Tag Archives: Sarah Lawrence College

Critic’s Pick: Oversight

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Now that we’ve explored several aspects of sexual assault policies, it’s time to examine how policies are monitored and revised. Who is in charge of enforcing the policy? Is there a review process to fix problems? How can students or other members of the community raise concerns about the policy and procedures? Every school must be mindful of oversight.

Regardless of what the school’s policy looks like, it is of utmost importance that oversight is clearly articulated. It doesn’t matter how good a policy is if no one is going to follow it as written. I’ve found some good examples of well-defined oversight that might be helpful as models for those schools that have yet to identify the management and revision of their policies.

Let’s begin with Sarah Lawrence College.

Disclaimer: At the top of Sarah Lawrence’s Assault Awareness page, it says, “This policy is currently under review by the Sexual Harassment/Assault Policy Review Task Force. The following policy will remain in effect until the task force completes its work in fall 2008. When the new policy is completed, the community will be notified of the change in policy and the new policy will be available online.” It’s currently 2011, and Sarah Lawrence has yet to get their shit together enough to put their revised policy online. So, I can’t guarantee that the information below is completely up to date, but it’s useful to look at as an example.

One of the tabs on this website is “Education Prevention Response.” At the bottom of this page, there is a section that clearly states the committees responsible for sexual assault education, prevention and policy recommendations, which is great. What’s even better is this statement:

Students, faculty and staff with questions, ideas or concerns about various aspects of the College’s sexual assault education, prevention and response program should contact the appropriate group below.

Students are then directed to one of the following: Health Education Programming Committee, Sexual Assault Education and Prevention Committee, or the Sexual Assault Policy Committee. For each one, Sarah Lawrence lists the responsibilities and a contact person. Fantastic! Students know exactly where to go and whom to contact if there are questions or concerns with the campus resources and policy.

Occidental College has a pretty comprehensive Sexual Assault Policy (for Students), which contains clear statements about policy revision and policy enforcement. Under “Institutional Responsibilities,” there is a bullet point saying:

Policy will be reviewed annually by the Dean of Students Office to coincide with the California Penal and Educational Code.

We know when the policy is reviewed, who is reviewing it and what kind of code it is following. Presumably, students could to go to the Dean of Students Office with concerns that might be incorporated into the policy review. In addition, most schools don’t review their policies annually (it’s often every 3 or 5 years), so it’s great that it takes place that regularly. Right under this, Occidental has a section titled “Policy Enforcement,” which says:

This policy was authorized and approved by the President of Occidental College and is enforced under the authority of the Dean of the College, Vice President of Student Affairs/Dean of Students, Vice President for Administration and Finance, Vice President for Enrollment Services, Vice President for Institutional Advancement, and Vice President for Information Resources.

This is also good—we know who has approved of the policy and who enforces it. To have a truly great policy, it is essential that what is written is enforced.

Another good example: Earlham College. There is a section under its Sexual Assault Policy called “Dissemination, Monitoring and Amending the Document,” which addresses where the policy and security report are available to read, which office maintains records and provides administrative review, how and when the policy can be amended, and whom to contact with proposed changes.

In addition, Earlham addresses many of the same issues under “Review and Revision” of its Judicial Policies and Procedures. There is a regular five-year review of the college’s principles and practices, and any community member or group can propose amendments (committee to contact is given). In addition, there is an extra provision:

Should unforeseen difficulties with this policy and process materialize, the Vice President and Dean of Student Development, in consultation with the enumerated Judicial Process Authorities, may institute temporary changes.

Earlham addresses the review and revision process in both its Sexual Assault Policy and its Judicial Policies. It’s extremely helpful to have it in multiple places to make it very accessible. Students should be able to make suggestions and raise concerns easily, as these policies and procedures affect them very directly.

The three schools that I just discussed above all acknowledge oversight explicitly in their sexual assault policies, but there are some schools that only bring up the issue in their general code of conduct or judicial processes. Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Marquette University are two such schools. SIUC has a whole section titled “Interpretation and Revision” under the Student Conduct Code, which discusses questions of interpretations, formal and emergency reviews, amendments and how newly updated policies and procedures will be disseminated. Marquette University has a bit of a less extensive section called “Amendments” but addresses whom to give proposed amendments and who will be responsible for approving those changes.

While it’s great that schools include sections on oversight, having them directly related to the specific issue of sexual assault would improve the policy significantly. So, for those of you who are now checking whether or not your school addresses oversight, the important things to include are:

  • Enforcement: is there someone in charge of making sure the policy is followed as written? Where can students get their questions answered?
  • Review: is there an office or person to regularly review the policy
  • Revision: can students and community members propose changes easily?

Make sure the school clearly articulates each of these points because they are essential to a strong policy. It is quite possible the school already has procedures in place but has not included them transparently in the policy. Oversight is such an important part of a school’s accountability in having and enforcing a sexual assault policy.

Demystifying Activism: the Student Awareness Campaign

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Hola readers – this is Renée, the newest SAFER blogger. I’ve been interning with SAFER since June, but this is my first shot at writing for our blog. Below is the first piece in a series I’m developing for the Info Shop on campus programming campaigns, and this week we’re kicking off with a Student Awareness Campaign! (I swear it’s not as vague as it sounds.)

As I sat down to write the following article, the first thing I thought about was the dozens of other things I had to do. Not that I found this unimportant, but as a student, seemingly everything we have to do is important. In any given week we tackle classes, jobs, clubs, internships, volunteerism, the all-important social life, of course eating and maybe, if we’re lucky, sleeping more than 5 hours per night. So who has time for “activism,” this thing that requires not only action, but sustained, collective, and strategic action? What the most salted activists will tell you is that if you let the concept get too daunting and overwhelming, it gets that much harder to act. So the following is a briefing on the Student Awareness Campaign, an umbrella term for a collection of relatively short-term and simple efforts you can implement on your campus to bring awareness, attention, and momentum to your issue.

Your Student Awareness Campaign: What Are We Bringing Awareness To?

Once you have your core group of activists together and ready to plan and implement a Student Awareness Campaign, the first question to answer is, “What are we bringing awareness to?” It may seem obvious – you want to bring awareness to sexual assault on campus – but in order to make your campaign more effective and manageable, this answer needs to be more specific. Mainly:

A. Are we trying to bring awareness to the campus sexual assault policy?

If your policy is already spectacular, you may want to let the campus community know about the policy: some specifics about how it works or the programs it outlines, for instance.  Awareness of the existing policy will help make it more effective.

Unfortunately, and more likely, you may recognize that your college or university might need a partial or complete policy reform. This is a huge task to take on, but it can be accomplished!  We understand, this reform takes a lot of time and effort, and there are many students who do want to be active in the reform process but just cannot commit to what may be two years of intense involvement. So, bringing awareness to your policy can be done without taking on the challenge of reform immediately. This type of Student Awareness Campaign will also help immensely when you and your fellow activists are ready to take on reform – you will already have the campus talking about the issue and will probably have roused enough student interest to have strong and collective campus support.

B. Are we trying to bring awareness to prevention efforts on campus? Continue reading →

Activist Victory at Sarah Lawrence College

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As SAFER has been shuffling through organizational changes and getting geared up for the year ahead, I’ve been completely remiss in posting a major campus update.

As of yesterday, Sarah Lawrence College officially launched their new Sexual Assault and Harassment Policy! For the past year and a half, a faculty/staff/and student task force has been working to completely overhaul the school’s policy (not to mention the months and months of student activism that preceded the task force), and all of their recommendations have now been accepted and put into action. As stated in a letter from the SCL President, policy highlights include:

  • separate policies for faculty/staff and students that acknowledge the different nature of these two constituencies
  • redefinition of prohibited behaviors into three categories: sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and sexual assault
  • clear and understandable language and format
  • an emphasis in the student policy on education, health, and safety
  • clear definition of “consent” in the student policy
  • simplified explanation of how to obtain support on and off campus
  • newly designed procedures for filing complaints that make the process easier to understand and navigate
  • clear designation of which faculty, administrative and staff positions are confidential reporters and which are non-confidential reporters
  • clear explanation for faculty/staff about what to do when they receive a report about sexual harassment, misconduct or assault from a student or a colleague
  • newly defined statement about relationships between students and employees
  • revised sanctions that are aligned with prohibited behaviors

Recent SLC graduate (and recently selected SAFER Board member) Erin Burrows was part of the policy revision process from the beginning, and her story and advice on campus activism can be tracked on our blog, as well as heard on our website’s front page. Congratulations to everyone at Sarah Lawrence who worked so hard and fought for change. The new policy can be found online. If you are interested in seeing how your school’s policy stacks up, remember that you check out SAFER’s College Sexual Assault Policies Database.

resistance is romantic – policy requires patience

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Hello all – first time blogger here. I have been working as an intern at SAFER since August 2008.

Tuesday night I went to a lecture about this book, Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization, on resistance movements in Bolvia against the privatization of public resources (water and gas). One of the editors of the book, Jim Shultz, said something along the lines that resistance is romantic, but the infrastructure and policy making that becomes necessary afterward is just as important. This notion has stayed with me since then, especially in application to my own struggle over the sexual assault policy at Sarah Lawrence College. Although it’s problematic to view all resistance as romantic considering the violence and seriousness of such movements – I have found it true that the glory of organizing is found in the energy of building a movement from the ground up, in tactics that require risk and fighting through the frustration of not being listened to.

Our most dramatic and exciting tactics were employed at our new president’s inaugural event in October 2007. We called on our allies and passed out handbills that exclaimed, “SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE HAS NO SEXUAL ASSAULT PROGRAM” detailing the history of sexual assault programming on campus. We coupled this with talking face to face with the most important members of the greater SLC community and dropping banners outside the dorms during the event. These actions, along with a letter directly to the new president landed us in her office with four other administrators.  Although we were initially shut down in this meeting, we were eventually successful in having the president call for a task force to rewrite the sexual harassment and sexual assault policy. (More details of Sarah Lawrence campaign can be found in this interview conducted by the lovely Nora.) We were invited to select two student representatives to sit on the task force.  This was the turning point from focused anger, righteous publicity stunts and drafting letters of demands to actually sitting at the table with the policy in our hands and discussing real options for transformation.

Since last February, I have been sitting on the Task Force as one of two student representatives. Every Monday morning, a group of eight (two students, two faculty, three staff members and an administrator) gather around a table and chew over the begrudging details of rough drafts. This process has been a lot of things to me, but has primarily taught me that a movement based on policy reform requires an enormous amount of patience and perseverance to succeed.

Here are a few tips I wish I had in the beginning of this process:

- Do your research before you need it. Get familiar with local and state laws, actually read the Clery Act, make sure you understand Title IX etc. The more you know, the more you’ll be a force to be reckoned with when it comes down to drafting the details.

- Find Models. I found Case Western Reserve’s policy through interning as the Policy Analyst at SAFER last semester. The flow chart is an incredible tool for mapping holes in the policy, and giving students who will actually use the policy a different way to access the information in it. Search for schools familiar to yours in size and demographics and see how they’re dealing with the issue. (The SAFER Policy Database is an amazing tool for this. (I plan on highlighting other “best practices” to pull from other policies in a future blog post) 

- Ensure that there are student representatives on the committee or task force responsible for rewriting the policy. We were invited to sit on the task force, however, I have heard of other schools – Princeton, for example, that are working on a new policy without direct student voices. Flex that political muscle and demand to have a seat at the table.

- Keep up regular communication with your comrades. The group that I was in that lead the campaign has since fallen apart. I really wish that I had a group of activists to return to each week and talk about progress, vent frustrations, keep energy up and insure that more students are represented in this process than my own perspective.  Try to keep your group cohesive by meeting regularly, collaborating with ally organizations on their campaigns and planning awareness building events such as Take Back the Night.

- Don’t lose sight of your goals! What brought you here in the first place? An inaccessible and offensive policy that hurt people more than it helped? Working to streamline and articulate the discipline process on campus? Working to make sure that students knew exactly what their rights were before they reported? Breaking down rape culture on campus? Make sure to step back from time to time and ensure that direction that things are going in actually meet your original intentions.

- Be honest about burn out – it’s hard to commit to a project like policy reform and keep the same fire about justice alive the entire time. If you need to step down, find a replacement for your voice on the task force or committee. If you need a reminder of why you’re there, re-read the old policy and look back on the letters and actions it took to get you to this point.

- Just because it’s on paper doesn’t mean it will be enforced. Make sure that even when a new policy is finally passed – all of the elements that are supposed to be happening (i.e. educational programming, self-defense classes, getting emergency contraception in the health center) are actually happening. Students have the power to keep their administrations accountable! The policy can serve as the foundation for action, but it does not mean that action will inherently occur just because it’s on the books.

- Leave a record. Make sure after you’ve left campus (graduation, transferring etc.) that you’ve left something for institutional memory. If your campus has an archive, make sure to give the archivist any materials from your campaign that might be useful to future activists. Tell SAFER your story so we can use it as a case study for movements on other campuses!

- CELEBRATE. Make sure that everyone who was involved with the campaign knows that they were important to its fulfillment. Let yourself feel really good about your work and use it to power your next political projects. Take your lessons and share them.


Primarily, I have realized that college campuses are unique places to draft policy as they can enforce more specific standards around consent and what happens when consent is violated.  Colleges and universities have the power to supersede abstinence-only sex ed and institute preventative educational programming with an emphasis on healthy sexual relationships.  It’s also important to remember that colleges are embedded in local and state laws, which means that the boundaries of what is possible in policy making are compromised by current legal means of dealing with sexual assault.  None the less, reforming a policy so that it is accessible and student-friendly can mean the difference between someone getting the help they need when they need it or alienating and silencing their experience.

I would love to hear stories from other activists who are at this point of weekly face to face negotiations with the powers that be. I find it to be both incredibly challenging and rewarding to see the results of a three year campaign in its final stages. This is the point in sexual assault campaigns to keep our eyes on the prize, keep people informed and invested and make sure that as many voices as possible are contributing to what will shape the future experience of a survivor on campus.

Student Success: Sarah Lawrence College

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Erin Burrows is currently a fifth-year graduate student in Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence College. She is working as the Policy Analysis Intern at SAFER. She hopes to see you on November 7th at Safer’s Benefit Show at the Galapagos Art Space, in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

How did you get involved in challenging how your school handles sexual assault?

I served as the co-chair of FLUX, our feminist club—Feminism Liberation Unity X. My first year there was a program called Access, which provided sexual assault awareness. It was funded by a federal grant that then expired, and instead of finding alternate funding [the Sarah Lawrence administration] fired the director and canceled the program. It was supposedly absorbed into other programs but nothing really happened.

Junior year we started working on policy itself. We started pulling it apart, just printed out copies and looked at what we wanted to change, really using Antioch’s policy as a comparison.

I was abroad when the movement building began, I can put in touch with others who were there. They put out a flyer that had an image of a fist from a self defense manual. It said, “We didn’t consent to the sexual assault policy, did you?” We put out a zine that listed everything we thought was wrong with the policy and asked for input from students.

There was a student body meeting and articles ran in the school newspaper. A lot of concerns were voiced, but there was little action.

When we came back in the fall, we picked up the campaign right away. A new president was being inaugurated, so we planned at our first meeting to do some kind of action at the inauguration. Everyone who was a member of the Sarah Lawrence community would be there, so we really struggled about what to do. We thought about all wearing red t-shirts and unrolling a banner, etc.

We ended up handing out half sheet flyers that said “Sarah Lawrence has no sexual assault policy” and gave the history of the school’s lack of action and our activities to date. We also draped two banners from two dorm’s windows.

Everyone was talking about it. All the FLUX members walked around handing out flyers, and everybody had one.

We got a lot of hell for it. They said that we had stepped in on her day, etc. But we ignored it, and in the end we got a meeting with the new President, the Vice President of Administration, the Dean of Student Affairs, the Dean of Students. Flux had a student representative for every class; I went as the senior.

We had tried to really prepare. We had written a letter to present and demanded a new program and the hiring of a new director. We got steamrolled. We were told that there was a program in place, that we just didn’t know what was going on. They inferred that what we wanted was a luxury, that the school was running on a Hyundai budget and what we wanted was a Cadillac budget. At the end of the meeting, we assured them that the conversation was not over, and in turn, they promised to continue working with us, insisting that it was their job.

We took a little time off from the campaign—we were organizing a gender symposium on campus. One of the deans had written a summary of our meeting that really sugar-coated everything, so we were upset. We found out that the Office of Student Affairs was hiring new staff, so we wanted to add sexual assault liaison responsibilities, RA training, and demanded that what the handbook said we had would be fulfilled.

In a meeting with the Dean of Students, we negotiated that the liaison responsibilities would be moved to an administrator in the Health Services department. It actually turned out to be one of our larger successes, although not exactly what we were looking for. At least students now have a point person to turn to who is not a mandatory reporter who can assist students with their immediate and long term needs.

In the meantime the president called for a taskforce to rewrite the policy. Eight people, including two students, met every week during the spring semester. We went through comparable schools pulling out best practices to use for our policy. It should be finished this fall and passed this spring. I served as one of the student representatives, along with another member of Flux. The task force is now continuing through the fall, hopefully bringing the new policy to a committee by late November. It’s been a long process, but ultimately a success in institutionalizing progressive change.

While we did not win our demands to put in place a new sexual assault program, we have had some victories. Sarah Lawrence is in a bad budget situation, so putting in a new position would be a big strain. There’s no endowment like a lot of schools have because it started as a rich finishing school, and now most tuition money goes directly into paying faculty and staff.

I graduated with BA, and am continuing with an MA, and there are a lot of undergrads still there to hopefully keep the fire going.

How did you get other students involved?

One of my biggest regrets about how the campaign functioned is that it was really an inner circle kind of job. We did a really awful job of investing other students on the campus in the issue, and didn’t do a good enough job of reaching out.

We received the SAFER manual at some point, I think when we were starting to rewrite the policy, SAFER is so good about pushing outreach.

What were the biggest concerns about your school and sexual assault among students on your campus?

Shutting down the previous program.

No communication about who was a mandatory reporter and who wasn’t. At some point the RAs weren’t and then they were and underclass students weren’t told.

People had no idea if there was an emergency where to go.

How and when were trainings taking place—especially for public safety officers? We just found out they are doing a training this fall for staff.

More counseling services on campus for survivors. There was a limited number of sessions they were allowed and that was really unfair for people who needed them and couldn’t access transportation to get to a private therapist in town.

We were trying to make sure that we were also being really conscious of racial tensions on campus. In our ultimate description what was asked for was a queer person of color who was trained in sexual assault or at least someone who was adamantly anti-racist and was interested in working with those kinds of issues at Sarah Lawrence.

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