Transcript

Host: Hello, and welcome to Prevention and Protection, the United Educators Risk Management Podcast. Today, Melanie Bennett, Senior Risk Management Counsel at UE, will speak with Jeff Nolan and Miriam McKendall, education and employment attorneys with the national law firm of Holland & Knight.

This episode was recorded on March 11, 2026. A reminder to listeners that you can find other UE podcasts, as well as UE risk management resources, on our website, ue.org. Our podcasts are also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Now here’s Melanie.

Melanie Bennett: Thank you. I’m pleased to have Jeff and Miriam on the podcast. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Nolan: Thanks for having us, Melanie. We appreciate the opportunity.

Bennett: And hi, Miriam.

Miriam McKendall: Hi, Melanie. We’re looking forward to today’s program.

Bennett: Today we’re talking about hazing trends and prevention. It’s been over a year since the enactment of the Stop Campus Hazing Act. We’ve done a webinar on this, and in this episode, we’re focusing on how schools responded to the new law, what we’ve learned in the first year, and what they should continue incorporating.

Last year, you both joined us for a UE webinar on what was then the new Stop Campus Hazing Act. We’ll link the full webinar on the podcast webpage. Can you provide an overview of the new requirements from that act?

McKendall: Sure. I’d be happy to, Melanie. So when we think about the act and look at sort of a high-level overview, there are three primary requirements that we want to think about.

One requirement is that institutions have to compile and disclose specific information about hazing incidents that were reported to a campus security authority, a CSA, as we know, or to local police, and that has to be in the institution’s annual security report, or ASRs.

The second requirement is the new campus hazing transparency report. So with that, institutions have to publish information about findings where a student organization is found to be in violation of the school’s anti-hazing policy, and that, again, is referred to as the Campus Hazing Transparency Report.

Now, before I get to the third requirement, I just want to flag in regard to these two requirements, one needs to look at the threshold definitions in the act for hazing and for a student organization. And as you mentioned, Melanie, we have the PowerPoint materials from our January of 2025 webinar, but we want you to look at the definition of hazing. There are examples in the statute itself, and we put them and describe them in last year’s PowerPoint. And also to look at the definition of student organization.

And just a brief reminder on that. The definition of student organization under the act is a little bit broader than many institutions had been used to, and it refers to two or more members that are in an organization. And the underscore here is it’s whether or not the organization is established or recognized by the institution. And that’s something that from the get-go, we’ve asked our institutions to flag and think about, and we have a few pointers or thoughts that will come about with that as we continue with today’s program.

So I said there are three requirements that would be helpful for an overview. The third requirement is that the act requires institutions to create and implement anti-hazing policies and hazing prevention programs. So here too, take a look at what Melanie has put up on the webinar, and we will speak a little bit more about that as we move on today. But I thought that would be helpful, Melanie, for a brief overview to kick off today’s program.

Bennett: That’s a great way to start. From your work with colleges and universities over the past year, how are schools now responding to the act? Are most schools still in the planning stage or have many already updated their hazing policies and procedures?

Nolan: Thanks, Melanie. I can’t speak for schools we haven’t worked with, but we have worked with many schools that have developed and published required policy statements, revised or developed anti-hazing policies, advised their campus security authorities of their obligations to report to responsible officials hazing reports that they receive. They’ve published campus hazing transparency reports if necessary and have developed or are in the process of developing anti-hazing awareness and prevention programming.

Bennett: So schools are in the process of updating their policies, working on their procedures. Now that they’ve had some experience implementing the SCHA, what are they finding challenging about it?

Nolan: CSA training on the definitions of hazing and student organizations is, of course, still a challenge, as is the development of the awareness and prevention program required by the law, because unlike policy and statement development that can be completed by internal or external legal counsel, training and education programs require institutional support and resources, time, and the involvement of many campus community members.

Miriam, would you like to talk more about awareness and prevention programming?

McKendall: Yes, Jeff, thanks. And Jeff and I have spoken about this a lot. And the challenge for schools is not agreeing with the rationale or the need necessarily. The challenge comes with administrative coordination, centralization, and coordination. And let me explain that.

First, let me take a step back. So what the act requires, as I mentioned when I did the overview, the third requirement is the act called for the school to create and implement anti-hazing policies and publishing them with statements. And that is fairly common. What is the policy? What is the anti-hazing policy? What are the reporting mechanisms? And what is the investigation process? What happens when you report? How is it investigated? That’s pretty standard. That requires coordination. It requires coordination within schools, particularly in larger institutions. You might have undergraduate schools, you might have professional schools, licensing schools, and things of that nature, but the coordination needs to be there.

The bigger challenge that it presents, though, is the aspect of the act that calls for having hazing prevention programs. Here, it’s very helpful to in fact go back to the act and look at what the act says there. It wants the schools to have prevention awareness programs. Within that, there’ll be a description of what is referred to as research-informed, campus-wide prevention programs. And those are to be designed to reach not just one student group, not just all students, but campus-wide designed to reach students, staff, and faculty.

And within the act itself, it drills down a little bit and talks about some components that are applicable to the prevention, the strategy for prevention. And the statute itself does refer to primary prevention strategies and gives by way of examples information about ethical leadership, skill building, skill building techniques for, we’ve heard it before, bystander intervention and promotion of strategies to build group cohesion, activities, group belongingness, without elements of hazing.

So when you ask about challenges and what our schools are seeing, most schools can read that and agree with it. It might be one of those things that is easier said than done, particularly in our larger institutions with multi-campuses, undergraduates, different professional schools, graduate schools.

So the bottom line is, the goal is to create a campus-wide culture that educates about hazing and strategizes about preventing hazing. This is not just a mandate, thou shall not. It is setting forth a philosophy of having some shared foundation of why thou shall not, and how can we prevent the bad acts from occurring. And with that all, it’s owned campus-wide. It doesn’t just belong to one group, athletics or whoever’s in charge of athletics, or Greek life and whatever administrative persons are responsible for Greek life. It needs to be owned by all, across the board, campus-wide.

And I think that can present a challenge sometimes, but the bottom line is in a simple term, you’ve got to have that coordination between the entire school campus-wide, and it just cannot be in silos. And that sometimes presents challenges, but that challenge really does need to be overcome if the goals and rationale for the component of the act which calls for program awareness and prevention is going to be implemented properly.

Nolan: And if I may, Melanie, just add a little bit to that. The language that Miriam noted, that the law states that programs that she’s been talking about have to be designed to reach students, staff, and faculty, my understanding is that that language does not mean that attendance must be taken and everyone who’s a staff, faculty, or student at the school needs to be documented in their attendance, but rather that the programs should be available to them and there should be a reasonable effort made to do the outreach necessary to get that information to students, staff, and faculty. And I think that’s something that will be looked at by the department, as we’ll talk about in a moment.

Final note on this, because it is so important, as schools are looking for resources, each one of the elements that Miriam talked about in terms of bystander intervention, ethical leadership, and creating group cohesion without hazing is to varying extent something that has been the subject of research. And so to the extent that we are required, institutions are required to have research-informed programming, work can be done by institutions to work with their faculty, work with experts, what have you, to learn more about those areas.

And I noted a recent law review article in the West Virginia Law Review titled Foreshadowing the Stop Campus Hazing Act, should be findable by Google, and it lists some resources in terms of research papers and so on, on those three elements of bystander intervention, ethical leadership, and creating group cohesion without hazing. So it might be worth a look there just to get yourself started if it’s not something you’ve jumped into before.

Bennett: That’s a helpful note. And I want to bring us back to something you mentioned earlier. Earlier, you were talking about the new campus hazing transparency reports, and I’m wondering what issues have arisen from your work with clients regarding these new reports.

Nolan: One issue I’ve seen come up is a need to refine the scope of what I s reported. As you know, the law requires a school to report specified information about findings made during the relevant reporting period that student organizations that are established or recognized by the school violated the school’s anti-hazing policy. It does not require schools to publish information about hazing allegations, about hazing investigations in progress, or about investigations that did not result in a finding of responsibility.

Now, schools can make their own decisions about publishing information not required by the Stop Campus Hazing Act, at least as long as they don’t violate FERPA, but I think schools should be careful not to extend the scope of what they publish to avoid creating undue community concern about allegations that have not been adjudicated, to avoid incentivizing community reactions that could jeopardize the integrity of pending investigations, and to avoid defamation claims and community retaliation against student organizations related to the publication of allegations that were not ultimately established through an investigation and adjudication process.

I’ve also fielded questions regarding whether schools should create online campus hazing transparency report placeholders or shell websites, even if they do not yet have findings of anti-hazing policy violations. The law clearly does not require them to do so, nor does it require them to make periodic updates to prior CHTRs unless and until additional findings of violations are made. But if they have the bandwidth, they might want to consider creating such a shell or a placeholder to preempt community or public questions about whether they are complying with CHTR requirements. Specifically, schools may want to avoid someone coming to the incorrect conclusion that they’ve not published or periodically updated a CHTR out of ignorance of the law when, in fact, they have not published or updated it because they did not make any findings of hazing violations during the relevant period.

If they choose to create an online shell, they could just indicate what a CHTR is, what it would include if a finding of hazing had been made, other information about programming and its policies and links to them in the anti-hazing realm, and indicate for the initial July 1, 2025, to Dec. 23, 2025, period, and subsequent twice-per-year periods, that no findings of violations were made during such periods. Of course, if and when a finding is made, the school can enter the substantive information about that into the online shell that it has already created, as required by the law.

Finally, I’ll just note on this topic, I’ve not seen a school be effectively incentivized by public scrutiny to do so, but I also anticipate that schools may wish to take advantage of the provisions in the law that permit it to explain the differences between the statistics on hazing reports that must be included in the ASR and the information that would or would not be included in a campus hazing transparency report. Obviously, because the statistics on reports of hazing by student organizations that are and are not recognized or established by the school will be much more numerous than findings of violations of the school’s anti-hazing policy by student organizations that are recognized or established by the school, the numbers will not add up. So a preemptive explanation about why that is so might be very helpful in fending off inquiries about the discrepancy.

Bennett: That’s a great point. I’m really glad you highlighted that. And I have questions about enforcement. Because enforcement is so big, this is a multi-part question for you. So part one is, have you seen any federal enforcement associated with the SCHA? Part two is, do you have any insight regarding likely federal enforcement priorities? And finally, part three is what can happen in terms of enforcement if the college doesn’t fully comply?

Nolan: Sure. Obviously very important topic. As of mid-March 2026, I have not seen anything announced publicly yet that the department is targeting schools for compliance with the SCHA.

In terms of insight regarding likely priorities, the most obvious priority is, and this is consistent with past practice at the Federal Student Aid Clery Enforcement Unit, obviously if a hazing incident at a particular college or university is reported in the media, it is highly likely that the department would initiate some level of review. That has been typical department practice. If they did so, they would likely check the institution’s statistics, its policy statements, and its policies themselves, its training of campus security authorities, its awareness and prevention programming, and its campus hazing transparency report, if that’s applicable.

In terms of other priorities, I have it on good authority from someone who used to be involved in FSA enforcement at a high level that awareness and prevention programming will be viewed by the department as something that schools and colleges and universities absolutely do have to make available to the community, and that they will be scrutinizing closely, whether recipients are offering that program in a manner that is, in fact, reasonably designed to reach students, staff, and faculty. Schools should ensure, therefore, that it is offering programming designed to reach students, staff, and faculty on each of the subject matter areas Miriam referred to, and that the curricula for such programming are research-informed.

In addition to some of the research highlighted in the law review article I spoke of previously, folks can absolutely look to organizations such as stophazing.org or the Hazing Prevention Network as a means of getting started on developing research-informed programming. If a college doesn’t comply fully with the Clery Act, as of January 2025, the fine for a single Clery Act violation had been adjusted to $71,545. As of the time of recording this, the department had not yet updated that in accordance with a generally applicable civil money penalty inflation increase law, but by the time this is posted, they may have made that adjustment in accordance with inflation.

It should be noted that while the department has discretion to assess less than 100% of that amount for each violation, it has shown a tendency in recent years to assess a relatively greater percentage of that maximum per violation than was historically the case, sometimes to dramatic effect, particularly where there are numerous violations found by the department.

Bennett: Some institutions may still be early in their compliance efforts. What are the most important steps they should prioritize now?

Nolan: Certainly everything that’s specified in the text of the law must be prioritized. So compiling statistics, creating required policy statements, developing corresponding underlying policies, and creating a campus hazing transparency report, if there’s something to report, should be prioritized because a failure to meet those minimum requirements is per se a violation of the law.

CSA training is also crucial because statistics cannot be counted accurately if CSAs do not know how to recognize a report of hazing or understand the reporting obligations. Once those tasks are completed, working to continue to build out multimodal campus-wide awareness and prevention efforts as a matter of compliance, and more importantly harm reduction, should be prioritized as well.

McKendall: And I’ll add on that if I could, Jeff. I think it’ll be evident that one of my recurring themes is to look at the section of the statute that talks about primary prevention strategies. My add-in on that is this is not a one-and-done situation. So issuing the policies, setting up investigation processes and whatnot, in many analogous situations, once that is set up, it’s looked at here and there, tweaked, and if it’s a well-running machine, go for it.

But here when we’re talking about the primary prevention strategies, that is going to be something that is ongoing. And Jeff spoke about it. He referred to a law review article about it. But remember the three components that are right there in the statute to look at research-based methods and approaches to primary prevention strategies, the bystander intervention, trying to work with building mechanisms and approaches for building group cohesion without elements of hazing, and to really talk about and elevate ethical leadership.

Those are the next steps, current steps, but I want to emphasize those are ongoing steps and it does need, as Jeff said, that campus-wide coordination and consistency.

Bennett: I’m going to ask you both to look into your crystal balls now. What future legal trends do you anticipate associated with the SCHA?

Nolan: Colleges and universities will, no doubt, continue to get sued when hazing results in harm, and there will undoubtedly be an attempt to support such claims through citation to the Stop Campus Hazing Act. Now, the Clery Statute, which the Stop Campus Hazing Act is now a part, provides that nothing in the statute may be construed to create a cause of action against the institution of higher education or any employee of an institution, or any civil liability can’t be construed to establish a standard of care. And also from an evidentiary standpoint says that notwithstanding any other provision of law, evidence regarding compliance or noncompliance with the Clery Act shall not be admissible as evidence in any proceeding of any court, agency, board, or other entity, except with respect to an action to enforce this subsection. So that would be departmental action.

Private litigants have attempted to circumvent that statutory language over the years. Those attempts have been routinely rejected by courts, but it is worth emphasizing that policy language may be enforceable under state contract law principles, consumer protection law principles, voluntary assumption of duty tort principles, as we’ve seen in the statement, for example. Most states recognize that, all depending on state law, but if statements are being made as required by the Clery Act, that the school will be doing awareness and prevention programming that will be research-informed and have certain subject matter areas, that can certainly be seen as a statement of promise by contract, consumer information for protection law, or that a voluntary assumption of duty has been made.

So even though a plaintiff couldn’t cite to the Clery Act in front of a jury or rely on it in an opposition to summary judgment, for example, the fact that a statement like that was motivated by the Clery Act or even required by it doesn’t mean that the statement itself is going to be evidence of having undertaken an obligation or made a promise. So that’s something I think is going to have to be very closely watched.

And so schools should therefore expect that in the event of hazing-related litigation, there’s going to be scrutiny of the quality of its awareness and prevention programming and research that informs it, all of which can be criticized or supported by expert witnesses, even if plaintiffs cannot literally cite to the fact that such programming was required by the Clery Act. Great care should therefore be taken in developing that programming.

McKendall: And I’ll underscore what Jeff just stated. To take a step back, in higher ed, there is and needs to be a focus on what sort of government actions might be taken, enforcement actions, where it is the government that is on one side of the vs. if you will toward the institution. But there might be no private right of action, yes, a private right of action. There might be rules about what evidence can come in or not come in.

But putting that aside for a moment, as Jeff just said, what institutions must keep mindful is individuals can and bring lawsuits for all the types of subject matters, if you will, that are covered by the statutes. It might not be that they can use a statute directly as a violation of a statute. It might mean there are certain evidentiary restrictions, but nonetheless, as Jeff has just said, there will be plaintiffs, individuals, students who might be harmed by some hazing act, and they will look at everything that Jeff just articulated to help inform their case, and therefore the schools should be ready to look at everything that we’ve just described, particularly for the strategy prevention programs, in order to prove its case of its diligence and defensive claim.

Bennett: And I have a final question. What is one final takeaway you would like schools to have from this conversation?

McKendall: I’ll go first because mine is quite short, if you don’t mind. So when we look at a statute, of course we want to think about compliance, but I want to add in a quick way to think about it, five other Cs that in my mind emerged from this act. And that is we want to create a culture of no hazing, commitment to make sure there is no hazing, there are policies around hazing, there are prevention programs. There needs to be, with that commitment, a consistency and coordination, and that needs to be campus-wide. So I’m looking at, Melanie, sort of the five Cs, culture, commitment, consistency, coordination, and campus-wide, if I could, is my final takeaway.

Nolan: Thank you, Miriam. I think hopefully this follows from that. I’ll say as a final takeaway that while the placement of the Stop Campus Hazing Act within the Clery Act necessarily requires colleges to view the law from a compliance perspective, schools should not lose sight of the salutary purpose behind the law, which was obviously to reduce the risk of harm from hazing on campus.

Anti-hazing awareness and prevention programs will have to compete with other campus priorities for resources and time. And frankly, if it takes the specter of potential Clery Act fines to convince campus leaders to support those programs, individuals involved in prevention work on campus and involved in managing risk might reasonably see the SCHA as more of an opportunity than a challenge.

McKendall: As a final note and a precaution, we really want our institutions to keep abreast of this hazing act and any enforcement actions that might arise or any developments. As you know, the enforcement actions tend to come down in various forms and at various speeds. So with this act, like others, institutions really need to keep their finger on the pulse and look for developments that might occur after the date that we have recorded this podcast.

Bennett: That’s it for today’s podcast. Thank you, Miriam and Jeff, for joining me today.

McKendall: Thank you.

Nolan: Thank you, Melanie, and thanks to United Educators for hosting this podcast.

Host: From United Educators insurance, this is the Prevention and Protection Podcast. For additional episodes and other risk management resources, please visit our website at ue.org.