‘This Is a Fight We Can Win’

Stephen Voss for The Chronicle

Six years ago, 21-year-old Alexandra Brodsky joined 15 students and recent graduates of Yale University to file a federal complaint against it for failing to properly respond to sexual assault — a violation, they argued, of the gender-equity law known as Title IX.

Several days later, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation of Yale and issued the now-famous Dear Colleague letter, reminding colleges that they were required under Title IX to respond promptly and equitably to reports of sexual violence.

Ms. Brodsky, who had been sexually assaulted as a freshman, was inspired to act after her experience with Yale’s disciplinary process. She said the campus grievance board had urged her to keep quiet. After filing the federal complaint, she began connecting with students at other colleges who had similar experiences.

That touched off a wave of activism and dozens more federal Title IX complaints. In 2013, Ms. Brodsky co-founded Know Your IX, a network of survivors and advocates.

She has since completed her law degree at Yale and works as a fellow at the National Women’s Law Center. She serves on the board of Know Your IX and writes regularly about campus sexual violence. And she’s paying especially close attention as Donald J. Trump assumes the presidency — a shift that could spell change for the Title IX enforcement protocol of the past half a decade.

Ms. Brodsky spoke with The Chronicle about how the conversation around campus sexual assault has changed since 2011 and what the future might hold for the movement she helped create.

Back in 2010, when you were an undergrad at Yale, members of a fraternity were videotaped marching around campus chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal.” What’s different about the conversations we were having about campus sexual assault then and those we’re having now?

Everything. (Laughs.) It’s funny, because I’m 26, but I feel like I’m almost part of a different generation than the current college students. I have so much both admiration and jealousy, because students are even coming onto campus as freshmen with a better understanding of their rights, a better understanding of the issues that they’re facing.

While there are still certainly tremendous challenges legally and socially and culturally around this issue, there are a growing number of shared values and just acknowledgment of the problem. Rape culture is no longer seen as this weird, jargony, radical term.

A lot of survivor-advocacy organizations have grown out of this movement: Know Your IX, End Rape on Campus, SurvJustice, and others. Why have so many different groups, versus a more coordinated approach?

There’s probably more coordination behind the scenes than is always apparent. I sometimes find myself pushing reporters to recognize that it’s not a centralized, homogenous movement. It’s not like there’s a headquarters and someone sends out the bat signal. We do work together, but there are a lot of different important parts of this work that need to be done by people with different skill sets and people with different local commitments.

When you say that the movement isn’t homogenous, what do you mean?

This all happened really organically. No one ever woke up and said, Wait, there should be a national student movement around Title IX. I had gone through this complaint process, and then my high-school friend introduced me to Dana Bolger [of Amherst College], who I ended up cofounding Know Your IX with. People reached out to her because of her organizing at Amherst, and it just sort of grew and grew and grew.

To be blunt about it, getting raped doesn’t lead to one set of political commitments. There are certain points on which there is broad consensus in terms of policy, but there are areas of disagreement. And it’s important that policy makers don’t try to smooth over those tensions, because they point to the fact that survivors are different from one another, and policy solutions have to be responsive to that.

What other misconceptions about the movement would you like to correct?

There is sometimes a misconception that the work that students did was to “tell their stories.” That is an important part of it, but such a small part of it.

Stories are really important for giving people not just a sense for what violence looks like but for its effects. For many people, it’s not obvious that rape poses an obstacle to learning. Some of the most powerful narratives have been those that said, This is why it was hard for me to keep studying in the same library with my abusive ex.

But I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the whole telling-your-story thing. One, it’s asking a tremendous amount of students. For a 19-year-old to go onto CBS and say “I have been raped” comes with a tremendous cost. And I am uncomfortable with a model of organizing and a model of reporting that expect that everyone who works on this issue will at some point stand out and cry on camera.

That understanding of what students are doing seems to crowd everything else out. You have students who have written laws who are recognized as sad rape girls rather than as policy makers. It’s a tricky balance. It’s really important for survivors to be in the room because they have expertise from their personal experiences. But when you reduce them to their experiences, you leave them out of the policy conversations and the legal conversations. That’s a huge shame.

There are 301 open Title IX investigations into how colleges handle sexual violence. Many campuses have changed their sexual-misconduct policies, largely because of activists like you. Now the nation has elected somebody who was caught on a hot microphone bragging about sexually assaulting women. What were you feeling as you watched Donald Trump get elected?

Look, obviously there is good reason to be concerned about what Title IX enforcement — or nonenforcement — looks like under a Trump administration. I also think this is a fight we can win.

There’s already a student movement that has mobilized. As much as I am a sort of Lhamon fangirl now [Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights], we started off on opposite sides of the table as students were pushing OCR to finally enforce Title IX. We held the Obama administration to account, and students will continue to hold the White House to account to make sure that students’ civil rights are respected. There is a lot of interest from attorneys to represent students and to keep an eye on OCR.

I also think — and this has been lost a little bit in the news coverage — the Obama administration didn’t invent our rights. The guidance was important because of how clearly it articulated the obligations. But those are obligations under a law that was passed by Congress and signed by the president, not an invention of the Department of Education. Whether the Trump administration agrees or not, the rights as articulated in the Dear Colleague letter are the rights under a law.

But if enforcement by the Office for Civil Rights lapses, where are survivors going to seek recourse if they believe the law has been violated on a campus?

I hope OCR continues to do its job. If that’s not the case, I imagine that we’ll be turning to the courts more often. That’s why we’re working very hard here [at the National Women’s Law Center] to build our network of attorneys who can take on these cases and make sure that the attorneys have the resources they need.

Many states have Title IX equivalents that allow for students to sue under state law. Some also include administrative enforcement, kind of state OCRs. We are working with our partners to figure out where students can go on the state level if the federal option is no longer as robust.

I’m not trying to pretend that if OCR is inactive, that that’s no loss — of course it is. And again, I’m not resigning myself to that. But given that OCR had never revoked a school’s federal funding, so much of the incentive for colleges was actually to avoid bad press. Students and advocates will have to be creative about additional ways to drum up that media attention, to shine a spotlight on individual schools. But Trump hasn’t gotten rid of newspapers yet. (Laughs.)

You’ve said, We can win this fight against campus sexual assault, no matter who is in office. But as Donald Trump is sworn in as president, what hope can you and others offer to survivors on campuses?

(Long pause.) Look, it’s hard. Students have built such power over the last couple of years in finding each other and developing strategies, and while those were developed in a different environment, they will continue to be at students’ disposal going forward.

In the early days, so much of our energy was spent trying to figure out the basics. Part of this is just what it means to be a student organizer. We were also teaching ourselves about the law and developing networks on campuses across the country and with older generations of feminists whose advice and expertise we really needed.

I don’t think that it is really controversial to say that we are a hell of a lot better organized than the Trump transition team right now, and that puts us at an advantage.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.