Tag Archives: sexual assault

While there is still no sign the GC’s office is willing to settle the gender discrimination lawsuit brought by Prof Jennifer Freyd, this is the second time that I know of that Reed’s office has agreed to settle with a male student who complained that UO had botched its investigation of sexual assault allegations against them. Kenny Jacoby had the story on the previous settlement in USA Today here:

… The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) under Secretary Betsy DeVos facilitated a confidential deal between Wallace’s mother and the University of Oregon, in which Oregon agreed to change the athlete’s transcript to remove reference to the sexual assaults.

In part because of the “apparent predatory nature” of the acts, the university had marked Wallace’s transcript with a rarely used notation that would alert other schools to his actions, records show. “Expelled for sexual misconduct,” his transcript said.

But with the federal agency’s help, Loleta Wallace brokered a deal in which Oregon amended her son’s transcript to say simply, “Expelled for student conduct,” records show, a change that would make other schools more likely to recruit him.

Oregon promised Loleta Wallace that the August 2018 resolution agreement would “not be discoverable or releasable” under the Freedom of Information Act, but the USA TODAY Network obtained a copy from a university source. …

Hannah Kanik has the latest story in the Daily Emerald, on a different case, here:

The University of Oregon partially settled a lawsuit filed by a student who said he was denied his due process rights and was discriminated against because of his gender when he was accused of sexual assault in February 2016.

The university acknowledged that it failed to follow the procedures outlined in the Student Conduct Code and Standard Operating Procedures while investigating the student after the accusation, court documents show.

… In July 2017, Doe filed a complaint against the UO officials in charge of overseeing Title IX investigations, Sandy Weintraub, Carol Millie and Robin Holmes, as well as the University of Oregon, alleging violations of the Student Conduct Code and Standard Operating Policies, as well as gender-based discrimination.

… Carol Millie, UO Title IX investigator, was accused of interviewing Roe during the investigation without reporting the content of the conversation to the “record” — another violation of the university’s policies. …

Read the partial settlement agreement here

As near as I can tell the plaintiff has agreed to drop his lawsuit against former VP Robin Holmes (now at Lewis and Clark), former UO Title IX investigator Carol Millie (now at OSU) and former Student Conduct Director Sandy Weintraub (now Director Oregon Law Commission) in exchange for a settlement to be determined in the next few weeks. As part of the agreement, UO  agreed that it had been negligent and had broken a long list of its own rules:

EXHIBIT III:

12/11/2019:

Here: Sounds like UO will be starring in #2.

12/10/2019: Last year the UO Senate gave Mr. Jacoby its Trust, Transparency, and Shared Governance Award for his work as a Daily Emerald reporter, uncovering various Duck athletic scandals despite the cover-up efforts of the UO administration. He’s since gone national – though I expect this series of stories will have some specific local content as well:

Tomorrow we publish my yearlong, four-part @USATODAY investigation on the NCAA pipeline that enables athletes suspended, expelled and even convicted of sexual assault to avoid sanctions and freely transfer between schools. Here’s me discussing it on tomorrow’s @GMA. pic.twitter.com/av06WzLLJQ

— Kenny Jacoby (@kennyjacoby) December 11, 2019

12/4/2018: One of the trustees asked me about this, so I’m reposting it.

11/5/2018: At other big-time sports factories, the rate for athletes is just 3x higher than that for all students, all adjusting for numbers.

While it’s pretty well established about 20% of college students are subject to sexual assaults (broadly defined), there is little research on the perpetrators. (But see below.) ESPN’s “Over The Line” has just made an effort to address this, by posting data on Title IX complaints at big-time sports schools, including UO: http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/25080028/otl-analysis-tracking-title-ix-complaints-athletes-power-5-schools:

Starting in March, Outside the Lines made official public records requests to all 53 public Power 5 schools for data on Title IX complaints against all students and student-athletes from 2012 to 2017. Outside the Lines also requested data from the 12 private Power 5 schools that are not subject to open records laws. The requested Title IX reports covered allegations of sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, sexual coercion, stalking or retaliation.

They note that Title IX complaints are far from a perfect measure of sexual assaults, and caution about cross school comparisons, as different schools provided different information:

Using the data to make school-to-school comparisons about which have the highest percentage of complaints or the highest number of complaints involving accused athletes should be done with caution because school officials did not always provide the exact data Outside the Lines requested. For example, one school might have insisted upon providing every complaint that had been filed with a Title IX office while another school might have insisted upon providing data only about cases that ended up in formal investigations. It is possible to determine an overall comparison of athletes to other students because, within each school, the data for athletes and students were subject to the same parameters. Outside the Lines consulted with two statisticians about its study methods.

UO only provided 3 of the requested 6 years of data:

The total of all students in Oregon’s data above represent the total for the past three years for which there is comparable athlete data. The total for complaints involving student respondents for all years is 213; that includes sex-based stalking, social media harassment, unwanted contact, unwanted touching, domestic/dating violence and sexual assault. Oregon officials noted that a respondent could be named in more than one complaint.

That said, the data they have from UO shows 113 complaints against regular students and 13 against athletes over the past 3 years. After accounting for the different population counts this means complaints against UO athletes were 6 times more likely than complaints against regular students. Here’s the table for the PAC-12:

And thanks to a helpful reader for this link:

Around the O has the news:

The University of Oregon is in receipt of a notice of investigation from the Office for Civil Rights.

The university issued the following statement in response to the matter:

The University of Oregon has been notified by the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education that an investigation is being undertaken in response to a complaint from a former student who was a respondent in the campus’ Title IX processes.  The complaint alleges that UO’s processes discriminated against the student on the basis of sex.

In its notification letter, OCR states that, “OCR’s decision to open an investigation does not reflect an opinion by OCR regarding the merits of the allegation or the university’s compliance status with respect to federal civil rights laws.”

The University is deeply committed to maintaining a campus free from discrimination and harassment. Not only will we cooperate fully with the review, we will work with OCR to demonstrate our commitment to a fair, compliant and effective Title IX program. We are proud to have developed policies, procedures and practices that provide for the prompt and equitable resolution of such complaints.

During the course of the OCR inquiry, the university will not be able to share any additional information.

Perhaps this relates to the 2016 case of a male UO student who sued several UO administrators after they suspended him for a year for allegedly engaging in unwanted sexual contact with a female student. That (federal court) docket is here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6121360/doe-v-university-of-oregon/. The (amended) complaint:

…

…

An earlier post about this case is at https://uomatters.com/2017/09/uo-lawyers-wants-to-out-anonymous-plaintiff-in-sexual-misconduct-case.html#more-27052

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story, here:

In an apparent first, federal officials have found a college in violation of Title IX, the gender-equity law, for infringing on the rights of students accused of sexual violence.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had opened an investigation of Wesley College, in Delaware, in July 2015. That investigation was one of more than 300 the office, known as OCR, has conducted into colleges for possibly mishandling reports of sexual violence.

In the past, OCR’s findings about colleges have occasionally alluded to the rights of accused students. But experts say the findings in the Wesley case,released Wednesday, seem to mark the first time that the office has cited unfair treatment of an accused student as the primary Title IX violation. …

7/22/2016 CORRECTION: I emailed VPSA Robin Holmes about this, relaying the suggestion for stickers in the comments. She quickly replied that the info *will* be on the cards. Good news:

Bill,

I checked with the Director of the EMU and the card office to confirm that we will indeed be placing the emergency numbers on the card as we planned and as was advised and advocated for by students.  I am not sure where the information came that we were not planning on doing that—I am sure it was just some sort of miscommunication.  As you can see from the email below, not all of the numbers could be placed on the card so the idea was to have the card in a sleeve (to keep it from becoming de-magnified) and that that sleeve would have the additional numbers. 

Robin H. Holmes Ph.D., Vice President
Division of Student Life

7/20/2016: New UO IDs feature sports egofices, but not SAFE reporting website

The Daily Emerald reports that a UO student group has been lobbying for the latter since 2014:

In 2014, UO Active Minds launched a campaign to persuade the university to include university resources numbers – Health Center, Safe Ride, Sexual Assault Prevention, Non Emergency Public Safety – on the back of the card.

“A lot of the time (these are) resources that students forget,” Active Minds member Juan Rivera said. “In my case, as a first year student you know about them, and you learn about them. As you progress throughout the years, you start forgetting what was originally there.”

Those numbers didn’t make it on the new design, though students will find their student ID number and barcode on the back of their new cards.

The SAFE website is here. It’s the best antidote to the confusing, outdated, and wrong information that has been posted on UO’s Affirmative Action and Police websites about reporting sexual harassment and assault. Putting the URL and 24-hour hotline number on ID’s was also very exciting to Mike Gottfredson and Robin Holmes’ hand picked $80K “External Review Committee”, as explained here. Bob Berdahl was enthusiastic. I wonder why the new UO administration wouldn’t do it, and who made the decision?

This Comedy Central show starts with some statistics on college sexual violence, including the finding in a recent NBER working paper that reported rapes of college age women increase 41% on football home-game weekends.

Brenda Tracy then recounts the story of her 1998 gang-rape by Oregon State football players, explaining the pressure brought on her to drop charges, given that OSU was trying to raise money for a new football stadium. Tracy then introduces a campaign to try and get the NCAA to ban violent athletes, and the emcees explain the expected value calculation that has led so many colleges to hide rapes by revenue-sport athletes, and then introduce UO’s putative new mascot, Shushy the rape-ignoring ostrich:

This is arguably unfair, given that Tracy was raped by student-athletes from Oregon State, not UO. But then Duck fans can hardly complain, given that President Gottfredson’s administration did its best to keep the March 2014 gang-rape allegations against three of coach Dana Altman’s basketball players secret until the players could be quietly transferred away to other unsuspecting campuses, as the documents in their lawsuit against UO demonstrate. (Docket here, correspondence between Altman’s recruit’s attorney and current UO Deputy General Counsel Doug Park, showing the agreement to keep the nature of the accusations against the player off his transcripts, here.)

I have a few issues with the expected value comparison of the costs of rapes and the benefits of football revenue that the show presents. Setting aside the issue of the non-pecuniary costs, the emceee’s state “If [the expected value of legal settlements for rape victims] is less money than the money generated by your football program then it’s more cost-efficient for you to just convince these co-eds that they were never raped.”

However, this math ignores the fact that the profits from big-time sports goes to the coaches, athletic directors and NCAA leaders like Mark Emmert, while the costs of the legal settlements are typically paid by the universities. The downside risk to coaches who tolerate rapists and alleged rapists seems to be small. For example, Mike Riley, who was OSU football coach when Tracy was raped, gave the two players one-game suspensions and appears to have lost nothing by that decision, being hired by OSU for a second stretch in 2003. The Duck’s Dana Altman will presumably receive a fat raise when his current contract expires, despite his decision to not ask any questions about why one of the alleged rapists, whom he recruited to UO as a transfer, had been suspended by his previous university for an entire year.

Diane Dietz has more on Shushy here, including the inevitable quote from self-described Duck advocate and PR flack Tobin Klinger.

TheFire has the news on the latest outbreak of campus incivility, here:

Senator Demands Answers from Department of Education About Controversial Mandates

January 7, 2016

WASHINGTON, January 7, 2016—In a letter sent today expressing “continued alarm” about the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), United States Senator James Lankford demands answers from Acting Secretary of Education John B. King about the agency’s authority to impose controversial new mandates on colleges and universities that strip students of rights without congressional approval or even a chance for public notice and comment.

Issued in 2010 and 2011 under the guise of “Dear Colleague” letters, OCR’s mandates dictate how colleges and universities that accept federal funding—virtually every institution in the country—must respond to bullying and sexual misconduct in order to comply with federal anti-discrimination statutes like Title IX. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and other civil liberties organizations have repeatedly criticized the letters for threatening freedom of expression and due process on campus by defining First Amendment-protected expression as “harassment” and mandating the use of the lowest standard of proof in sexual misconduct cases, among other requirements.

Senator Lankford notes that OCR’s letters “fail to point to precise governing statutory or regulatory language that support their sweeping policy change.”

“OCR has consistently avoided giving real answers to questions about its power to issue regulations outside the bounds of the law,” said Robert Shibley, FIRE’s executive director. “It cannot avoid accountability forever.”

Given the substantive mandates announced in OCR’s letters, Senator Lankford asks Acting Secretary King why the agency declined to submit them for public notice and comment, as required by the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA). …

Among the rules promulgated by these letters is the mandatory reporting requirement that President Gottfredson imposed on the UO faculty by fiat. (Remember that online training? I didn’t think so).

The WaPo has the story, here: