Amid a fresh wave of national attention on campus sexual assault, accusations are swirling at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where the official responsible for handling those matters has resigned, and student leaders say the administration has repeatedly failed to support victims.
Campus outrage reached a peak last week when Gillian Gullett, a 2020 graduate, found out — from a reporter, not the university — that Arkansas had paid a $20,000 settlement to the now-former student she accused of sexual assault in 2017.
Joseph E. Steinmetz, Arkansas’s chancellor, agreed this week to five demands outlined in a petition prompted by news of the settlement, which called for hiring more trauma-informed staff to handle sexual-assault cases and more required prevention training for students, among other things.
What’s happening at Arkansas is emblematic of the debates gaining steam at colleges nationwide, as Title IX — the gender-equity law that governs how campuses handle reports of sexual assault — comes under scrutiny. Last month, Arkansas’s fellow Southeastern Conference member, Louisiana State University, came under fire for widespread failures in handling sexual-misconduct reports, especially in athletics.
And President Biden has ordered a review of divisive new Title IX regulations put in place by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that added protections for students accused of sexual assault.
Those new rules are, in part, why Arkansas settled with the former student. According to a university letter included with the settlement, the man, identified in court documents as John Doe, might not have been punished because of the stringent disciplinary mandates — like cross-examination at a live hearing — required by the new regulations, which were not in place when he was found at fault in 2018. “Given the closeness of the evidence presented to the Hearing Panel,” the letter stated, “it is possible that the revised procedures could have led to a different outcome.”
The letter also cited a decision last year by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the former student’s Title IX lawsuit against the university to proceed. The appeals court ruled that “Doe” made several accusations — including an alleged lack of evidence that the incident was nonconsensual — that, if proven, could constitute gender bias, overturning a district court’s decision to dismiss the case.
“Doe” had been initially cleared by the university’s Title IX office during the spring semester of 2018, but that finding was overturned by a three-person appeals panel. The former student was required to go through training and do 10 hours of community service, according to court documents.
Gullett said university officials didn’t tell her about the settlement in advance; she found out from a local reporter who contacted her for comment. A spokesman said the university tried to contact Gullett the day the student’s lawsuit was dismissed. That was April 21, more than a week after the university signed the agreement.
In response to the petition, written by Gullett and two student leaders, the university has agreed to ensure that students with an interest in future Title IX lawsuits will be informed about updates. The university also pledged to meet a demand for a $20,001 donation to support survivors.
A spokesman for the university confirmed that Liz Means, the Title IX coordinator since March 2020, had resigned, effective at the end of this week. Means didn’t respond to a request for comment.
‘The Best of Intentions’
Arkansas students’ frustration has been building for months. The first sign of trouble came in February, when Means and two other administrators sent a campuswide email about how students could keep themselves safe from sexual assaults.
A month into the spring semester, three incidents of rape or attempted rape had been reported in university dorms. “That had a lot of students on edge,” said Julia Nall, a senior who served as student-body president this academic year.
The university’s email directed students to “take precautions and exercise good judgment” when “alone late at night” and “especially after consuming alcohol.”
Immediately, students criticized what they saw as victim-blaming language. “The email didn’t mention anything about consent,” Nall said, “and it focused really largely on preventative measures that students could take to prevent being assaulted.” There was nothing about how attackers shouldn’t be attacking in the first place, she said.
Chancellor Steinmetz said the email was well intentioned. “We don’t apologize for wanting to protect our community,” he said. But student-affairs and Title IX officials now understand that they need to be “more careful in how they express that kind of safety.”
The university eventually released a statement to journalists: “Despite the best of intentions, we recognize that the message had unintentional effects on many. For that, we apologize.”
But Nall and JD DiLoreto-Hill, a Ph.D. student in public policy who leads the graduate-student government, wanted the university to publicly post an apology on its website — and directly engage with students to win back their trust. The Graduate Professional Student Congress passed a resolution asking for “an apology email from the University of Arkansas” and an additional email detailing “what is happening to prevent further crimes, describing consent and the ways consent is not given, and reminding people that is never the victim’s fault and always the assaulter’s fault.”
A few weeks passed, and DiLoreto-Hill said graduate students received no official response to their resolution.
Steinmetz said he regularly met with graduate-student leaders about Title IX issues and has stressed to students that the university doesn’t blame victims. “I don’t see any reason to put out more messages on this,” he said.
It seemed, DiLoreto-Hill said, that the university was waiting for Sexual Assault Awareness Month, in April, to try to make things right. But the planning meeting for the month’s activities was held at the last minute, he said, and administrators seemed unprepared. “The meeting was all over the place,” he said. “You could feel tension between the administrators.” He and other graduate students ended up organizing their own event.
Steinmetz said it was the first year that the university had tried to unite its Sexual Assault Awareness Month programs across the campus, and acknowledged there were some bumps.
Then came Gillian Gullett’s viral tweet about the university’s settlement. “I think it sends a terrible message to campus,” she said. She posted a photo of her with Steinmetz, receiving a university award in 2020 that honored her advocacy. Alongside it, she posted a screenshot of the chancellor’s signature on the settlement.
Back in the spring of 2018, when Gullett appealed the university’s initial decision to clear the man she accused, she carried a bedsheet around campus in protest. Later, she successfully pushed for the university to make its sexual-assault-reporting process more accessible to students.
Now, a year after her graduation, Gullett is relieved that the university has agreed to her demands. “I want to make sure something good comes out of this,” she said.
But she believes the university still has a lot of work to do to restore students’ trust.
Signs of Progress
Nall, who helped Gullett write the petition, said students want a Title IX office that actually helps victims. She understands that Title IX officials are constrained in what they can say and do. But she still believes they could be more supportive.
“It’s hard when so much of it is part of a legal process,” Nall said, but she wants to see “real, compassionate sensitivity to students.” She added: “The way that you talk to an 18-year-old or 19-year-old going through this sort of thing really matters.”
DiLoreto-Hill has researched colleges and Title IX, and co-authored a 2018 study with Jacquelyn Wiersma-Mosley, a professor in human development and family studies at Arkansas. The study found that Title IX offices were “woefully understaffed,” he said. And too often, he said, Arkansas’s Title IX office seems focused on checking compliance boxes. “Supporting survivors is going out of your way to do preventative things, rather than just focusing on reporting and focusing on the policy,” he said. On Friday, he and other graduate students held a rally to support sexual-assault survivors, which drew about 70 attendees.
Arkansas is planning to restructure its Title IX office and add five new staff members this summer, Steinmetz said. One person will be focused solely on prevention and training. The university also plans to reinstate its student Title IX advisory board, which had been in hiatus during the pandemic.
The chancellor said he wants the Title IX office to treat students with empathy, but he also wants to set expectations more clearly with students about what the office can and can’t do. “It has to be fair,” he said, to both sides in a sexual-assault case. “Neutrality is really essential in this office,” he said, even though “it’s not popular.”
Over the weekend, Arkansas’s next student-body president was inaugurated at a campus event. In her last act as president, Nall brought a folder of anonymous student stories about the Title IX process, and she handed it to the chancellor, who was seated in the front row.
Steinmetz sent her a note on Monday saying he had read them, and would share them with the Title IX office and other senior administrators. Nall was pleased. At the very least, it felt like students were being heard.
