Under the UO policy students could discuss incidents of sexual harassment confidentially with faculty, without fear that the faculty would be required to report their names and details against the students’ wishes. Now faculty must report these conversations or face discipline.
I spent a good year or two of my life as UO Senate President helping Jennifer Freyd, Merle Weiner and many others write UO’s policy, pass it in the Senate, and then convince Pres Mike Schill to implement it. Many UO OA’s put in a huge amount of work implementing it. Alex Walters of the Chronicle has the story on its sad end here. The gist:
The university’s old policy — dubbed “mandatory supporting” — required faculty and staff members to provide students who told them about possible sexual misconduct with resources and information about reporting, but left the ultimate choice to report — or not to report — in their hands.
Trump-era federal regulations allowed Oregon’s unique system to flourish, with advocates pointing to it as a more trauma-informed approach that protected students’ autonomy. When the Biden administration released an updated rule, with strict reporting requirements for campus employees, the university lobbied for leeway in hopes of saving the policy. Those efforts failed.
* For the record I use the word bureaucrat descriptively, not pejoratively. My mother was a bureaucrat “and proud of it”. We need good government and good government needs good bureaucrats. Too bad we don’t do more to incentivize them to take chances on a good idea.
Thank you UOM.
This is a huge disappointment. There seems to be a pervasive misunderstanding about the impact of compelling disclosure. Many people – particularly lawyers, it sometimes seems – believe that forcing disclosure will lead to more information that can be acted on. And those same people apparently don’t believe that compelling disclosure harms survivors. The research is clear: they are wrong on both counts. Mandatory reporting is neither effective or safe. Respecting adults’ autonomy is psychologically safer AND it is more likely to lead to usable information that can ultimately prevent sexual violence. My colleagues and I tried very hard to educated ED about the research but we failed to be heard or believed. We know that paternalism does not work — but for some reason it remains popular in this context.
I am proud of the UO’s policy that was in effect for the past 7 years. I hope in the future we can return to a policy that respects adult survivors of sexual violence.
For readers who want to know more – here is a resource page about the UO’s cool mandatory supporting policy (that was in effect from September 2017 until this summer) and what researchers know about the impact of mandatory reporting:
https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/disclosure/requiredreporting.html
I fully supported Jennifer Freyd’s “mandatory supporting” approach when it was adopted. But I think it’s important to understand the full reasons for supporting the alternative approach, reasons that I once held before Jennifer and others made clear to me the priority of student autonomy in these matters.
Over the years at Oregon, I became convinced that, if faculty were not obliged to report student complaints of harassment/assault, they would simply ignore them–whatever the student wanted to happen or not happen. In the 1990s, a faculty member of religious studies was sent to state prison for assaulting a minor. It turned out that there had been 11 years of complaints to university faculty about him—which every one of those faculty chose to ignore. Not long after, there was a publicized case of sexual harassment in the philosophy department that almost every faculty member had been told about–yet chose to ignore it. So, it is important to be sufficiently cynical about how much faculty/administrators will do about such matters, if not compelled to. Mandatory reporting also serves to protect those that administrators would otherwise attack for raising such concerns. Associate Provost Russ Tomlin once issued a public statement attacking me for advancing sexual harassment complaints. My defense was that I was, in fact, a mandatory reporter, hence obliged to do so. (Tomlin was not aware of this requirement.) The Office of University Counsel/Title IX Office subsequently launched an investigation to justify Tomlin’s actions, including extensive interviews with people as to my motives” for advancing sexual harassment complaints. Again, my mandatory reporter obligations were my defense.
When I left the University of Oregon, the main problem was that students had no idea at all what their rights were one way or the other. So it really didn’t matter what the policies were. The administration–– starting with the Title IX office–adamantly refused to do anything about this; VP Robin Holmes even wrote me that things would be “worse” if students knew their rights. It was only after a highly publicized basketball-rape scandal that minimal steps were taken to inform students.
Amazed that the Chronicle speaks approvingly of Trump era policies.
Perhaps the good old days will return.
Then, maybe an honorary degree?
Speaking of reporting, PR, Around the O, etc. — Does anyone know why the great Peter VandeGraaf left KWAX, rather abruptly, it seems. He was a huge “catch” for Eugene and UO in the perhaps small world of classical music radio. A letter in the Eugene Weekly claims he was forced out by UO admin. Does anyone know the story? Something tells me we won’t be hearing this from UO’s latest PR hack.