At a gathering last month for students admitted to Dartmouth College’s Class of 2018, a father asked Lorelei Yang, a junior there, whether the campus was a dangerous place for women. He’d heard about sexual assaults at Dartmouth, says Ms. Yang, and wondered if the campus’s problems were unique.
Dartmouth is the primary target in a hard-hitting new advertising campaign by the national gender-equality group UltraViolet. “Accepted to Dartmouth?” reads one of the ads that appeared last month on Facebook and other websites, drawing more than 200,000 views. “You should know about its rape problem.”
The campaign comes as colleges are under increasing pressure from students and the federal government to improve their response to reports of sexual assault. In personal accounts and in complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Education, students and alumni have alleged that their institutions brushed off or mishandled their reports. And dozens of investigations have ensued, along with much media attention and strong assurances from college presidents that they are committed to this important issue.
This month UltraViolet dialed up the intensity, expanding its ad campaign to Occidental College; American, Brandeis, Harvard, and Florida State Universities; and the Universities of California at Berkeley and of Michigan at Ann Arbor. With the exception of American and Brandeis, the targeted institutions are among 55 colleges and universities now under federal investigation for possible violations of the gender-equity law known as Title IX, which requires campus officials to investigate and resolve reports of sexual harassment and assault whether or not the police are involved.
UltraViolet’s online ad campaign is an in-your-face attempt to get prospective students and campus officials to recognize the severity of sexual assault, says Karin Roland, the group’s organizing director. “The goal is to make sure that students considering these schools know what they’re getting into,” she says. “And it’s to make sure administrators know they can’t hide from this problem. Universities can either take student safety seriously, or we’ll bring the grass-roots pressure to push them over the edge to do it.”
Ms. Yang, a government major and member of a campus group at Dartmouth that educates students about sexual misconduct, believes the ad campaign is more about fear-mongering than about fixing the problem. In response to the concerned father at the Class of 2018 gathering, she recalls saying that while Dartmouth does have a sexual-assault problem, it isn’t alone. “I said, ‘It’s a problem at every university campus.’”
Dartmouth, meanwhile, created its own ad campaign last month. Its ads refer people to a “sexual-assault awareness resource page,” which says the university is poised to institute tough new sanctions for students found responsible for rape, to open a resource center for victims, and to host a national conference in July.
“We think we’re on the leading edge of where higher ed is right now in terms of ways to prevent sexual assault and punish students,” says Justin Anderson, a Dartmouth spokesman. “UltraViolet is ignoring the actions Dartmouth is taking.”
‘If Bad PR Is What It Takes …’
UltraViolet prefers to be pointed. Like other staff members there, Ms. Roland used to work for MoveOn.org, a nonprofit group that backs Democratic politicians and is known for its early use of email and online communication to spread information and raise money.
UltraViolet, which also speaks out on abortion, pay equity, birth control, and gender discrimination, took aim at Dartmouth and the seven other campuses, Ms. Roland says, either because they were the site of high-profile sexual-assault cases or because students there were pushing administrators to step up their response to sexual assault.
At Dartmouth this year, a first-year student came forward and said that her name had appeared in an online “rape guide,” in which a male classmate gave tips on how to persuade her to perform oral sex. The student said she was later assaulted at a fraternity party. In April of last year, the college canceled classes for a day of dialogue after students protested at an event for prospective students, decrying incidents of sexual assault, racism, and homophobia on the campus. Last May, Dartmouth students announced they had filed a federal complaint over the college’s alleged misreporting of sexual-assault cases.
“Dartmouth has one of the most rampant sexual-assault problems in the country,” says Ms. Roland. And UltraViolet wants to get that message out. “If bad PR is what it takes to get these schools to act,” she says, “we’ll bring them bad PR.”
Florida State is part of the ad campaign, says Ms. Roland, because in 2012 an undergraduate woman accused the university’s high-profile quarterback, Jameis Winston, of rape. Critics have said university officials did nothing to deal with the allegation. A local prosecutor, meanwhile, said he lacked evidence to charge Mr. Winston.
Florida State can’t comment on the case, a university spokeswoman says. But “the university agrees with UltraViolet,” she adds, “on the importance of shining a light on the issue of sexual assault.”
‘What’s the End Goal?’
It’s unclear what effect the UltraViolet campaign may have. Spring is when admitted students decide where to enroll, but many factors influence their college choices.
During a program for prospective students this year at Dartmouth, students and parents asked questions about sexual assault, Mr. Anderson says. The university’s applications dropped 14 percent this year over last year, to 19,235, a decline officials there are studying. But at the same time, its yield, or the proportion of admitted students who enroll, hit an all-time high of 54.5 percent. “For the first time in seven years,” says Mr. Anderson, “we won’t have to go to our wait list.”
Susan Struble, a 1993 Dartmouth graduate, applauds the UltraViolet campaign and any additional attention and resources the college may commit to the issue. Two years ago she started a group of faculty members, students, and alumni called DartmouthChange.org to persuade the university to pay more attention to sexual violence. “It was bad when I was on campus,” she says, “and it’s bad now.” Ms. Struble was sexually assaulted by a male undergraduate when she was a prospective student visiting Dartmouth, she says, and then again after she enrolled. She never filed a report.
To put more pressure on campuses and further raise awareness, UltraViolet has also asked Princeton Review Inc. to survey students about sexual assault on their campuses and include that information in its college rankings. But while the company added a page on its website last month devoted to student safety, it does not plan to ask students to rank campuses specifically on sexual assault, says Robert Franek, senior vice president there.
“The creation of a student-opinion ranking based on sexual assault,” he says, “is not the ranking list we can create at the Princeton Review.” Any information it provides about sexual assault, he believes, should be based on quantitative data, not students’ opinions.
Alison Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus, thinks UltraViolet’s “scare tactics” may be counterproductive. The Clery Center, a nonprofit group created to lobby for consumer information on campus crime, continues to monitor and advocate for student safety.
“What’s the end goal?” Ms. Kiss asks about the ad campaign. “It sounds like it is to shame the institution,” she says. “How is that improving the community or the culture for students there now? I don’t think it takes an evidence-based approach to eradicate sexual violence on campus.”
