Four more colleges hit with complaints over handling of sexual assaults
College Insurrection recently reported that Yale has been fined $165,000 for underreporting sexual assaults.
Now Libby Sander of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that four more colleges face similar complaints.
4 More Colleges Are Targets of Students’ Complaints Over Sexual Assault
Students at Dartmouth College, Swarthmore College, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California announced on Wednesday that they had filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education over the institutions’ alleged mishandling of sexual-misconduct cases.
The students made the announcement at a news conference in New York with Gloria Allred, a Los Angeles lawyer who is advising the Southern California students. Also present were students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and from Occidental College, where similar complaints have recently been filed. (Ms. Allred is also helping the Occidental students in their complaint.)
Some of the new complaints were filed under the Clery Act, a federal law that requires colleges to provide accurate reports of their campus-crime statistics, and others under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds.
Nastassja Schmiedt, a Dartmouth student who attended the news conference, said the students had filed the complaints because they wanted “to tell everyone that we were not OK with sexual assault and violence happening on our campuses, and we were going to pursue legal justice.”
Officials at the four colleges said they had not yet seen the complaints and could not comment on the allegations. But they stressed that their institutions took seriously students’ concerns about sexual assault and sexual misconduct, and pledged to strengthen their efforts to deal with those problems.
4 More Colleges Are Targets of Students' Complaints Over Sexual Assault (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Comments
Why is a teaching institution in the loop of a crime investigation? Do students give up their rights to equality under the law? Why aren’t these cases referred directly to local law enforcement. The campus police are hired and fired by the schools and dare not challenge their employer. If this is some kind of political jurisdiction then in a democracy the important positions should be elective like the dean etcetera. Of course some students are not old enough to vote. My point is get the schools out of law enforcement and prosecution.