On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden signed the Stop Campus Hazing Act into law, making it the first federal law to create anti-hazing requirements for institutions of higher education.
The SCHA amends Section 485(f) of the Higher Education Act of 1965, otherwise known as the “Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act” (Clery Act). Notably, the SCHA also renamed the Clery Act the “Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act.”
The SCHA went into effect on January 1, 2025, and focuses on increasing transparency around the issue of hazing on college campuses. It mandates that higher education institutions participating in programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 comply with, among other things, enhanced reporting guidelines and hazing prevention education requirements in order to achieve this goal of transparency.
What will campuses be required to do?
The Stop Campus Hazing Act has three primary components:
- Inclusion of hazing statistics in annual security reports: Colleges and universities will need to include statistics for hazing incidents that were reported to campus security authorities or local law enforcement, as defined by SCHA, in their annual security reports.
- Implementation of hazing policies, including those specific to hazing prevention: Colleges and universities will be required to have a hazing policy with information on how to make a report of hazing and the process used to investigate hazing incidents. They must also have a policy that addresses hazing prevention and awareness programs, which includes a description of research-informed campus-wide prevention programs and primary prevention strategies.
- Compilation of a Campus Hazing Transparency Report: Each institution must compile and publish on a prominent location of their public website a hazing transparency report that summarizes findings concerning any student organization found to be in violation of the institution’s standards of conduct related to hazing. The report will include:
- The name of the student organization;
- A general description of the violation that resulted in a finding of responsibility; and
- Related dates (the date of the alleged incident, the date of the initiation of the investigation, the date the investigation ended with a finding, and the date the institution provided notice to the organization of the finding)
All members of The University of Alabama community have a duty to promptly report good faith concerns about potential hazing impacting another member of the campus community. Specifically, if any such individual holds firsthand knowledge about hazing, whether that hazing has already occurred or is set to occur in the future, they have a duty to make a reasonable effort to immediately report the hazing-related information. Click the button below for further instructions on reporting hazing incidents.
Information on hazing violations can be found through the University’s Violation Page.