Boston University students said the school’s background checks on employees are justified, but criminal charges shouldn’t necessarily prevent hiring.
BU is conducting criminal background checks on only a few select potential employees, according to BU spokesman Colin Riley.
BU’s access to the state criminal history database is cleared through the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety. The office certifies specific individuals for use of the database and further limits searches by restricting its use to the hiring phase, only allowing searches to be used “to decide whether to employ someone,” Riley said.
During this time, the searches that are authorized are on applicants who will have unsupervised access to private rooms and apartments on a regular basis. BU utilizes searches following these regulations, Riley said.
Most students agreed background checks are justified.
Philip Bell, a College of Arts and Sciences junior, said the need for background checks “depends on position,” citing employees with access to “important documents, food, medicine [and] assets of significant value” as those who should be checked.
Bell questioned the importance of a background check for other positions.
“I doubt janitors steal cleaning fluid. They use it all day; they wouldn’t want to take it home,” he said.
Samuel Achord, a CAS senior, disagreed, saying background checks shouldn’t apply only to certain groups.
“If they are going to check, it should be across the board … It shouldn’t be discriminatory,” he said.
Mindy Chou said background checks are “important because there’s so much security already, it’s just one more step to protect students.”
Chou, a CAS sophomore, said the underlying assumption of BU security policies is that students’ parents “entrust BU to be our guardians,” and given that reasoning, background checks would make sense.
Students agreed criminal history should be factored in when hiring employees but should not be an automatic disqualification.
Bell said it seemed to be unsound policy to restrict people from general jobs with no special trust due to past behavior they have already dealt with.
“If they can’t participate in the economy, we shouldn’t let them out of the jails,” he said.
Chou said a person’s background “shouldn’t hurt them if they have reformed,” with some exceptions, such as sexual predators.
The students questioned said they would have no objections to having a background check performed on them, but they weren’t aware of any having been previously conducted.
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