THE PUBLICATION IN APRIL of the Report of the Provost's Task Force on Sexual Assault Policies and Practices capped a year when such concerns gripped colleges across the country as never before. The full report is available online at notalone.stanford.edu. Provost John Etchemendy, PhD '82, has said he intends to implement as many recommendations as possible in the coming academic year.
The 18-member task force, drawn from across the university, was charged with reviewing and making recommendations in three areas: prevention; support and response; and investigation and adjudication. Some report highlights follow.
• Enhanced and more extensive educational efforts should include new emphasis on graduate students, relationship violence, and "the concerns of students of color, LGBTQ students, and all gender identities and expressions."
• Numerous offices and resources are brought to bear in cases of sexual misconduct; confusion is widespread about the role of each. The task force recommends establishing a centralized, streamlined support and response team that will "take responsibility for connections between the student and all other parties."
• The report calls for significant changes in the investigation and adjudication of cases, to be implemented as a pilot project and evaluated over several years. The current system allows for two different procedures conducted by different offices following different processes with different possible remedies. Under the pilot project, the Title IX office alone will conduct investigations and determine whether there is a case to answer and what evidentiary material is admissible, with provision for an outside evidentiary expert to make a final ruling when either party objects.
• Cases that proceed to a hearing will be heard by a panel of three well-trained members serving multiyear terms; undergraduate students will not be eligible. The panel must reach a unanimous decision as to responsibility and as to sanction when the sanction is expulsion. (For lesser sanctions, agreement by two out of three members is required.)
• The "expected" sanction for the most egregious violations of university policy (modeled on California rape law) is expulsion; the report recommends that for any violation of university policy on sexual misconduct, reviewing panels consider expulsion before weighing lesser sanctions. It also asks the provost to consider applying its recommendations to cases brought forward after a responding party has graduated.
