How One University Worked to Get Ahead of the Curve on Title IX

When administrators at the University of Central Missouri received the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, they sensed an opportunity.

The letter — a landmark document signaling a new era of federal involvement in colleges’ handling of sexual assault — laid out a new series of mandates on how colleges should be handling investigations into sexual-violence allegations. Follow these guidelines, the office said, or risk running afoul of the gender-discrimination law known as Title IX.

Many colleges have reformed their policies in response to high-profile allegations that they botched sexual-assault investigations. Others have made changes in order to resolve federal Title IX investigations. But Central Missouri wanted to change on its own terms, said Corey Bowman, the university’s associate vice provost for student services and Title IX coordinator.

Mr. Bowman said he and his team used the “Dear Colleague” letter as motivation to go beyond the department’s standards for compliance and better help students who had experienced some type of trauma to finish their degrees. That involved novel steps like hiring a case manager to help sexual-assault victims.

“This is our opportunity to really make sure we have a system that’s really true to the spirit of Title IX, " Mr. Bowman said. “Back in 2011 we recognized the interpretation of compliance was going to change over time, but the interpretation of the spirit of Title IX was steadfast and consistent.”

The university made some immediate changes in 2011, like ensuring it had a clearly designated Title IX coordinator, Mr. Bowman said. After that, Mr. Bowman wanted to make changes that would reverberate across the campus, so administrators turned to a consultant: Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University.

Mr. Lake said Central Missouri wanted to prevent harassment and assaults, not just react to them. With his help, administrators devised a plan to help students stay in classes during and after a sexual-assault investigation. “One of the real tragedies of sexual violence is victims often just leave higher education and never return,” Mr. Lake said. “It’s an enrollment-management issue along with everything else.”

In the wake of the “Dear Colleague” letter, most universities weren’t thinking about how student safety and enrollment management were linked, Mr. Lake said, putting Central Missouri ahead of the curve. The university has also managed to reshape its Title IX office without spending too much money, Mr. Lake said, adding that many existing positions were just reassigned or better defined.

An Eye on Student Success

The university, like many others, has a devoted investigator for sexual-violence reports. But it also has a case manager whose duties are completely separate: to help complainants throughout a sexual-harassment or sexual-violence investigation, and keep up with them until they graduate. (The case manager, Heather Lawson, did not respond to requests for an interview.)

It’s the case manager’s job to help a student transition back into regular campus life during and after an investigation, Mr. Bowman said. For example, sometimes the case manager will help a student with requesting a housing or class-schedule change.

“When that student does have a trusted contact person, someone who they develop that lasting rapport with, they are much more likely to be successful and they are much more likely ask for help,” Mr. Bowman said.

Getting Charles M. Ambrose, the university’s president, on board to reform the office and hire someone to manage cases full-time wasn’t difficult, Mr. Bowman said, because university leaders recognized early on that the long-term impacts of trauma would also pose enrollment perils.

“The ‘Dear Colleague’ letter gave us permission to allocate resources,” said Amy Kiger, direction of the office of violence and substance-abuse prevention. “There’s always competing priorities at a university, and whenever we had the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, that gave us the external justification for allocating resources in ways that we knew were already important.”

Central Missouri received a grant from the state office of women’s health to fund training through Green Dot, a popular bystander-intervention program meant to reduce sexual assault and domestic violence in a community. The training has been taking place for about three years, Ms. Kiger said.

Despite the many changes, Mr. Bowman says the Title IX office has a ways to go. He wants to change the climate on campus and, hopefully, hire another case manager. “Compliance is the floor that all of us should already be on,” Mr. Bowman said. He’d rather focus on “the aspiration of where we should be.”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.