Harvard Grads Place Red Tape on Caps in Sexual Assault Policy Protest
We reported that Harvard University was one of 5 Massachusetts institutions under federal investigation for its mishandling of sex assault cases.
Now, its students are expressing their unhappiness with the school’s handling of these cases in a graduation protest.
[Photographer: John Lauerman/Bloomberg]
Dozens of Harvard University seniors marked their graduation caps with red tape in support of victims of sexual assault and to protest the school’s response to campus attacks.
Students put a stripe of crimson tape on the edge of their mortarboards at the school’s 363rd commencement today in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvard, the oldest and richest U.S. college, has come under increasing criticism from students saying that programs to prevent sexual assault are inadequate and not enough is being done so that victims can continue their studies. While President Drew Faust has appointed a task force to study the issue, student voices haven’t been heard in the effort to create policy, said Kate Sim, a graduating senior who helped found Our Harvard Can Do Better, a victims’ advocacy group.
“I would like to see more than task forces,” Sim said in an interview. “Policy change is a long process, but I would like to see students more integrated into the change-making progress.”
A group of undergraduates filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights alleging that Harvard’s undergraduate college, failed to comply with Title IX, which bars schools from gender-based discrimination. Insufficient response to sexual assault is a violation of the rule.
Harvard Graduates Wear Red Tape in Sexual Assault Policy Protest (Bloomberg)
Comments
Hey, here’s an idea. How about if someone reports that they’ve been sexually assaulted you call the damn police? You know, the people that actually investigate crime? Unlike a college administration?
Another worthless “protest” by worthless students. Now they’ll go off and not do anything worthwhile to affect any real policy change.
Typical.
Same thing at Columbia. Here’s my question — what is it they want the university to do? Make the burden of proof even less than a preponderance of the evidence?
What this is, it seems to me, is an insistence that any woman who complains of sexual contact of any type is presumed truthful. Just to state it is to refute it, at least among those who understand what is at stake when such accusations are made. I need not repeat that universities are ill-suited to the type of investigation needed when rape claims are made.
If these are the next generation’s leaders, I weep for our future.