have to look at it as part of the whole process.”
Duringer said the hiring process requires discussion and judgment on the part of the university officials, and it wouldn’t be fair to applicants if they bound themselves to rigid rules in cases of minor offenses.
“Just because you get a traffic ticket, you can’t be unemployed the rest of your life,” Duringer said.
Instead, Duringer said, the background check process, combined with other measures, is a way to look out for campus safety.
In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, Duringer said UM instituted many safeguards to ensure campus safety. In case of an emergency, notifications will be sent to everyone in the University system via e-mail and text message. Every building is also equipped with an LED light bar. Usually, the bars show the date and time, but in the event of an emergency, they sound an alarm and appropriate instructions scroll across. These safety measures, along with rigorous background checks, go a long way to keep the campus safe, Duringer said.
“We did as much, or more, as any university in the United States to make sure our students and faculty were safe,” Duringer said.
The best you can do is the best you can do…
Screening policies and procedures change in response to unfolding events - unanticipated acts of fraud, invasion, harassment and violence that escape our precautions and shake our sense of security. Employee background checks are a preventative measure, based on the idea that knowing about a candidate in advance informs smart decision making and reduces the risks associated with hiring. Employers generally view screening as a serious necessity for the workplace, and yet the screening process itself is often oversimplified - even by some service providers in the industry.
If an online screening package seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s a lot more to the screening process than simply running a name through a database search, and even the most rigorous screening approach can get stumped by variables beyond its control: inconsistent record keeping, incorrect reporting, the suspension of public records, restrictions on certain kinds of information, the fragmentation of a single profile across county, state and federal databases - any number of systemic shortcomings can prevent screening agencies from getting total results.
There most certainly is a comprehensive way to perform background checks, but as University of Montana Vice President, Bob Duringer (featured in the above story) suggests, there’s really no such thing as total results. Duringer expresses confidence in UM’s screening process, but he goes onto convey to the author (Kimball Bennion) that no background check will lead employers to risk-free decision making.
Reports generated by searches do not provide employers with ultimate answers; reports provide information, which employers must then interpret in order to make decisions. Screening, rather than help employers eliminate risk, merely helps them distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable risks. Perhaps the notion of an “acceptable risk” seems more attractive to us when we’re talking about skydiving or playing the market or running with the bulls in Pamplona - yet as a society, we do accept a certain level of risk by demanding the fulfillment of our safety needs without the forfeiting of our privacy principles. We know that the perfect screening system would come at the expense of other things we value, and likely result in drastically less than perfect “Big Brother” type working environments - which nobody wants, even though everybody wants to feels safe.
When it comes to keeping our workplaces safe and secure, making informed decisions based on a rigorous and dynamic screening approach is the best we can do. Realistically, at the end of the day, we probably don’t want our best to get any better than that.