UVa President Responds to ‘Rolling Stone’ Article About Rape on Campus

An article published by Rolling Stone on Wednesday accuses the University of Virginia of turning a blind eye to a “culture of hidden sexual violence” on its campus, but the institution’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan, responded in a statement posted on the university’s Website Wednesday evening that UVa takes seriously both the issue of sexual misconduct and the institution’s duty to provide a safe environment for its students.

The magazine article, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVa,” says that rapes are kept quiet on the Charlottesville campus “both by students—who brush off sexual assaults as regrettable but inevitable casualties of their cherished party culture—and by an administration that critics say is less concerned with protecting students than it is with protecting its own reputation from scandal.”

Ms. Sullivan countered that the university had adopted several initiatives and policies to encourage students to report misconduct and to support them in dealing with law enforcement and the student disciplinary process. She also said she had asked the Charlottesville police to investigate a particularly brutal sexual assault described in the article and said many details in the article were previously unknown to the university. The university will cooperate with the police investigation, she said.