Penn State may require background checks for all faculty members in the coming weeks.

This decision came soon after school officials discovered the triple murder conviction of Paul Eric Krueger, former assistant professor of education.

Other professors have been assigned to teach Krueger's fall classes and work with his graduate students, university spokesman Bill Mahon said. Penn State is one of many Big Ten schools that does not require background checks for faculty, he said.

"It is fairly uncommon in higher education to have criminal background checks," Mahon said.

He said most background checks are based to verify a potential faculty member's credentials.

However, employees who work in daycare facilities on campus and those who deal with national security are given criminal background checks, he said.

Now Penn State is working with other Big Ten universities, which are members of the Committee of Institutional Cooperation, an academic consortium, to hire a firm to implement background checks for all faculty, Mahon said.

"Sometime last spring the Committee of Institutional Cooperation had begun to discuss background checks in higher education," Mahon said. "That process is still in play now."

An informal survey by Purdue University said most schools in the Big Ten would like to do criminal background checks, but are unable because of financial limitations, said Diana Prieto, director of affirmative action at Purdue.

Limited finances may have been a reason why Penn State did not use criminal background checks for faculty members in the past, Mahon said.

While Penn State did not implement a criminal background check on Krueger, a thorough academic check had been done, Mahon said. Krueger was a Penn State employee for four years before the university learned of his conviction.

In 1965, Krueger fired 40 bullets from a rifle at three fishermen off the coast of Texas. He pleaded guilty the following year and spent more than 12 years in prison before being paroled in 1979.

National University, a private college in La Jolla, Calif., planned to hire Krueger as a business professor until notified of his conviction by The Associated Press. National does not require checks for faculty, but was reviewing its policy when Krueger was hired, said Hoyt Smith, a school spokesman.

"We checked his academic background and asked if he had been convicted of a crime within the past seven years," Smith said. "His academic past was checked thoroughly and confirmed that he had an outstanding past as a scholar."