Flawed system not aiding survivors
Colleges are expelling few sexual misconduct offenders – meanwhile, survivors are suffering
Adrianna Crossing thought her case was straightforward.
A doctoral student at Michigan State University, she had grown increasingly alarmed when a male student’s romantic interest in her escalated into obsession.
He pulled her phone number from an emergency contact list and messaged her repeatedly. His persistent requests for dates, late-night calls and messages and an email describing his imagined future with her prompted her to report the matter to campus officials and police and file for a restraining order.
Michigan State launched an investigation in March 2019 under the federal law known as Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education. The male student refused to participate. But almost all the evidence was in writing.
The case crawled along for nearly 10 months, during which investigators interviewed two witnesses. The investigation found him responsible for sexual harassment and stalking. When officials asked what sanction she felt was appropriate, Crossing recommended expulsion, saying she feared for her and other women’s safety and the student needed to be held accountable.
Instead, Michigan State placed him on disciplinary probation, to be punished only if he violated school rules again. He graduated later that year with a master’s degree in human resources.
“It was a slap in the face,” Crossing said. “For the investigation to just drag on forever, with no end in sight – and then an abrupt end, and it’s nothing? It’s what we call ‘retraumatizing.’”
Passed 50 years ago this summer, Title IX is supposed to ensure students’ right to an education free from
sexual harassment and gendered violence. It put the onus on colleges to build robust systems for investigating allegations, protecting complainants and disciplining perpetrators.
But an 18-month USA TODAY investigation found a flawed system with inconsistent enforcement and widely varying results across dozens of the nation’s largest public universities. Understaffed Title IX offices struggled to reach victims and effectively address complaints. Schools steered cases toward outcomes that required minimal action and imposed light sanctions against perpetrators that undercut findings of fault.
While many survivors who endured the process saw their education disrupted, few students who harmed them faced meaningful punishment. Universities suspended just 1 of every 12,400 students enrolled each year for sexual misconduct. They expelled 1 in 22,900. That’s despite studies consistently finding roughly 1 in 5 female and 1 in 16 male students experience sexual assault in college, with LGBTQ+ students experiencing sexual violence at even higher rates.
The findings stem from a first-of-itskind analysis of Title IX case outcome data obtained by USA TODAY through inquiries to university officials and public records requests.
USA TODAY asked 107 public universities that compete in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision for statistics about sexual misconduct reports received from 2014 through 2020, including the number formally investigated, the number that resulted in students being found responsible, and a breakdown of sanctions imposed. The analysis covered all forms of sexual misconduct schools must address under Title IX, including sexual harassment and assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking.
Of those schools, which represent the nation’s most recognizable and well-resourced public universities, 56 gave complete data. Thirty-four provided data covering a partial timeframe, and 11 gave incomplete data that captured a subset of the requested information. Six – including the University of Georgia, Auburn University, and the University of Nevada, Reno – provided none at all.
In the absence of a federal mandate to report such information, USA TODAY’s analysis, while incomplete, offers the fullest picture yet of how top colleges handled sexual misconduct reports during a period of heightened enforcement of the law and attention toward the issue of campus sexual assault.
In addition to the data analysis, reporters reviewed thousands of pages of Title IX case files, policies, outside reviews, court records, and other documents and interviewed more than 100 student survivors, current and former Title IX officials, attorneys, researchers and activists to understand how cases fell through the cracks.
Among the findings:
⬤ Tens of thousands of sexual misconduct reports filed across the 56 universities that provided complete data resulted in just 1,094 students suspended and 594 expelled. That’s an average of 2.8 suspensions and 1.5 expulsions per school each year. The average annual enrollment of the institutions was 34,600 students.
⬤ Despite the federal government’s clarion call for colleges to build infrastructure for Title IX offices, some schools invested little in their Title IX programs. Some left their offices in the hands of a single employee. Three University of Louisiana system schools spent a combined 45 times more money on direct subsidies to their athletic departments than on their Title IX operations.
⬤ Confusing policies allowed schools to avoid investigating cases and steer reports toward outcomes that required minimal action. California State University, the nation’s largest public university system serving nearly a halfmillion students, had a policy for years that enabled Title IX officials to close sexual misconduct reports without so much as contacting the victim. CSU defended the policy but quietly changed it weeks after USA TODAY began reporting on it.
⬤ In the rare cases when Title IX reports resulted in discipline, students found responsible were frequently issued light sanctions that allowed them to continue their education without interruption. At Georgia State University, for example, 99 of the 122 disciplined students received sanctions such as like probation and training that required no missed class time. That included students found responsible for rape, dating and domestic violence, and those disciplined multiple times for stalking and sexual assault.
“This data really helps provide a counternarrative to the men’s rights groups claiming that there are swaths of young men who are being falsely accused of sexual violence and having their lives ruined,” said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of the nonprofit It’s On Us, which combats campus sexual violence through student organizing and education. “It’s just simply not true, and this data backs that up.”
To be sure, the schools provided aggregate numbers that offer a big-picture view of Title IX case outcomes. With one exception – Georgia State – they did not provide specific details about the conduct alleged in each case, and most schools did not list the sanctions imposed according to the violation types.
Sexual misconduct violations also vary widely in severity, from verbal sexual harassment to forcible rape. Some schools view these situations, particularly less severe offenses, as learning opportunities that do not merit suspension or expulsion. Many survivors also decline to pursue formal investigations but still receive accommodations, such as retaking a class, changing dorm rooms, or switching out of a class with their perpetrator.
Almost all stakeholders agreed the Title IX process is an imperfect system, carried out mostly by well-intentioned people. Already stretched thin, school administrators struggle to interpret complicated federal mandates and adapt each time they change.
But a flawed process beats no process, experts said, and just a decade ago, victims of sexual violence at many colleges had nowhere to seek assistance or recourse.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is tasked with enforcing the law. Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon, who heads that office, said the data collected by USA TODAY demonstrates the continued and distressing salience of the issue of sexbased discrimination in schools and that “we have quite a distance still to travel to make Congress’ 50-year-old promise true in students’ lives.”
“The change that we are seeing in this country is slow. It’s insufficient. It’s less than Congress promised. It’s less than we need and it’s enormously frustrating, but I know what I’ve seen is sea change because the federal government has drawn attention to the issue,” Lhamon said.
In some ways, Michigan State is a model for how colleges should address sexual misconduct. It dedicates 42 fulltime employees to Title IX cases and survivor advocacy, including prevention, education and outreach specialists, investigators and therapists.
The 2,211 sexual misconduct reports it received against students over the seven-year period was among the highest in USA TODAY’s analysis and an indication that survivors felt comfortable reporting to school officials.
But Michigan State has struggled to handle its heavy caseload, according to an audit by the law firm Cozen O’Connor, required as part of a resolution agreement over its handling of sexual abuse claims against its former doctor, Larry Nassar. Title IX officials closed reports prematurely and communicated poorly with victims, the audit found. At one point, its average case from report to resolution lasted 361 days – roughly twice as long as its current policy prescribes.
Michigan State spokesperson Dan Olsen acknowledged the problems but said the school is making progress. He noted the firm’s audit of spring 2022 cases found fewer timeliness issues and that “our Title IX Office’s investigations are fair, impartial and thorough, and the institution follows its policies and the Title IX regulations appropriately.”
Olsen also said Michigan State tapped another outside firm to help address the issues and plans to hire more Title IX staff.
The promise of additional staffing came as little consolation to Crossing, whose experience left her feeling “no confidence” in Michigan State’s “ability or desire to protect the students that fight and go all the way through this process.” Olsen declined to comment on her case, citing student privacy laws.
“It did not seem like it was actually designed to serve the students,” Crossing said. “It seemed like it was designed to protect the university.”
Crackdown sparks backlash
Although colleges adjudicated sexual assault allegations under their student conduct codes for decades, robust enforcement under Title IX did not begin until the early 2010s, when the Department of Education under President Barack Obama launched a crackdown. The issue has been a political football since.
In 2014, the Office for Civil Rights prescribed specific steps schools must take to respond to sexual misconduct complaints or risk losing all federal funding. It directed schools to adopt policies that centered on the safety and well-being of the survivor.
Pushback began almost immediately. Critics accused schools of punishing male students without fair hearings or adequate evidence. Scores of disciplined students sued their colleges, and courts rebuked some schools for due process violations.
Shortly after Donald Trump took office in 2017, his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, rescinded the Obama-era rules. Within a year, many colleges conducted fewer investigations, found fewer students at fault, and suspended and expelled fewer students, USA TODAY’s analysis found.
The drop-off, Lhamon said, “suggests that the country heard loud and clear” the Trump administration’s message that it was not “taking seriously the Congressional charge to ensure our students’ rights would be protected in school.”
DeVos then unveiled new regulations in 2020 that made it harder for schools to find accused students at fault. But the data show colleges had not been disciplining men en masse, as critics had claimed.
It was the opposite: Half of Title IX investigations resulted in no discipline, which experts said showed schools exercise great caution before rendering judgment. Even schools with the highest discipline rates removed very few students from their campuses.
In June, President Joe Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, proposed changes that would undo parts of the DeVos rules. But never has the federal government collected data from schools on Title IX case outcomes, and only two states, New York and Maryland, require colleges to report such statistics.
The data is “incredibly important,” Lhamon said, and the country would benefit from having it. But the department does not have the congressional authority, staffing or funding to collect it.
As a result, no one knows the true impact of the whiplash in regulatory changes, said Tara Richards, a University of Nebraska Omaha victimologist who studied the data from those two states and found similar results as USA TODAY.
“As a social scientist, the thing that drives me bananas is that policy should be driven by data,” Richards said. “It is just maddening that we’re making all these important decisions that impact students all over the country in a vacuum.”
Those decisions invariably filter down to one key person on each campus – the Title IX coordinator, whose job overseeing their school’s implementation of Title IX is made more difficult by the mutable edicts coming from Washington, D.C. As a result, not many people want the job, said Andrea Goldblum, who spent six years as a Title IX coordinator at four different colleges, including Ohio State University and University of Cincinnati.
People often blame coordinators for schools’ failings, Goldblum said, but the criticism isn’t always fair. The work is highly emotional, stressful, and political, she said. It’s important and meaningful, but not fun. The turnover and burnout rates are high, she said, “especially when offices are not adequately resourced and it’s all on one or two people’s shoulders.”
At least six different people have served as Cincinnati’s Title IX coordinator in the last decade, according to public records. Goldblum spent nine months in the job until Cincinnati forced her to resign in 2019 for providing a statement to the student newspaper, court records show.
The statement, which was never published, addressed public criticism amid revelations the school gave an award to a student who was registered as a sex offender. Goldblum said her statement offered resources to students who may have been affected.
Goldblum sued Cincinnati for retaliation under Title IX. The lawsuit is ongoing. But it ended her career in Title IX work, she said.
She now works in employee relations for JPMorgan Chase.
“Everybody is unhappy in this (Title IX) process because of the nature of what’s going on,” Goldblum said. “You have to be very intrinsically motivated, and it can be very isolating when you don’t have the support around you.”