Students
The Difference Claire McCaskill Made in Higher Education
But the former prosecutor also helped put campus sexual misconduct on the radar of Congress — and the nation.
McCaskill, who faced one of the toughest re-election battles of any Democratic senator, lost her seat on Tuesday to Josh Hawley, Missouri’s Republican attorney general. She fell short by six percentage points in a state that President Trump won easily in 2016.
McCaskill’s advocacy against campus sexual assault took shape around the same time that the Obama administration’s Education Department ramped up its enforcement of Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, and started opening more investigations of colleges for potentially mishandling sexual-misconduct cases.
In the fall of 2013, as she was helping shepherd through Congress a major bill on sexual assault in the military, McCaskill decided to also focus on college campuses. She told The Washington Post that she saw many parallels between the military and higher education: young victims, pressure to stay silent, and questions about how internal disciplinary processes intersect with the criminal-justice system.
The following year, McCaskill and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, called on Congress to increase funding for the department’s Office for Civil Rights to expand its work on sexual violence. McCaskill’s office surveyed more than 400 four-year colleges for a report, titled “Sexual Violence on Campus.” The report found that more than 40 percent of the institutions hadn’t conducted a sexual-assault investigation in the past five years.
McCaskill also held roundtable discussions on campus sexual assault and crafted legislation, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, which she hoped would improve colleges’ handling of such cases and encourage more victims to come forward.
Among her priorities were to strengthen training requirements for students and employees, require colleges to designate “confidential advisers” to support victims, and smooth the coordination between campus officials and local law-enforcement agencies. She also wanted colleges to conduct annual surveys to gauge students’ knowledge of campus policies and their attitudes and experiences related to sexual assault.
She also talked about the possibility of revising the penalties for colleges that violate Title IX. That proposal didn’t materialize; currently, colleges can lose all of their federal funding if they violate Title IX, but federal officials have never levied that punishment.
The 11 articles in this collection look at the latest guidance on the enforcement of Title IX, the federal gender-equity law that applies to sexual violence; best practices for evaluating allegations fairly; and the roles that various people on campus play in arriving at just solutions. Download the collection here.
At the time, McCaskill hoped to enshrine into law the Obama administration’s preferred evidentiary standard for deciding campus sexual-misconduct cases. That standard is known as the “preponderance of evidence,” meaning that it’s more likely than not that a sexual assault took place, and is lower than the standard used in criminal cases, known as “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Advocates for accused students have said that the “preponderance” standard is not fair.
Under President Trump, the Education Department has withdrawn the guidance document that told colleges to use that standard, part of a broader loosening of Obama-era policies.
McCaskill’s bill never came up for a vote in 2014. She continued to push for bipartisan support and eventually persuaded more than 40 Democratic and Republican senators to sign on. She and Gillibrand also publicly slammed a competing bill that would have prevented colleges from opening their own investigations into reported sexual assaults unless students had also reported the incidents to local law enforcement.
In 2015 the Senate’s education committee held a public hearing on McCaskill’s measure. But the bill never made it out of committee. She and other senators tried to revive it in 2016 and 2017 without success.
McCaskill's advocacy packed less punch once Trump took office, but she continued making regular public statements about campus sexual misconduct. The senator signed onto several letters to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, criticizing her for overhauling the Obama-era approach to enforcing Title IX.
During her two terms, she also advocated for student-loan forgiveness programs, more funding for minority-serving institutions, and stricter regulations on for-profit colleges, among other things.
In the end, it wasn’t a huge surprise that McCaskill lost her re-election bid; despite her efforts to brand herself as a moderate Democrat, Missouri has become increasingly red. Russian hackers sensed her vulnerability and made her their first target of the midterm elections, according to a forensic analysis by the Daily Beast.
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.
