This week, as professors and graduate students make final preparations for their fall classes, some have been grappling with an especially fraught issue: how to tell their students about their responsibility to report sexual misconduct.
At many — and possibly most — colleges, the vast majority of faculty members and graduate-student instructors are considered mandatory reporters. If they hear about any incident of sexual misconduct, they must report it to the Title IX office or another campus authority. But their students might not know that.
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This week, as professors and graduate students make final preparations for their fall classes, some have been grappling with an especially fraught issue: how to tell their students about their responsibility to report sexual misconduct.
At many — and possibly most — colleges, the vast majority of faculty members and graduate-student instructors are considered mandatory reporters. If they hear about any incident of sexual misconduct, they must report it to the Title IX office or another campus authority. But their students might not know that.
This state of affairs has put many professors in the awkward position of having to interrupt a student who’s just brought up a traumatic experience in mid-conversation, so they can tell the student that they’ll have to report anything he or she says. On occasion, they might have to violate a student’s wishes to keep the information confidential.
New campus rules on mandatory reporting for professors were issued during the Obama administration. To comply with Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights told colleges that “responsible employees” must report any potential sex discrimination, including sexual misconduct. Many institutions crafted blanket policies that put most faculty and staff members in that category.
In addition, some professors might be designated as “campus-security authorities” under the Clery Act, the federal campus-safety and crime-reporting law. That means they must report any crimes, including sex offenses, that they learn about.
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On Tuesday, Chanell Washington, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Pennsylvania State University, wrote on Twitter that she planned to add language to her syllabus noting that she is a mandatory reporter, and she encouraged other instructors to do the same.
Professors, if you’re a mandated reporter, you should probably put that in your syllabus. Last week a student wrote in a paper that she was sexually assaulted, and I realized that I had to report it.
In an interview, Washington said she had recently finished teaching a course that covered, among other things, rape culture. At the end of the term, students had to write an autobiography and link concepts from the course to their own lives. One student wrote about being sexually assaulted and how her mother had blamed her for it.
The incident occurred before the woman became a Penn State student, Washington said. “At first, I read it and I didn’t realize I needed to report it,” she said. Then she was having dinner with a fellow graduate student who told her: Actually, you do. The campus’s Title IX office told her the same thing.
It was Washington’s first time teaching the course, and she had not expected anyone to talk about a sexual assault. She worried about how the student would react to her reporting it. “She trusted me enough to write that in her paper,” Washington said. “I feel like if she knew that I was a mandatory reporter when she wrote that paper, she wouldn’t have said that.”
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To her relief, the student understood. She thanked Washington for providing her with confidential resources in case she didn’t want to talk to the Title IX coordinator.
Brianne Pragg, also a Penn State graduate student, gave Washington the idea of mentioning mandatory reporting in her syllabus; one of Pragg’s students had also disclosed a sexual assault in an assignment. Washington’s tweet about the syllabus statement went viral, touching off a broader conversation among faculty members and graduate students about how to warn students about their instructors’ reporting obligations.
Many academics reacted favorably to the idea of putting a note in course syllabi. Molly A. Martin, an associate professor of sociology at Penn State, saw Washington’s tweet and decided to craft a statement about mandatory reporting for that purpose. Washington modeled her syllabus language on Martin’s.
Kathy Dettmer, an adjunct instructor at three universities, is also taking that step.
Dettmer teaches French, and in foreign-language courses it’s common for students to write about themselves and their opinions. So she’s had to report sexual misconduct on several occasions. She said she doesn’t want students who have just had the worst experience of their lives to have to play a guessing game about where to turn for help.
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As an adjunct, though, she can’t just add the same statement to all of her syllabi because campus policies might differ. She’s checking with department chairs at each of her three institutions to find out if there is boilerplate language about mandatory reporting that she can use.
When Olivia Hinerfeld was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, she lobbied to make it a requirement for faculty members to do so. Hinerfeld was a co-chair of the university’s 2016-17 sexual-assault task force.
“After much prodding,” Hinerfeld wrote in an email, the faculty members on the task force endorsed a recommendation for faculty leaders to “consider an approach for faculty members to incorporate language in their syllabi that is sensitive to issues of sexual assault.” When she starts law school there this fall, she said, she’ll push for them to go further.
Other instructors take different approaches.
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I’ve had to do this more than once, and it’s led me to the same conclusion. Instead of simply placing it in my syllabi with the rest of the boilerplate, I now make it a point to include it in my introductory lecture for every course I teach.
While Sharon Shewmake doesn’t have a statement in her syllabus about her obligation to report sexual misconduct, she said she thought doing so was a good idea, especially in courses whose students often talk and write about their experiences. Shewmake is an associate professor in the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University.
In Shewmake’s economics courses, students don’t typically write personal essays. But sexual assault has come up, she said, when students have fallen behind in their work and visit her office to talk about it.
She immediately explains what being a mandatory reporter means. Then she tells students that her main goal is to help them get back on track, and offers to connect them to any resources they might need.
“That has almost always been met with, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’” Shewmake said. She’s glad she’s a mandatory reporter because she believes it puts her in a position to better protect her students.
Washington, the Penn State Ph.D. candidate, said she’s not a fan of mandatory reporting. If she were working with minors, it would make sense. But when it comes to adult victims, such policies seem paternalistic, she said: “Now I have to report because you don’t know what’s best for you.”
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Washington isn’t the only one with concerns.
I hate mandatory reporting. Especially as someone who has done research on rape culture and sexual violence. My students know about my work and have come to me with their stories in the past because I was someone they felt they could trust, who would support them. https://t.co/kjKr5GbxVG
Now I feel like I have to actively discourage them from confiding in me unless they are ready to report—and there are thousands of valid reasons why they wouldn’t be.
Those are some of the reasons that the University of Oregon last year rolled out a more nuanced mandatory-reporting policy. If students tell professors that they don’t want a report to be made, professors can usually keep the information confidential. One Oregon faculty member who helped orchestrate the change pointed that out this week.
Agreed. If you are a mandatory reporter you must be clear about that. HOWEVER, colleges, there is another policy approach (as used at U Oregon). Model consent. Be trauma informed. Let adult #surivorsdecide what happens with their information. https://t.co/z8DQrdZd3hhttps://t.co/VcRcIUGNEm
Some professors and graduate students say they remain confused about what to tell their students because they’re not sure what exactly they’re required to do. What if a student describes a rape in a class assignment? What if the incident occurred before the student came to campus? Am I even a mandatory reporter?
I asked about this when I hired in and apparently since I’m just an adjunct I’m not a mandatory reporter? I think schools need to have a LOT more transparency where this is concerned
I just re-read my campus policy (written Jan 2018 after I last took training) and am now more confused than before about whether I am a mandatory Title IX reporter or not. Seriously.
Pamela E. Oliver, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, just asked her department chair to send around a memo clarifying whether professors and other instructors are mandatory reporters. Part of the confusion, she said, stems from a revision of some campus policies this year.
Oliver used to be chair, so she’s no stranger to dealing with sexual-harassment and sexual-assault issues. Still, she wrote in an email, “my own feeling is that the exact rules for reporting for each kind of thing are very unclear.”
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John Lucas, a Madison spokesman, said faculty members are not considered mandatory reporters unless they are a department chair or program director, or hold another administrative post.
If employees witness a sexual assault firsthand, they must report it under Wisconsin state law, Lucas wrote in an email. Campus leaders have encouraged all employees to report any allegations of sexual misconduct, he said.
A tangle of issues surrounds mandatory-reporting protocols, as well as other policies on campus sexual assault, Oliver added.
“A really serious problem,” she said, “is the conflict between what is good for protecting the victim and doing what the victim wants, and what the laws, rules, and regulations require — not to mention what is good for the system, in terms of stopping assault and harassment.”
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.