Two years of scrutiny have given college presidents many opportunities to offer the reassurance that they take sexual assault seriously. But they might think twice before phrasing it that way again.
The Hunting Ground, a new documentary about campus sexual assault, excoriates colleges in a montage of clips of leaders claiming to take the issue “very seriously.” All evidence the film presents is to the contrary. It largely omits administrators’ perspectives, going “straight to the heart,” it advertises, “of a shocking epidemic of violence and institutional cover-ups sweeping college campuses across America.”
Each class arrives full of potential. “To our new, treasured students: This is your moment,” a nameless dean declares as the film begins. But when a fifth of young women experience sexual assault, and one after another turns to her college for help, the institutions don’t treasure them at all, but discredit and forsake them. According to the film’s experts, colleges care more about keeping their crime statistics low and their applications high, about not challenging powerful interests like fraternities and athletics.
Students, parents, faculty, and alumni must “help stop this epidemic,” The Hunting Ground implores. Administrators, apparently, are beyond hope. Online the filmmakers have posted a pledge: “Commit to holding your college accountable.”
The project was a moral imperative, say the filmmakers, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering. As they traveled with their last film, The Invisible War, on sexual assault in the military, they were exploring a new topic entirely. But personal appeals from students came after screenings and in letters. “We felt compelled,” says Ms. Ziering, “like how could we not make this film?”
Its rising action is the activism of the past two years: the wave of federal complaints against colleges under the gender-equity law Title IX, White House campaigns, and close attention from lawmakers. “You can see the movement gain momentum in real time,” says Annie E. Clark, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the movement’s founders.
The film’s provocative title comes from a young woman at Occidental College describing the environment there in one of many wrenching testimonials. “This is not about bad hookups,” says Ms. Ziering, but predators and prey, with the latter uniformly betrayed by their institutions.
That lack of nuance has led to some harsh criticism of the film. Presenting a series of counterpoints with statistics and facts of individual cases, Slate dismisses it as a polemic that does the public a disservice.
Yet as the film screens in more places — Ithaca, N.Y.; Columbia, Mo.; La Jolla, Calif. — its portrayal of colleges is something they’ll have to reckon with. “Any parent sending a child off to college should consider this required viewing,” says a new flier, quoting David Edelstein of New York magazine. Students and faculty want the film on their campuses, and more than 50 will show it in the next couple of months. By the end of the year it will air on CNN.
While the Obama administration and Congress have kept the pressure on colleges, more than 100 of which are under federal investigation, The Hunting Ground will only heighten it.
‘Empty Gesture’
Defending an institution to people primed to distrust it is a formidable task. And any attempts colleges are making to confront sexual assault aren’t part of this picture. Initially the film said, in text on the screen, that leaders of a handful of campuses prominently featured and 35 others had all declined to be interviewed. A later version dropped the reference to the 35. But it’s not clear whether anyone had a real chance.
Research and production for the film began in early 2013, and filmmakers requested an interview with a representative of at least one institution, the University of California at Berkeley, toward the end of that year. “We gave the request careful attention; however, we weren’t certain that a balanced view of the campus’s efforts would be conveyed,” Janet Gilmore, director of strategic communications, said in a written statement to The Chronicle. Instead, campus officials provided information to the filmmakers about how Berkeley is trying to prevent and respond to sexual assault, but that didn’t make it into the film.
Other colleges received requests much later. “We would welcome the opportunity to sit down with a respected leader like yourself who could share with us your thoughts and insights on the issue and how your institution is responding to the current crisis,” says an email from Ms. Ziering received by a number of colleges — including Florida State University, Occidental, the University of California at Davis, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Southern California — between December 9 and 21 of last year. “Thanks so much for considering,” it says, “and for doing all you do to bring awareness to this issue.”
Some administrators took that as a token effort. The final deadline for submissions to the Sundance Film Festival, where the documentary debuted, had been in September, and the lineup was announced on December 8.
Florida State, already the subject of public rebuke for its handling of sexual-assault allegations against its star football player Jameis Winston, has responded fiercely to The Hunting Ground. Carolyn A. Egan, the university’s general counsel, sent a letter last month to the production company, RADiUS-TWC, to register her “most strenuous objection” to, among other things, the interview request she describes as an “empty gesture.”
But pushback can play into a narrative of malfeasance, and the letter’s tone may not do the university any favors. “The filmmakers should have been well aware that it takes weeks to schedule any interviews with university presidents,” Ms. Egan wrote. In a public statement, the president, John E. Thrasher, denounces the film for ignoring how the university went to “extraordinary lengths” to support Mr. Winston’s accuser and “to initiate an impartial, independent Title IX investigation.”
The film’s writer and director, Mr. Dick, says Florida State took more than two months to respond to the interview request. “We kept the film open until February 19th in the hopes that President Thrasher and other presidents would come forward,” he said in a statement to the Hollywood publication The Wrap. “It’s unfortunate because we would have welcomed including President Thrasher or another FSU official in the film.”
One of the two presidents who was interviewed, Patricia A. McGuire of Trinity Washington University, appears for a few seconds in the film’s sequence about protecting high-profile athletes accused of rape. Colleges, she says on screen, fear alienating important people. She wrote last month in The Washington Post that her quote was out of context and didn’t accurately represent her position on the issue. “Some presidents,” she said, “actually are quite serious about taking action to stop sexual assault.”
When Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, president of Amherst College, was asked to be interviewed for the film, she readily accepted. “I care about the issue deeply,” she says. “I think it’s important to be as open as possible in the hope that that makes it easier for students and for the campus as a whole to talk about the issue, and for people to come forward when there are incidents.”
Ms. Martin has yet to see the film, but understands why it portrays colleges as it does. “There’s a lot of criticism that is fair and warranted,” she says. And yet “it’s also important,” she adds, “to acknowledge the change that’s under way.”
She described that change in her interview for the film, but her comments didn’t make the cut.
Other material sufficiently conveyed the perspective of college presidents, says Mr. Dick. “We decided that Pat McGuire was covering that area pretty well.”
Trinity may not have big-time sports or even many male students, but Ms. McGuire speaks for universities that do, says Ms. Ziering, the producer. “She meets frequently with other presidents, they trade notes. She really understands how the system works.”
Faculty Allies
The story of a corrupt system is powerful, and it’s resonating. Despite The Hunting Ground’s warning that colleges retaliate against employees who advocate for victims of sexual assault, the film is attracting allies in the faculty ranks.
Timothy L. Barnard, a visiting assistant professor of film and media studies at the College of William & Mary, went to Sundance expecting to find a foreign film for the campus’s Global Film Festival, which he directs. But when he saw The Hunting Ground, he felt an immediate sense of urgency. “Any professor who sees the film has to reflect on all of the students they’ve had over the years,” he says. Statistically, some of them were victims of sexual assault.
He left the screening feeling like he was at a “personal moral crossroads,” he says. “If William & Mary is going to be one of these institutions that’s not proactively working to change this culture and eliminate the status quo, then I don’t know if I can work for an institution in good conscience like that.”
Back on the campus, he and students working on the festival secured the rights to the documentary and reserved complimentary tickets for leaders of fraternities, sororities, and other student groups. Many administrators attended on a Friday night last month, and counselors were on hand to speak with anyone upset by the film.
A second showing the following Sunday led into a discussion with Ms. Clark and Andrea Pino, the activists and film subjects, paid for by the student assembly and the college’s Task Force on Preventing Sexual Assault and Harassment. William & Mary’s president, W. Taylor Reveley III, stayed afterward to speak with students. “We recognize the problem exists, and we are working on it tooth and claw,” he told the campus newspaper, The Flat Hat.
But that doesn’t ease Mr. Barnard’s worry that “a task force or a teach-in are these Band-Aid things that are just for show.” The film may have amplified the voices of sexual-assault survivors, he says, but he wonders if campus activism will continue: “Will that translate into pushing the task force if they don’t do enough?”
The film lowers the risk of complacency, but what’s needed is vigilance, he says. “We’re going to have to stay on them.”
‘Moral High Ground’
Many campuses now tout a list of their efforts to combat sexual assault. They’re taking action, creating new brochures and websites, adopting new policies, hiring new staff members, training students and employees in new ways. While they promote and refine such efforts, can they meet increasing expectations?
“There is this moral high ground in higher education that’s just sitting vacant,” David Lisak, a retired associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says in The Hunting Ground.
In an interview, Mr. Lisak, who studies sexual assault and consults with the military and colleges, says he sees abdication and general ineptitude on some campuses. But he also knows administrators scrambling to protect students. “If you want to make a documentary about the institutions that are desperately working their tails off to make the necessary changes, to get it right, to create systems that are fair and effective,” he says, “it’s happening.”
Still, that isn’t enough. Colleges are too reactive, Mr. Lisak argues, and their responses are incomplete. He’s waiting for a five-year strategic plan for adjudication, prevention, and assessment. “There are a number of campuses that say, We’re a leader, and we’re going to be a leader and whatever, but I don’t think we’ve really seen a true example of that.”
To Ms. Martin, of Amherst, what’s crucial is open, honest discussion. “We’ve been guided in very large measure,” she says, “by the activism and the insight that some of our own survivors and survivors across the country have provided.” She points to Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia as tackling sexual assault head on. “Colleges and universities are not going to be able to end this problem on their own,” she says, “but we can certainly do a lot more than we’ve done in the past.”
In her interview for The Hunting Ground, Ms. Martin says she was asked if she was hopeful about the future. “I said that I was hopeful, given the changes that are under way,” she recalls, “and also that I thought progress depended on more awareness societywide.”
Ms. Martin may not appear in the film, but she advocated for a local theater to show it. She’s trying to set up a screening at Amherst in April.
