Background Investigations underway at University of Colorado

The University of Colorado might be making sweeping reforms when it comes to background investigations and screening employees for criminal pasts.

"There's a lot for us to look at in the next week," CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard said. "It's a big undertaking. We're examining the policy from top to bottom."

Top campus officials will be reviewing the school's criminal background investigation policies following Monday's stabbing, in which a former student-center employee is accused of slicing a student's throat with a knife.

The university did not run a background investigation on suspect Kenton Drew Astin, who was sent to the state mental hospital after he was accused of attempting to stab a 21-year-old Longmont man in 2001. Astin's six-month temporary employment in the food court at CU was arranged through a partnership between the university and a rehabilitation service for mentally ill adults. Hilliard said the incident prompted CU to conduct a comprehensive review of its relationship with referral companies.

The university also will be running criminal background investigations on all of its newly hired employees, and that could include professors and staff members brought on board within the past month, officials say.

CU will decide whether background checks will be done on the more than 7,000 existing employees. And officials still need to decide if it would be a random check, and whether all employees should be screened. University policy now requires background investigations for applicants who are seeking security-sensitive positions. Those include employees who provide patient or childcare, have access to controlled substances, have master keys to dorms or work with confidential data.

The campus also screens professors who are on track to earn tenure, higher education's job security, Hilliard said.

The screenings of applicants, up until last year, hadn't cost the university. CU police had been conducting 2,000 background investigations every year for the school, until the Colorado Bureau of Investigation notified the department that it's not allowed to use federal and state law-enforcement databases to perform the checks. CU has since been contracting with a private company to do the pre-employment checks

There's been a split in approaches at colleges across the country, and CU's process, if applied to all employees, could become among the most stringent.

Higher-education hiring became a hot-button topic about four years ago, when officials at Pennsylvania State University learned one of their faculty members had been convicted of murdering three people in the mid-1960s.

CU senior Amy Foster said she "definitely" endorses the university conducting background investigations on all employees.
"We're not children anymore, but we've just transitioned from being at home where our parents looked out for our safety," Foster said.