Firing will be the “presumptive punishment” for faculty and staff members at the University of Texas at Austin who commit sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, or interpersonal violence, the university’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, announced on Monday.
In addition, information will be made publicly available about those who are found to have committed such acts but whose jobs are spared because of mitigating circumstances, the president said.
Termination may be the practice for more and more schools, but putting it in writing as policy is an uncommon step.
Pressure has been building on colleges to toughen their responses to sexual harassment, but it’s unusual for a campus to spell out firing as the expected response.
“Termination may be the practice for more and more schools, but putting it in writing as policy is an uncommon step, so far,” Brett A. Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators, wrote in an email. He said this is the first such policy he’s aware of.
At UT-Austin, decisive punishment and transparency have been key demands of students who have for months been complaining about professors who return to the classroom after being found responsible for violating the university’s sexual-misconduct policies. Among them was Coleman Hutchison, a tenured associate professor of English who was punished for not reporting a relationship with a former graduate student and for making inappropriate comments to other graduate students.
Fenves said he had accepted all of the recommendations submitted by Husch Blackwell, an outside law firm that conducted a four-month review of the university’s policies related to sexual misconduct. The changes, the president said, “are designed to better support survivors, provide clear disciplinary guidelines, and improve communication with the campus community.”
Among the key changes:
Termination as the presumptive punishment: Employees who engage in any of the four categories of misconduct outlined in the report will have to make a convincing case why they shouldn’t be fired. This a big win for activists who have argued that suspensions and other interim punishments allow harassers to return to the campus to victimize more students. Fenves said misconduct findings would come only after a thorough investigation.
Sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, and interpersonal violence are the four categories of misconduct outlined in a 2019 state law that requires universities to report such violations. Fenves said that the policy change would make clear that sexual misconduct wouldn’t be tolerated and that if it happened, “the consequences will be clear.”
Sokolow wrote that the policy could backfire by chilling reporting “by victims/survivors who are not looking to have someone terminated or expelled.” That possibility could be mitigated, he said, if the process takes into consideration what the victim considers an appropriate consequence.
Some faculty members are already on edge about the possibility that, with Texas’ new mandatory reporting law, they could face criminal charges for failing to report harassment.
Making information public when offenders remain employed: The university agreed to compile and make information about offenses public as long as the privacy of survivors is protected. At times in the past, the university has balked at releasing information about sexual misconduct, saying that doing so could violate the rights of complainants who don’t want to go public. It remains to be seen how the university will meet its latest commitment to transparency when complainants want their identities protected and worry that too many details will expose them to public scrutiny.
The law firm recommended that the university publicly disclose the name of the employee in question, a brief description of the incident, and an explanation of why the person wasn’t fired.
It noted that none of the peer universities it studied had such a policy in place. “However, we believe there are unique legal issues in Texas, including the mandatory reporting law and Texas’ robust public-information law, that warrant a unique approach.”
In the past, it’s generally taken public-records requests to bring that kind of information to light. In January, following such requests, the university disclosed that 17 employees of the flagship campus had violated its sexual-misconduct policies from November 2017 to December 2019.
Streamlining the resources available to complainants: During an emotional public forum in January, students complained that the university was doing too little to protect them from “sexual predators” and that the services available to survivors were insufficient.
The review found that the university offered a robust assortment of programs for survivors, but that they were confusing, not clearly communicated, and possibly underused.
Fenves said some survivors had expressed interest in alternative forms of dispute resolution and other ways to help in the healing process. The university will consult with experts, including at the school of social work, to introduce restorative justice, an umbrella term that covers a variety of cooperative interventions aimed more at healing than punishing.
