GREENWICH VILLAGE — New York University is shunning a controversial question on the widely-used Common App college application form that asks about an applicants' criminal and disciplinary history, after years of pressure from student activists.
While the school will continue to use the Common App form, it will ignore that question, and instead add a supplemental question that asks more narrowly if an applicant has been convicted or disciplined for violence.
"Since NYU took up this issue, we have been constantly working to seek a balance between two principles: keeping our campus safe and ensuring that NYU gives people a second chance and lives up to its mission as an engine of social mobility," said NYU Vice President for Enrollment Management MJ Knoll-Finn in a statement.
NYU already had a policy of first-reading applications without knowing whether an applicant had checked the Common App's box, and only seeing the results after a preliminary admissions decision had been made about the candidate.
► READ MORE: NYU Questions Use of Criminal Background Check on College Application Form
They will have the same policy with their new question this year, and plan to seek more information directly from tentatively-admitted students who answered yes.
Student activists are dissatisfied with the new policy, however.
“We must call out the false binary between so-called ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent’ crimes," said NYU graduate student Emma Pliskin, an organizer with the group Incarceration to Education Coalition, which has been pressuring the school on the issue since 2013. "We know that because of racial stereotypes, the police assume people of color are more violent than their white counterparts, and will be charged differently.”
NYU previously asked the Common App to conduct research to see if the criminal record question is having any positive impact on campus safety at the 600 schools that participate in its application system. The nonprofit decided to do that, after an internal discussion.
► READ MORE: Common App Launched Inquiry Into Criminal History Box 6 Months Ago
The school also looked at its own enrolled students' disciplinary records and "found no meaningful differences in the rates of infractions" between "enrolled students who had checked the box against the overall undergraduate NYU population."
Their findings is what prompted them to part from the Common App's question and come up with their own, Knoll-Finn said.
“The findings caused us to pose questions to ourselves: in terms of our responsibility to keep the campus safe, what information do we really want and need to know?" Knoll-Finn said. "What concerned us most was the prospect of violent crime. And so we concluded that a narrower question – one specifically focused on violent crime – made more sense. If someone has committed a violent crime, we want to know and want to have an opportunity to get more information from the applicant, judge the context, and evaluate whether there might be ongoing safety concerns for our campus."
► READ MORE: Formerly Incarcerated NYU Administrator Wants School to 'Ban the Box'
