COUNCIL: State of the University	Print Issue
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President Amy Gutmann

For today’s update, I want to focus on sexual assault and violence on campus. It is an important subject for Penn, as well as colleges and universities across the country. Our perspective on sexual assault and violence is that one assault is one too many. We are committed to doing everything we can to educate and raise awareness for prevention and to deal fairly with cases.

Penn has an excellent structure in place for preventing and addressing sexual violence. Our University is in compliance with the law and on pace with this challenging issue. In addition, we are closely monitoring recent legislative changes and guidance from the US Department of Education to ensure Penn continues to be compliant.

For more than four decades, Penn has been a leader in proactively addressing sexual violence on campus.

Our students, our faculty, our staff and our leadership have together implemented and improved a range of programs and procedures over the years.

The Penn Women’s Center has created a variety of robust programs and campaigns addressing prevention, education and awareness.

Penn’s Division of Public Safety (DPS) has operated a special services unit for decades. DPS also maintains strong relationships with the Philadelphia PD, the District Attorney’s Office and agencies including Women Organized Against Rape and Women Against Abuse.

VPUL runs a variety of educational programs on sexual assault prevention. They also partner with the Graduate Student Center and the Chaplain’s Office to confront this issue.

And the new Student Sexual Violence Educator in VPUL—hired as recommended by the Alcohol Commission—will play a central role in coordinating additional educational opportunities for the Penn community.

Yet as long as there are cases of sexual misconduct, Penn will continue to seek new and improved ways to address all forms of sexual violence on campus. It bears repeating: Even one instance is one too many. It also bears repeating that cases of sexual assault must be handled in a way that protects our core values of fairness in process.

We must ensure fairness to those coming forward as victims of sexual assault as well as to those accused of sexual assault. We can do nothing less.

We’re joined today by Senior Vice President and General Counsel Wendy White, Vice President for Institutional Affairs Joann Mitchell and Vice Provost for Education Andy Binns, who I asked to lead our efforts on this important issue.  

Sexual Assault and Violence

Wendy White—Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Thank you Dr. Gutmann. What I thought I would do in the next few minutes is talk a little about the legal context for the regulations and compliance efforts that we have been looking at for Title IX. And then I am going to talk specifically about Penn’s response to the legal context.

In 1972, Congress passed what is known as Title IX. It’s Title IX of the Higher Education Act. What Title IX does specifically is prohibit gender discrimination in any institution, including K-12 as well as higher education institutions that have federal funding. Virtually all institutions in higher education receive federal funding. Early on, Title IX was a surrogate word for equality in sports and athletics on college campuses. And that was really the focus and use of that legislation. Later on it became broadened to deal with issues of sexual harassment more broadly both in K-12 and in higher education. In April of 2011, the Office of Civil Rights, (OCR) of the Department of Education, the federal office, issued what’s known as a “Dear Colleague Letter” that went to every president of every college and university in the country explicitly providing that Title IX prohibited sexual assault and sexual violence on campus and providing guidance for the institutions as to how we should respond to sexual assault and sexual violence issues as they arise on our campus.

So since April of 2011, unless you’ve been living on another planet or under a rock, you have been reading day-by-day of a growing national focus and concern about sexual assault occurring nationwide on college campuses. There are more than 77 investigations being conducted right now by the Office of Civil Rights and there are a broad array of regulatory requirements, legislative requirements, negotiated rule makings and guidance that have come out from the Office of Civil Rights, the Department of Justice and the White House and there is pending legislation introduced by Senator McCaskill. Right before I came to this session, I started reading the new rules developed as part of a negotiated rule making under the Violence Against Women Act Amendments also known as the SaVE Act. 

In April of 2014, the White House introduced its own guidance and they call their campaign “Not Alone.” There are extensive questions and answers, references to regulatory and legislative requirements, a new Guidance from OCR, resources and guidance that the White House has posted on its new website. In short, this website has additional, and I have to say, more detailed requirements. So we have a complex regulatory background that we are confronting and have to take into account as we think about this extraordinarily important and serious issue.

As Dr. Gutmann indicated, in some respects, in many respects actually, Penn is way ahead of the game in this area. Before the Title IX “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011, Penn had a grant under the Violence Against Women Act and we were working hard, diligently and effectively in developing education campaigns, training and resources. There’s a brochure that many of you should have seen that was developed before this focus on Title IX nationally. Our campaign is “Call It What It Is” and these brochures, available all over campus, describe the laws, the definitions and the resources available on our campus. So this is not new to us. This is not a surprise. What is a surprise is the intensity of the regulatory environment on top of the work that we had already been doing. We saw this as a priority and it has long been extraordinarily important to addressing it on our campus. It continues to be a priority. 

So there are three new kinds of requirements that we are looking at. The first is reporting—Reporting of sexual assaults, sexual violence, dating violence, relationship violence and stalking. A number of these new requirements will require more extensive and more detailed reporting under the Clery Act and we are working very closely with the Division of Public Safety in implementing these requirements. DPS is really our partner in working to make sure that we meet these regulatory obligations and reporting statistics as we are required to do.

The second area is education and training. There are a whole series of new requirements that both encourage and require us to train all members of our community to recognize the problem of sexual assault, to know what to do when they learn of it, or witness it, to make sure that our students are aware of the numerous resources that we have and that they know what their options are if they are victims of sexual assault. So there are comprehensive new requirements on education and training. Again, we had undertaken to look at this a number of years ago and we continue to do so.

Then there’s the third piece, which I want to pause and spend a little more time on and that’s the disciplinary piece. How do we handle a complaint that is made by one of our students or others against a Penn student having to do with sexual assault or sexual violence? It is well documented that the process that we have used and all of our peers have used for many years in trying to address this very sensitive, very difficult, very complex issue was not working effectively and not serving our communities well. We were not successful in helping students to feel comfortable enough to come forward and raise a complaint of sexual assault. We know that the number of complaints that we get does not reflect the number or the scope of the problem on our campus or on any other campus. So, we along with all of our peer institutions have looked hard and closely and carefully and I hope thoughtfully at coming up with a different process for dealing with these sexual assault claims.

We have been encouraged to do so by the Office of Civil Rights, by the White House and other regulatory bodies as we think about what is a fair and balanced but effective way of dealing with these very difficult cases. We have consulted with student leaders, with the Penn Women’s Center, with the Vice Provost for University Life, with the Deans, the faculty, the Office of Student Conduct, Student Health, CAPS and others across the campus and now, here we are today, talking about what we are considering for a new procedure that will be objective, professional, even handed, fair and more effective in dealing with these complaints.

The new system that we are proposing, we are calling an “Investigative Model.” I think that’s consistent with what the White House and the Office of Civil Rights and experts have advocated. And what this means is that we will look to hire and we are already looking to hire a professional Title IX sexual assault investigator, that is someone who is well trained in investigating sexual assault, knows how to interview, knows how to assess credibility, knows how to read the evidence and someone who can be fair and impartial in conducting these kinds of investigations. Somebody who students will feel comfortable approaching if they want or need to raise a complaint, and someone who will make students accused of sexual assault feel as though they are being heard and treated fairly. 

Once we hire a sexual assault investigator, that person will work with a team that we will develop on a case-by-case basis depending upon who the student is, and what school is involved. You can never have just one person responsible for this kind of important investigation, so we will use a team that will interview the complainant and the respondent, the witnesses, look at any physical evidence if there is any and any available documents including evidence like text messages.

They will make a preliminary determination on whether or not they believe the respondent should be held responsible. The investigator  will then present this draft report to the complainant and the respondent who can comment on it, make suggestive changes, can ask for further work be done if that’s appropriate. The investigator then finalizes the report and makes a recommendation as to whether or not to find the student respondent responsible and a recommended sanction. If the matter can be resolved by that report to the satisfaction of both the complainant and the respondent that will resolve the matter. If not, the case will go to a panel. It will be a faculty panel that will be both trained generally and then trained just in time to handle these kinds of complainants. We will have a more limited panel to select the faculty panel from because we want to make sure that we have people who are experienced and well trained. These are not easy issues to deal with and we want people who know how to deal with them. They will listen to the investigator, read the report, look at the evidence, interview the complainant, interview the respondent and make a judgment as to whether or not to hold the respondent responsible. If the issue is not resolved at that point, both sides have the right to appeal to an appellate officer to ensure that the process was appropriately followed.

This is the process that the Office of Civil Rights and the White House is encouraging. But more importantly, we believe for our campus, it is the right process for us to make sure that we deal in a better, more effective, fair and balanced way with these very difficult issues. We think it will be less intimidating and will actually encourage victims who before have not been willing to come forward to make a claim. While at the same time protecting the rights of the accused. One of the first questions many people ask, after we do this presentation, well how many of these cases do we have? And there are a number of answers to that. As Dr. Gutmann says, “One is too many.” The number of cases we have, I suspect will go up at first, and as a matter of fact, that’s what we hope after this process is implemented because I think we will see that people are more willing to come forward than they were before. How many of these cases we will have we really don’t know. But it’s a problem that’s very serious, it’s nationwide and we do need to step up and deal with it appropriately. We’re still working out the details of the proposal, but that’s the basic outline.

Thank you.

President Amy Gutmann

Thank you all very much for the thorough update and discussion. Our efforts to address sexual assault are truly a shared community effort. I am grateful to all those who work so diligently to protect everyone who calls Penn home.

I believe the University is doing all that can be done to confront this issue effectively and fairly. I also know that we welcome any and all new ideas for improving this important work.

And of course, I look forward with hope to a time when, perhaps, that work will no longer be needed. Thank you.