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Confusion and Silence
A civil rights complaint alleges that Yale’s policies on sexual assault leave victims unsure where to turn.
July/August 2011
by Nicole Allan ’09
Nicole Allan ’09, an associate editor at The Atlantic, lives in Washington, DC.
As a self-proclaimed feminist who has taught New Haven high-schoolers about sex and consent and can rattle off the legal definition of rape as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance, Alison is clued into the dangers of today’s sexual culture. A member of a Yale sorority and a self-described “social girl,” she has a quick smile and an air of easy confidence. I am caught off guard, then, when 20 minutes into our conversation about sex at Yale, she mentions that she’s been sexually assaulted.
Alison and I are talking about allegations that Yale has allowed the growth of a hostile environment for its female students. (“Alison” is a pseudonym.) The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, responding to a complaint submitted in March by 16 students and recent alumni, is currently investigating whether the university is complying with Title IX’s mandate that it provide equal educational opportunities regardless of gender.
“The reason why I was willing to talk to you is that I can understand why people would be against the complaint if no evidence is presented,” Alison says. “I think the Title IX complaint will be productive because, if nothing else, it’s made girls feel like they’re not the only ones.”
Two years ago, when Alison was a sophomore, she danced and made out with an acquaintance at a fraternity party. Though she told him that she didn’t want to go home with him, she let him walk her back to her dorm. “I’m not sure why I let him upstairs,” she remembers, “but I think I didn’t want to be rude.” They talked for a bit, but when she tried to open the door for him to go, he grabbed her and started kissing her. Alison remembers pushing him off and saying “No,” but he grabbed her again. She ducked under his arm and ran to the bathroom, where she waited for him to leave. “Nothing besides making out happened,” Alison says. “I just remember being terrified by the violence that he was willing to use.”
The next day, going over alcohol-muddled memories of what had happened, she worried that she hadn’t resisted enough. When her roommate said she’d heard Alison yelling the night before, Alison was strangely relieved.
She didn’t think of calling the SHARE Center, Yale’s first resource for sexual assault victims, viewing it as “one of the hotlines for people who were struggling psychologically.” Her sorority didn’t offer any guidance; in fact, Alison hadn’t wanted to tell her friends, much less the administration.
“I felt really unsure about whether I was in the right or wrong, and I didn’t realize that I could talk to someone without committing to pressing disciplinary charges,” she says. “I think I dismissed any possibility of reporting it at that point because I had this image of the process as this really public thing. I didn’t think it was a ‘big enough deal’ to bother the administration with.”
Since Alison—like most victims on college campuses—didn’t report her assault, Yale never found out about it. The drinking that precipitated it happened off campus, facilitated by an unregistered student organization. Yale has the SHARE Center, an active Women’s Center, accessible masters and deans in each residential college, and multiple avenues to resolve complaints of sexual misconduct. What more could the university have done to prevent Alison’s experience or to guide her through it?
In conversations with a wide range of students about Yale’s sexual misconduct policies, I found one clear common denominator: confusion. Whether they or a friend had been assaulted or harassed, whether they were active in women’s issues or not, whether they were male or female, almost no one fully understood the multitude of options Yale offers victims of sexual harassment and assault.
Thanks to a string of high-profile incidents in recent years—including public misogynistic chanting by fraternity members and a mass e-mail rating the sexual attractiveness of incoming freshmen women—Yale has come under increased scrutiny on gender issues. In late May, the Department of Education cited Yale for underreporting sex offenses in 2001 and 2002 after an investigation sparked by a 2004 article in this magazine. Combined with the widespread confusion about Yale’s policies, these episodes have created, for many students, the perception that Yale does not take sexual harassment and assault seriously. Hence Alison’s decision to stay silent about her assault, and the Title IX complainants’ decision to speak out.
Yale is far from alone in its struggles to adjudicate sexual harassment on campus. The Department of Justice reports that one in five undergraduate women is assaulted during her college years. In 2010, the Center for Public Integrity, a liberal investigative journalism group, concluded a yearlong study of sexual assault policies at schools across the country. The center’s reporters “found that a thick blanket of secrecy still envelops cases involving allegations of sexual assault on campus” and that students deemed “‘responsible’ for alleged sexual assaults on college campuses can face little or no consequence for their acts.”
The Title IX complainants at Yale allege that both of these problems are embedded within Yale’s approach to sexual misconduct. Critics of the complaint have argued that these problems are no worse than at other schools, and maybe not as bad. (Princeton, Duke, Harvard Law School, and the University of Virginia are also facing Title IX investigations on similar claims.) When news of the complaint broke in April, Yale College dean Mary Miller ’81PhD wrote in a letter to the college community that “Yale is notable, in fact, for the extraordinary number and range of initiatives, programs of study, working groups, faculty and student organizations, and administrative offices devoted to the advancement of women and women’s issues.” She added that “Yale has strong regulations” on sexual misconduct, has investigated “questionable incidents,” and has issued “penalties where warranted.”
Comparing campuses can be difficult, given the subjectivity involved in evaluating a school’s sexual environment. Numbers don’t tell the full story: most victims don’t report their experiences, and low numbers of reported assaults can sometimes indicate an atmosphere in which victims don’t feel comfortable coming forward. But whether or not Yale’s atmosphere is worse than other schools’, media attention to the Title IX investigation has made the university a focal point for discussion of sexual harassment on college campuses.
Yale has rolled out a series of major reforms in the months since the investigation was announced and has indicated that it plans to hold itself publicly accountable for following through. The moves have raised hopes that the university could emerge as an innovator in a field that most schools struggle to navigate.
Though Alison thinks Yale has historically given students the impression of “not caring about justice for either side but really caring about their reputation,” she believes that were Yale to be “at the forefront of a disclosure wave,” the school could “go down in history as leading the way on this.”
When Catherine began her freshman year at Yale, she wasn’t surprised by the school’s rampant hook-up culture. She knew how to navigate it and when and how to say no. So when she learned that an athlete she knew was telling his teammates awful stories about her—that he’d seen her having sex on the floor of his common room, and that her “vagina was a petri dish that was growing STDs from all the people I’d hooked up with,” Catherine says—she approached his residential college dean to lodge a complaint. The dean told her to work it out with the student. (“Catherine” is a pseudonym.)
Catherine was shocked, but she approached the student, who she says told her, “What’s the harm with a little exaggeration?” Catherine managed to mentally brush off her interaction with her harasser, she says, because “when people say things that are that ridiculous, it’s OK.” But the dean’s reaction was different. “It made me feel like I didn’t belong here, and I wanted to leave.”
She told her freshman counselor what had happened and remembers him saying “he thought there was a hotline I could call if the harassment continued.” Yale has more than just a hotline that Catherine could have called—it has a Sexual Harassment Grievance Board that could have processed her complaint. But neither the dean nor the freshman counselor directed Catherine to it.
Besides Yale College, the university has 13 graduate and professional schools, and until July 1 of this year, each school had its own grievance procedures for victims of sexual harassment and assault. Undergraduates essentially had three options: bring a complaint to the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, which would provide informal mediation; bring a complaint to the Executive Committee, which would determine whether disciplinary action was merited; or go to the police.
The Title IX complainants allege that students who found their way to the Grievance Board or Executive Committee experienced a lengthy investigation process with frequent delays. One complainant, who graduated in May, reached out to a member of the Grievance Board in September to discuss filing an assault complaint. It took until April 1—the day after news of the Title IX investigation broke—for the board to contact her for a formal meeting.
Jill Cutler, who recently retired as Yale College’s assistant dean for academic affairs and served as secretary of the Executive Committee for 14 years, says that because the committee’s designated fact-finders were generally tenured faculty members (also true of the Grievance Board), they didn’t always have time to gather full evidence.
Many victims also felt frustrated by the strict confidentiality surrounding the process. Both the Grievance Board and the Executive Committee publish only cursory annual reports, listing resolutions of cases without names and with very few specifics. Therefore, a victim contemplating filing a complaint would have little sense of what the process might hold for her—what an “informal resolution” might look like, or how likely the Executive Committee would be to issue her assailant anything more than a “reprimand.”
In an effort to streamline its procedures and encourage victims to come forward, Yale has now created one committee to handle all sexual misconduct complaints. Starting this academic year, if almost any Yale student, undergraduate or graduate, reports an assault, he or she will be directed to the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. Victims will be able to seek informal mediation or discipline for their assailants—and they’ll be able to change their minds, switching to another avenue if they wish. The centralization of Yale’s grievance procedures may also allow the university to better fund the new committee, without having to allocate resources among its 14 schools.
The University-Wide Committee will also hire independent fact-finders trained in investigating sexual misconduct. Michael Della Rocca, a philosophy professor who will chair the committee, said the new fact-finders will be able to “give their prompt, full attention to investigating cases of sexual misconduct, which will allow for thorough fact-finding in a timely way.”
In mid-May, Yale also made a move toward more transparency. In an e-mail to students and faculty, Dean Miller explained part of the outcome of the Executive Committee’s investigation into Delta Kappa Epsilon pledges’ chants of “No means yes, yes means anal” on Old Campus last fall—an event that, by many accounts, sparked the Title IX complaint. Acknowledging that “it is unusual to send a memorandum regarding a particular Executive Committee decision to the Yale community,” Miller wrote that “a wide range of community members have been affected by this incident” and that she chose to publicize the outcome to “not only shed some light on a matter of public concern but also provide notice of the outcomes to all those who may have been affected by sexual harassment and, accordingly, educate our community.”
Miller declined to share details of cases involving individual DKE members, citing confidentiality restrictions. But she recounted sanctions the Executive Committee imposed on the fraternity as a whole, including a five-year ban on conducting recruiting or other events on campus and using Yale e-mail to communicate with members.
Diane Rosenfeld, a Harvard law lecturer and Title IX advocate who advised the Yale complainants, called the sanctions “an important first step” toward creating “a campus culture that doesn’t tolerate this type of sexual disrespect.”
First Amendment advocates, however, are less than pleased. “Whether we like what DKE did or not—and I don’t—their chants were protected speech,” says Nathaniel Zelinsky, a rising junior. “It’s kind of an unsettling conclusion to come to, but we don’t want to make content-based decisions on speech.”
While controversial, the sanctions themselves are not groundbreaking: because DKE is not a registered undergraduate organization, it was already mostly prohibited from conducting activities on campus. The university’s choice to publicize the penalties, however, is a departure from the past. “In cases with such broad impact, the university will consider such sharing of results,” explains Caroline Hendel ’83, an associate general counsel with Yale, “but we have to be mindful of privacy laws and the university’s own policies which generally do not permit disclosure of disciplinary actions against specific individuals.”
Yale has also funded a new educational effort to address the cultural roots of harassment and assault on campus. Yale’s endeavors in this area in the past have been mostly confined to a few sessions during freshman orientation. Now Melanie Boyd ’90, the director of undergraduate studies for the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program and a major player in Yale’s reform efforts, will work with two student affairs fellows and 36 paid student workers to create a continuing conversation about sexual mores.
While many of these recent changes have been brewing for years, the spotlight accompanying the Title IX investigation spurred Yale to accelerate its timing in rolling them out. In April, President Richard Levin ’74PhD announced a further measure: the appointment of four high-profile alumni to an external Advisory Committee on Campus Climate, which will recommend improvements to Yale’s sexual misconduct policies. It’s a step signaling Yale’s willingness to remain in the spotlight as its reforms go ahead. Levin says that the committee, which is chaired by Margaret Marshall ’76JD, a former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and a former Yale trustee, has already come to campus and conducted more than 100 interviews with students, faculty, and administrators.
If Yale aspires not just to satisfy federal investigators but also to lead national efforts to reform campus sexual culture, it still has students to convince. When I ask Alison what she thinks of the new University-Wide Committee, she rolls her eyes. “‘We’re going to make another committee! We’re going to combine all the grievance boards!’” she says sarcastically. “‘We’re going to listen to students’—that’s always what Yale has said. The reputation that it listens to its students is crumbling and false.”
But committees are Yale’s way of getting most anything done. If Yale follows through on its promised reforms and creates a culture in which incidents of harassment and assault are reduced—and victims have a clearer sense of where to turn—perhaps future students will have a less skeptical attitude about their university.  |
