Five years into a federal review of how it handles sexual assault, Ohio State University is still trying to get it right.
The Education Department announced in 2010 that, under the gender-equity law known as Title IX, it was opening a compliance review of all of Ohio State’s policies and procedures related to sexual harassment and assault, allegations of which had swirled around its marching band.
Over the next four years, investigators from the department’s Office for Civil Rights made several visits to the campus, and Ohio State turned over thousands of pages of documents. Last September university and federal officials reached a resolution agreement that lays out 100 separate steps the institution must take to comply with Title IX, including about a dozen requirements of its Title IX coordinator.
The university must, for instance, measure the effectiveness of the changes it makes under the agreement, but not before assembling a focus group of students and employees to discuss how such a climate check should be carried out. Any plans for that must be approved by the civil-rights office before the university can proceed.
The dizzying list of requirements is typical of agreements the OCR, as the office is known, is slowly striking with colleges it investigates under Title IX. The investigations frequently follow complaints by alleged victims that colleges mishandled their cases or other accounts of problems on particular campuses. By the time the office finishes monitoring Ohio State, it will be 2017 — seven years after the government began its review.
With campus sexual assault drawing tremendous attention nationally, how colleges respond is under scrutiny from students and advocates, as well as state and federal lawmakers. So when the civil-rights office asks a college for changes it says will make the campus safer, the college typically tries to do what it is told. But requirements are sometimes inscrutable.
No one argues with the goal of preventing sexual assault, but it’s unclear what exactly that should look like. When, campus officials wonder, will they have done as much as they can?
At a meeting of college lawyers in June, Ted Mitchell, the under secretary of education, called changes in how institutions handle sexual assault “a national experiment.” Some administrators, and consultants who help them keep up with the government’s guidance, say that made them feel like guinea pigs.
Catherine E. Lhamon, who heads the civil-rights office, says colleges have more discretion than they think. “There is tons of wiggle room,” she says, in how they set their policies.
Beyond trying to protect students, administrators say, the demands on colleges to reform their policies and procedures are enormous. Student-affairs officers particularly, they say, are buckling under the pressure of trying to meet the government’s approval with their prevention and adjudication efforts.
Because the stakes are so high — colleges found to have violated Title IX can theoretically lose all federal money — several administrators would not allow their names to be used in sharing their frustrations with the process.
Ohio State officials did question the OCR about some details in the agreement, including how the office had come up with some of its directives. But getting an answer can be difficult, and the university must move ahead to meet the requirements nonetheless.
“You can go through several rounds of conversations with the OCR to make sure your policy language matches what you’ve agreed to do,” says Kellie Brennan, Ohio State’s Title IX coordinator. “It has been a while for us to get to a place where we are even comfortable with a draft.”
‘Onerous’ Reviews
The higher-education cases the civil-rights office closed in 2014 took an average of 1,469 days — nearly four years — to complete. And the list of institutions under investigation is growing at a faster rate, from 55 in May 2014, when the office first made the list public, to 128 today. In the two years since Ms. Lhamon took over as assistant secretary for civil rights, the office has settled just seven investigations.
In a letter to several senators in April, the office explained why the process takes so long. “While OCR’s goal is to resolve all complaints within 180 days, sexual-violence investigations tend to be complex and may involve systemic, campus-, and institution-wide issues,” the letter says.
The OCR, it says, “comprehensively examines the campus culture with respect to sexual violence, reviews the institution’s response to complaints of sexual violence over a period of years, interviews students who filed sexual-violence complaints, interviews school officials involved in responding to sexual-violence reports and complaints, and meets with individual students and student groups.”
While the Obama administration has asked Congress for money to hire 200 more investigators, Ms. Lhamon says the job is so large that the office could actually use 500 more people.
“A review is onerous,” Ms. Lhamon says. “I don’t love how much time it takes for my staff, and I don’t love how much time it takes for schools. But I do love ensuring safety for all students on campus.”
While colleges are under investigation, they must conduct business as usual: fielding reports of sexual assault, hearing cases, training students, faculty, and staff. They must also decide whether to change their policies along the way or wait until the investigation is complete.
The University of Connecticut has been on the investigation list since 2013, first for one set of cases, and since this past winter, for another. Elizabeth Conklin, Connecticut’s Title IX coordinator, says that after a federal complaint against an institution, the OCR tends to look not only at the case of the individual who filed the complaint, but at all reports of sexual assault, policies, communication with students who report incidents, and prevention campaigns.
“It is the full landscape of what a university is doing,” she says. “It is a very 50,000-foot view down to the weeds and everything in between.”
Nicole Fournier Geltson, general counsel at Connecticut, says satisfying the government’s requests can be challenging because universities are so decentralized. “A single student complaint at UConn could involve multiple offices responding,” she says. “That student may have filed a report with [the campus] police, probably had assistance from our dean of students in changing classes or a dorm room, and may have had assistance from the women’s center or a professor.”
During its investigations, Connecticut has continued to modify how it handles students’ reports to keep up with what’s considered most effective. “We are constantly making changes large and small to policies, procedures, protocol, and prevention,” says Ms. Conklin. “My reading is that this can’t wait.”
Ruth Jones, Title IX coordinator at Occidental College, says sexual-assault policies on campuses nationally are “continually evolving.” That means institutions are always tinkering, even while a review is underway, which has been the case for two years at Occidental.
“We keep reading and thinking and trying to figure out the most effective way to do things,” says Ms. Jones. Many of the changes her office makes are small but important, she says. One is in its communication with students on both sides of a case: how many updates to send them while the college is investigating a report.
“Right now, we give one for every stage,” Ms. Jones says. “But we are still trying to decide, Would an update once a week be more appropriate?”
For now, the national experiment is still playing out, as colleges try to both protect students and comply with Title IX. It was the Obama administration that made enforcing the 1972 law a priority in responding to sexual violence. With so many investigations pending, a change in administration could bring a different approach.
Eventually, Ms. Lhamon says, campuses will reach the standards the civil-rights office is aiming for. “I really hope we don’t need to sustain this level of attention to this issue,” she says. “I really hope that we turn a corner, and this is no longer a flash point.”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
