St. Lawrence students requested a zero tolerance policy against sexual assaulters following the Oct. 12 protest against the university’s sexual misconduct policy. However, administrators are limited in their actions against those accused of sexual assault because of the current Title IX policy, according to St. Lawrence President Kate Morris.
One of the protest’s leaders Hannah Spaeth ’23 restated the protest’s goals in the petition “Change the Culture at St. Lawrence University,” which has over 670 signatures, as of Oct. 26. “Instate a ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY for those formally accused of sexual assault; until their cases are closed, enforce that they study at home,” Spaeth writes as one of the three goals. “If we can be sent home for plagiarism and missing two COVID-19 tests, we most certainly can be sent home for being formally accused of sexual assault.”
“A lot of people were saying, ‘We want transparency. We want names.’ But I think that just because of all of the Title IX rollbacks, I don’t know if we’re legally allowed to do that,” Spaeth said. “It just felt like a zero tolerance policy was the second best option.”
However, according to Morris, the university is unable to enforce the zero tolerance policy and send the accused away during the case due to federal law. “I talked to our attorney about this, and he was very clear that it would be illegal to do so unless you also remove the person who reports the incident because federal law requires that you have equal treatment of the two parties involved,” Morris states.
The federal law refers to the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, enforced by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Title IX encompasses a variety of issues, ranging from treatment of LGBTQI+ students, athletics to sex-based harassment. Title IX states: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Because the school receives federal financial assistance, St. Lawrence must adhere to Title IX and all the changes made to the policy, as specified by Assistant Vice President of Safety and Security Patrick Gagnon.
On May 6, 2020, the OCR released the former President Donald Trump administration’s Title IX policies on sexual harassment, changing certain aspects that were put into place under the Obama administration. R. Shep Melnick’s “Analyzing the Department of Education’s final Title IX rules on sexual misconduct” references a few changes: requiring that decision-makers cannot be employees of the Title IX coordinator to ensure impartiality, no longer requiring schools to use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard and requiring and requiring live hearings and cross-examination.
“Trump administration made some changes that allowed for due process rights on the accused side, I believe that was the intent,” said Gagnon. “As investigators, you have to make sure that we do this in a way that we’re the finders on the facts and so we don’t have a position in assigning responsibility to the person that’s being accused.”
While the Trump administration has attempted to make the investigation process more fair, these changes have been controversial. Director of the Office of Institutional Equity at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Jenn Rose, known for her advocacy work in improving institutional responses to allegations of sexual harassment and gender violence, notes that the current Title IX creates “a lot of really troubling challenges for complainants to come forward because most will feel so intimidated by a process that is essentially a quasi-criminal justice process.”
“There’s a lot of agreement that the cross-examination and live hearing is just too cumbersome and unnecessary because we’re a university,” Rose said. “We’re looking at the conduct of students. We’re not experts and judges.”
On the administrator’s side, Associate Director of Student Activities & Leadership and Deputy Title IX Coordinator Ashlee Downing-Duke acknowledged the recent challenges for students. “I know it is often re-traumatizing for the person who is assaulted,” said Downing-Duke about the live hearing change. “I may not necessarily agree, but I understand the reasoning behind why we need to protect both parties.”
“You need some kind of hearing process that protects basic rights, but, I think, that this process has made everything more daunting because of the in-person hearing and cross-examination,” said St. Lawrence Government and Gender Studies Professor Val Lehr. “I think that the inability to kind of impose no contact orders early on in the process makes it more difficult for students, so there are things like that that we have no choice but to follow. But they make the process even more daunting than it always was.”
“I would go back to the procedures that we had before the change in Title IX happened,” said Lehr. However, according to Lehr, the new administration provides an opportunity for the law to change once again.
“I kind of wish that those things weren’t changing every few years because we ended up like rewriting policies,” said Lehr. “It makes it confusing for students.”