"Come Clean, Carleton"
The 2018 essay that inspired the formation of Endeavoring to Do Better. Find it also on Medium, here.
Embedded Files
Carleton is taking measures to address sexual violence on campus. But similarities between problems I witnessed in the 1980s and more recent incidents suggest that not enough has changed. It’s time for an honest reckoning with our past. Let’s be brave.Last spring I picked up the latest issue of the Carleton College Voice with the rest of the mail and, still standing in my front hall, flipped through it, landing on the opening paragraph of “A Matter of Consent,” an article about new measures being taken on campus to prevent sexual violence and new protocols for institutional responses if it does occur. According to the author, Thomas Rozwadowski, who works in the communications department, this new emphasis is a proactive response to “high profile assault cases from Vanderbilt to Virginia.”I dropped the magazine inside the door and left it there for more than two weeks, too furious to read on.I wasn’t furious because I oppose such a thoughtful and thorough plan. Those of us who were active on this issue at Carleton years ago dreamed of campus-wide education on sexual consent and the kind of informed, supportive administrators that the article describes. But Carleton has “high profile assault cases” of its own, including some that occurred in the 1980s, when I was a student there. The Voice fails to reference that history, nor does it mention the lawsuit brought against the school for its handling of four of those cases or the press coverage, both local and national, that followed. In neglecting this history, the Voice also fails to acknowledge changes in the sexual assault policy came about in response to that suit.What’s even more problematic is how little those events appear to have affected the the school’s response to subsequent allegations of assault. Despite dramatic improvements in the clarity and scope of the school’s sexual misconduct policy over the last 35 years, there are deeply discouraging similarities between the complaints in the 1991 suit and those leveled in a later suit, this one filed by a 2015 graduate in May 2016 over the school’s handling of two sexual assaults she says she survived in 2011 and 2013. And even more recent events give further cause for concern.If Carleton and the Voice want to be credible on the subject of campus assault, they don’t need to whitewash Carleton’s history. They need to face it.§As a senior in 1987-’88, I was one of five sexual harassment advisers in a nascent program offering peer support to students dealing with sexual misconduct. The Voice article mentioned Angie Hattery, who was another. Appointed by the student government and approved by the administration, we were the first point of contact for a student with a complaint — be it of harassment or assault. We listened to their stories about what had happened to them and advised them of their options. If they wanted us to, we accompanied them to meet with administration officials and to any proceedings that might follow. This gave us an unusual vantage point: we saw how the administration — specifically dean of students Cris Roosenraad and President Stephen Lewis — responded to individual reports. But we also observed the response in aggregate. This is how we learned about the accusations against two particular offenders and the college’s disturbing response.Cases this old might seem like water under the bridge now. In truth, they’ve never been more relevant. President Obama’s work tying college funding to Title IX, as well as the 1990 Clery Act, which, the Voice explains, “required colleges that participate in federal financial aid programs to compile, publish, and distribute statistics concerning certain campus crimes in annual security reports,” contributed to a growing public awareness of the issue and of the responsibility institutions of higher learning have for their students’ safety. But we live in uncertain times, and there’s no guarantee that support for victims’ rights will remain a government priority. Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary, announced in September 2017 that, based on her concern that male students accused of rape are unfairly treated by college proceedings, the department plans to rescind the heart of these reforms. Many survivors and victim advocates would agree that colleges are ill-prepared and ill-suited to deal with accusations of felonies against students, but as Carleton’s own history shows, this practice is far harder on sexual assault survivors than on any other group. When Candice Jackson, DeVos’s head of the Education Department Office for Civil Rights, declares that the women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct are “fake victims,” it’s pretty clear that this is not a department that can be relied upon to look out for the best interests of everyone involved in these accusations.The events I witnessed preceded the Obama-era reforms. Unfortunately, student reporting on the school’s response to accusations of assaults as recent as 2016 suggest that some things haven’t changed.In 1987-’88, accusations of sexual assault were made against several male students at Carleton, but two particular men stand out. During the four years I was there, Carleton’s administration received a total of nine reports of sexual assault by one or the other of them. To be clear, the violence described by their accusers was not unique to these two men, nor were they the only people accused of multiple rapes. But the administration’s response to the reports against these two were the basis of the lawsuit later brought by four of their accusers. The local alternative weekly City Pages covered the case in a cover story by Julie Caniglia (’88) and Clara Jeffery (’89) on April 17, 1991 (not available online), identifying the two men pseudonymously, as “Brian” and “Andrew.”One of the women said she was raped while sleeping in her own bed, another said her attacker choked and threatened to kill her. Another was dragged from a party and raped in an adjacent room, and one got locked in her attacker’s room and raped for the next five hours.In choosing to report to the college, each of these nine survivors conveyed a clear message and objective: This man raped me, he threatened my life, he is intimidating me, keep him away from me, protect other women from him, investigate this case.As these women were to discover, Carleton’s hard-won sexual harassment policy, which was new and heralded as cutting edge in 1983, had significant deficits. Created and championed by students concerned about the college’s response to sexual misconduct, the policy was written to improve administrative transparency and accountability.It broke new ground, but it suffered from some “first draft” kinds of problems. Among the things it didn’t do well: provide clear labels for types of sexual misconduct. I actually memorized it within a matter of weeks, not deliberately but because I kept combing through it to find how it addressed sexual assault. But there was no mention of rape, or of any definition or protocol that allowed an accuser to bring forward a claim of “sexual assault.” Instead, the worst offense a student could be accused of was “advances without sanction,” a phrase so opaque as to be disorienting to students who were considering reporting an attack. And “sexual assault” was only described, in a curious loop of logic, as a violation of the harassment policy, as if a felony was somehow a subset of pestering.Students who had experienced an attack were to report it to Dean Roosenraad and could only make a complaint if it were reported within six months of the event. In this first meeting the dean would ask if the accuser wanted to make a “formal” or “informal” complaint. An informal complaint wouldn’t lead to any action being taken, it was just something he was supposed to bear in mind should related problems arise later. A formal complaint led to official in-house proceedings, including an appearance before the school’s Judicial Hearing Board. This body was made up of students, faculty, and administration officials, who, to my knowledge, had no special training for dealing with such matters.The policy didn’t allow for a charge of sexual assault, but the dean or the board could find a student guilty of sexual assault. Two findings of sexual assault would get you expelled.As advisers, we witnessed how carefully survivors made the decision to speak to the dean, an authority figure they typically had never met previously, about a violent, non-consensual sexual encounter. In our experience, they undertook this risk because they felt the attacks they had endured were more than a personal matter. They believed reporting was a matter of public safety.But we began to observe a pattern: Accusers who approached the dean with the clear intention of reporting an assault emerged confused about how to proceed. They often ended up spending weeks or even months trying to decide what kind of complaint to file. More than once, a student concluded a meeting with Roosenraad believing she had registered a formal complaint only to realize later that nothing had ever come of it. Advisers, beginning to anticipate the confusion, tried to check in with survivors after those meetings to make sure they were getting what they wanted out of the process.One survivor of an attack by “Andrew” recalls, “The main problem I had in dealing with [Roosenraad] was understanding the difference between formal and informal complaints,” she says. “I had told him that I didn’t want this to happen to other women again, and he told me that I could do that with an informal complaint.”Granted, Roosenraad isn’t here to defend himself — he died after a heart attack in October 2016 — but this survivor told City Pages that she met with him numerous times over a three-month period trying to get clarity about the difference between an informal and a formal complaint before she was finally told by a sexual harassment adviser that no action would be taken against Andrew unless she filed a formal complaint. With only a six-month window, a student who spent three months trying to make a decision was already running out of time.The policy’s lack of clear and actionable language for sexual assault was another point of confusion. One of plaintiffs recalled, “When I said I had been raped, I was corrected by the dean of students on my terminology. It was sexual harassment, or I could choose one of the nebulous definitions under the Carleton SHP [Sexual Harassment Policy] — advances with sanctions, advances without sanctions. All terms I didn’t understand.”Increasingly concerned about how muddy the waters seemed, I sent a letter to Roosenraad to protest how cases were being handled. Instead of a response to the substance of my complaint, I received my own letter back again, with the writing marked up in red ink as if I had submitted it to be graded. That night I went to Professor Rudolph Byrd’s house in Norse and said in despair over a cup of tea, “How can I keep up with this man? I’m trying to write my comps and he’s got a secretary.”Advisers weren’t the only people survivors turned to for help. A student I’ll call “A.” got a knock on her door in the wee hours one morning. The friend at her door had recently been attacked by Andrew and was apparently coming undone: trying to meet her academic demands while dealing with the stress of the rape and Andrew still being on campus was just too much. She had been drinking and was crying and threatening to kill herself. “I couldn’t ignore the magnitude of her words,” says A. She called the Northfield Police and had them take her friend to Northfield Hospital. A’s friend received treatment and was later released to return to campus.In the winter of 1987-’88, several people Patt Romero knew were struggling with their work to the point that they had been placed on academic probation. It dawned on her that every single one of them had been sexually harassed or assaulted. Though she was a student with no official position, she took it upon herself to go to Dean Roosenraad and tell him that she knew that the men they’d accused of assault were repeat offenders.She asked why the college wasn’t throwing them out or at least trying to get them treatment. She says Roosenraad got angry and said, “It is this administration’s belief that these men are better off with diplomas than without.” Patt left the meeting, packed her belongings, and left school in the middle of her senior year.§President Lewis (1987–2002) would get involved when a persistent problem demanded a higher authority than the dean. Lewis loved and encouraged simple-minded shenanigans like pranks with Schiller’s bust, but he could be less tolerant of other kinds of disorder. When he encountered a demonstration for divestment from South Africa outside a Board of Trustees meeting, he responded with retribution. An alumna remembers, “Lewis sent certified letters to the faculty and staff who were there, including Paul Wellstone and Mike Casper, and Nancy Casper, who worked in the library. The letters were threatening and suggested he had grounds for dismissal — I think on the grounds of violating the college code of conduct. We were all very upset and made a big banner that we put up on Sayles Hill, saying “Lewis to Fire Faculty, Staff?’ He didn’t of course, and I think the outrage we articulated was helpful in making that untenable.” She added “Mike Casper kept the banner up in his office for many years. I saw it when I visited for the special gathering of his students as he was beginning to go downhill fast.” (Casper had a neurological disease and died in 2007.)President Lewis demonstrated no patience for the sexual harassment advisers either. As the tension around sexual assault reports grew, Lewis called us in for a meeting in his office. I vividly remember him scolding us for heedlessly “ruining the futures” of the accused students, while Roosenraad nodded gravely behind him. Lewis told us we couldn’t possibly understand how unfair life would be for a man who had rape on his record. He’d be a social pariah, unable to have a career or a family. We needed to pipe down and consider how our actions could jeopardize a man’s entire future.Lewis also made it clear that the college was not going to honor our demand that attackers be moved out of dorms where their accusers were living. He told us the college would never be able to explain this to the parents of the assailant, and they could sue.When I asked Lewis how the college would explain this to the parents of women who’d been raped, who also might sue the school, he just waved me off. He said that on the advice of legal counsel they were obliged to side with the accused.On the other hand, he said, the accuser could move if she wanted to, but he couldn’t guarantee that the process would be speedy. She would have to be patient.At least two women to my knowledge did move, one after weeks, the other after months of waiting. One woman was moved to a different floor in the same dorm both she and the assailant lived in, and for the rest of the year she was terrified of bumping into him there. When this inevitably happened he would taunt her, indicating he could rape her again anytime he wanted to.At the same meeting, Lewis claimed that there was no appeals process after a ruling by the Judicial Hearing Board. This was not accurate: the sexual harassment policy stated that a ruling could be appealed to the Board of Trustees. But sorting out what to do in the face of his assertion was complex. (When I asked him if he’d like to share any thoughts or remarks about what happened during the 80s, Lewis declined to comment.)With their attackers allowed to remain on campus, survivors were fearful of repeat assaults, but the rest of the student body was vulnerable as well. There were no official alerts about the violent sexual predators in our midst, but word got out anyway and students began to take action on their own. In the fall of 1987 the door of a bathroom stall in the library became the site of record for recent rapes. Using markers, survivors posted anonymous testimony. Others answered with expressions of support. I remember one story of a rape having “me too” scrawled next to it.Related graffiti popped up elsewhere. On a bathroom door in Olin someone wrote, “I was raped. Now I am just a statistic.” Someone else answered, “You are not a statistic. You are just on the other side of a statistic.”Eventually an actual list took shape on a door in the library bathroom: the names of students accused of rape. It got painted over while the administration made noises about the injustice of outing accused attackers. Then it went back up, this time titled “Castration List,” before the maintenance crew was ordered to paint over it again.At the start of winter term in 1988 a student stuffed every mailbox with a flyer about “Brian” warning, “If you are a new woman on campus you may not know there is a serial rapist here. His name is Brian _____. Steer clear of him.”Dean Roosenraad was able to track down the identity of the author and summoned her to his office, where he reprimanded her and then forced her to confess to Brian in a signed note.Student groups sprang up to address the rising discontent. Martha Carey and I founded SMASH (Student Movement Against Sexual Harassment), and along with six other core members — including Laura Williams, another person who’s quoted in the Voice article, we put together a month-long series of public presentations on sexual harassment and assault.
Graffiti collected by student activists in 1987
With a budget of $5,000 we brought in nationally known speakers such as Catherine McKinnon, the renowned feminist attorney who had successfully introduced “sexual harassment” as a legal claim, and John Stoltenberg, who led a men-only workshop on implicit sexual violence in pornography. We staged a mock date-rape trial, recruiting local attorneys, student actors, and using Minnesota state law to create a legal drama with an unscripted outcome. MASH (Men Against Sexual Harassment), a spinoff of SMASH, published a booklet called Up Against the Wall, in which they documented hate-filled graffiti in men’s rooms across campus. Women weren’t the only target of these scribbles. One example they noted said “Die faggots. We don’t love you, we don’t want you here at Carleton. You don’t deserve to live. You suck dicks, you are a bunch of homo bastards from a deviant society. DIE.”The roiling atmosphere wasn’t limited to student life. A soc/anthro professor was disciplined with a forced two-trimester leave of absence for gender-based discrimination, intimidation, and (non-sexual) harassment of a female student. A second soc/anthro professor was abruptly terminated mid-trimester after being accused of statutory rape (unrelated to campus or students). And while the school seems to have handled these faculty cases quickly, they nonetheless contributed to the general tension on campus around harassment and assault.A faculty member who was sympathetic to the advisers’ mission showed us a memo that had been distributed to the entire faculty. The memo, written by a professor but circulated anonymously, said “radical feminists” had generated a “plague of hysteria” on campus about sexual assault and harassment and were imperiling academic discourse, behaving like “sharks on a feeding frenzy.”Frustrated by the administration’s responses to claims of assault, some advisers and survivors began to compare notes and talk about strategies for seeking support off campus. Several of us met with a reporter from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who published an article titled, “Harassment Battle Embroils Carleton” (April 10, 1988), but nothing came of it. We talked about whether there might be some legal recourse for survivors based on the discrepancies between Carleton’s punishments for sexual assault and those prescribed by state law. Some people found an attorney in town to ask for advice but didn’t come back with any ideas about how to move forward.§Then, on March 29, 1991, four of the nine students who had reported being raped by Brian or Andrew sued. With Julie Bauman, [GJW], et al v. Carleton College and Cris T. Roosenraad, campus sexual assault at Carleton, something that Roosenraad and Lewis had been dealing with internally for years, was making headlines across the country. On April 7, 1991, the New York Times reported that the four students claimed the college “not only failed to provide a safe living and working environment but also failed to adequately discipline their attackers.”
City Pages, April 17, 1991
Northfield police chief Ron Pieri told City Pages that Saint Olaf’s dean of students regularly accompanied students to make police reports about sexual assaults on campus — an average of a couple of students per year. He noted that in six years he hadn’t once seen Roosenraad bring in a Carleton student for that purpose. Pieri said, “I don’t know why they don’t do anything. They say that they have the mechanism inside to handle it. And if they are handling it–fine. But we don’t see any appearance of anything being handled and everything that we hear would make us think that, no, it’s not being handled, and that these things are still occurring.”Though Roosenraad had promised our advisees that in-house proceedings would be easier and much less invasive than going public, according to City Pages, the Judicial Hearing Board routinely asked rape survivors such questions as “Did you enjoy it?,” “How far do you go on a first date?,” and “How many times have you had oral sex before?”City Pages said that when two of the four plaintiffs informed Roosenraad in the spring of ’85 that Brian had raped each of them once and attempted to rape one of them a second time, Roosenraad had dismissed two of their complaints on the spot. He dismissed the alleged rape of the first woman based on the policy’s six-month window for reporting — the rape she alleged had happened the previous fall. He dismissed the second woman’s case after he interviewed Brian solo in an informal private meeting and Brian denied the accusation. He did, however, find that Brian had made “advances without sanction” when he attempted to rape the second woman a second time, and Brian was given probation for the next two trimesters. Roosenraad refused to move Brian from the dorm they all lived in.Then two more women went to Roosenraad to report being raped by Brian. Time magazine reported, in an article about the Carleton case and campus sexual assault more generally (June 3, 1991), that the third woman was raped in her dorm room in February 1986. A few weeks later, she said, Brian ripped her dress and grabbed her exposed breast in front of several people, including a professor, none of whom reported anything. She did not initially report the rape or the assault. “I stayed on campus until the following fall, when my depression was reawakened. That fall, flying home from Carleton, I was starting to think about how close to killing myself I had come last winter. I had a panic attack on the plane, and I decided not to come back.” By the time she returned to campus, in November 1987, a fourth woman had reported being sexually assaulted by Brian.The fourth woman reported Brian to Roosenraad two days after her assault. She told him Brian locked her in his room then raped her and threatened to kill her before finally letting her go after five hours. Four years later, City Pages published her account of what happened when she spoke to Roosenraad. He asked her if she had been to a doctor and when she told him no, he told her, “Well, you don’t have any proof.”She told City Pages, “He outlined my quote-unquote options: I had no physical evidence, it was going to be Brian’s word against mine. And if I went to the police, the school would not hear my case at Carleton until the criminal justice system made a decision — which could take up to six months to a year. He asked me what I wanted, and I said I want Brian away from me. I am afraid of him. I feared for my life. He said that nothing could be done about Brian and that there was no way the college could protect me unless I pressed charges through the school and did not go to the police. Then he asked me if I wanted to go to the police and I said no.”
Time, June 3, 1991
This fourth case did make it to a hearing in front of the Judicial Hearing Board, which found Brian had committed “sexual assault.” Now, even though the school policy didn’t outline protocols to bring charges for any transgression greater than “advances without sanction,” it did say a student could be expelled after two sexual assaults. Since he’d only been found to have committed one sexual assault, Brian wasn’t expelled. He was suspended for three terms.In late 1987 or early 1988, the four women went together to Roosenraad to object. “He was very defensive and upset that we were bothering him with this,” they told City Pages. “There was a [sexual harassment] policy at Carleton and somehow we were burdening him with additional things that he was able to dismiss because he didn’t find that they fit under the policy.”The third woman who said Brian raped her reported it for the first time at this meeting. According to the survivor’s account in City Pages, Roosenraad said that since more than six months had elapsed since the alleged attack, she had no standing to file a complaint. “Once he had dismissed my case, he did not give me any advice or counsel or pay attention to me for the rest of the meeting.” That’s when she decided to leave Carleton for good.When Andrew, the second repeat offender named in the suit, was accused of rape the first time, he was allowed to choose to have his case heard in a private formal meeting with Roosenraad rather than by the Judicial Hearing Board. Eliza Graham, SMASH president in 1991, told City Pages, “Different members of the administration have told me that rape does not occur at Carleton. This is their reasoning: since they cannot legally convict someone of rape, rape has no meaning. . . . They cannot call it rape so there has never been a rape.” Four more women reported being sexually assaulted by Andrew and ran into the same problems survivors of Brian’s attacks had.Lewis’s public statements about the suit in 1991 reflected the same dismissive attitude he had demonstrated toward the advisers. In a cover letter and three-page statement dated March 29, 1991, and distributed to students, faculty, staff, and alumni, Lewis claimed the “charges made in this suit are totally without merit,” repeatedly put the allegation of rape in quotes, and declared that “any student found guilty of such behavior either by the college hearing board or by the courts would have been expelled immediately.” He characterized Carleton’s response as one of “equity, compassion and fairness.” Time quoted Lewis only a few months later saying, “These women chose to go to the university [sic] hearing board but didn’t like the results and now they are suing.”He also said, “We understand they are upset but that doesn’t mean they are right. I accept fully that [they] believe they were raped but the university hearing boards concluded that they hadn’t been.”In his statement, Lewis claimed that “complaints may be heard by the Dean of Students (in lieu of the Judicial Hearing Board), but only if the complainant, the accused and the Dean all agree.” Here’s what’s wrong with that claim. Roosenraad had dismissed complaints against both Brian and Andrew in private meetings with them without approval or input by the accusers. The policy of allowing a hearing to go to the dean if both parties agreed to it came about as a result of the complaints being brought forward in the suit.Lewis’s public statement cited the adoption of the sexual harassment policy in 1983 as evidence of Carleton’s forward-thinking approach to the issue. But an alumna who was instrumental in helping to create and advocate for the policy told me in an email, “The Board of Trustees adopted it after students wrote it (and asked for review by the College’s legal counsel) and after an all-out grassroots effort to raise the issue to the Trustee level and to create some transparency and accountability for the administration, who did not appear to be holding harassers accountable. No one in the college administration initiated that change.”Though it contradicted what I witnessed as a sexual harassment adviser and what the Northfield police chief reported, Lewis said that “the policy of the Dean of Students in such cases has been to advise complainants of their right to go to the authorities and to offer to help them to do so.”As further evidence of the administration looking out for students, Lewis cited dormitory floor meetings about the sexual harassment policy. But these meetings were started by me, with participation from other sexual harassment advisers, in 1987-’88, and we received no administrative support for them, nor even any acknowledgment of them.§When Brian returned to campus after his suspension, he began following one of the women he had raped, leering at her and implying he could attack her again if he felt like it. The conditions of his return had stipulated that he not enter her dorm, but when she found a sexual proposition written on her door she assumed it had been left by him and went to Dean Roosenraad. She told City Pages that he told her Brian was “just trying to get a rise out of me, and that if I challenged him he might try to do something more dangerous or serious to me. And therefore I could be in danger if I tried to press formal charges against Brian again.”The fourth woman had been dissatisfied with the judicial hearing board’s decision to merely suspend Brian and had filed an appeal, Lewis’s misinformation notwithstanding, with the Board of Trustees. Nevertheless, Brian graduated in 1989.Roosenraad’s formal private hearing with Andrew after his third accusation resulted in a finding of “advances without sanction.” According to a survivor quoted in City Pages, Roosenraad called Andrew and the accuser together to inform them of his decision. He then turned to the accuser and “lectured” her in front of Andrew about how the fact that she had been drinking before the assault made it hard for him to decide if what happened was non-consensual. The next assault Andrew was charged with, his fourth reported rape, was of a student who was semi-conscious after heavy drinking at a huge party. Friends of the woman carried her back to her room and passed Andrew in the hallway. After they left he went into her room and raped her as she passed in and out of consciousness.After that the Judicial Hearing Board found Andrew guilty of “sexual assault” and suspended him for a year, effective immediately. Then, according to the survivor quoted in City Pages, Roosenraad gave him a whole week to get off campus. He was also allowed back on campus during his suspension to take his final exams so he could still get credit for the term. The survivors, including the one whose case had resulted in the suspension, were never told when he would leave or even that he would be returning. She told City Pages that when she complained Roosenraad told her, “I don’t know what you’re worried about — he’s not hurting anyone.”While Andrew was back on campus taking his exams, a fifth woman came forward to report that Andrew had raped her, too. At that point Andrew was expelled. That was the public story, in any case. Andrew told City Pages that his senior thesis was graded and that Roosenraad “offered him the chance to complete his coursework elsewhere and then re-apply to Carleton to receive his diploma.” The alumni office refused to release any information to me about Andrew, including whether or not he was allowed to graduate from Carleton.In November 1991, the four plaintiffs, two who’d accused Brian and two who’d accused Andrew, settled with Carleton. Their public statement said that while the parties hadn’t agreed to the facts of the case, “We are pleased to bring this litigation to a close in the context of Carleton’s very real and constructive efforts to address the issues raised by our experiences.”The college and plaintiffs issued a joint statement outlining eight changes to be made to the school’s sexual harassment and assault policy, including separating the investigative and adjudicative roles and developing educational programs to prevent sexual violence and provide training to respond to it.Apparently the lessons of that 1991 suit weren’t enough to ensure that students would be satisfied by Carleton’s response to future incidents. In a federal suit filed May 2, 2016, in Minneapolis, a 2015 graduate alleges that after she was raped twice, “Carleton mishandled the disciplinary proceedings against her assailants, failed to impose adequate sanctions against them, and failed even to explain (much less to assist her with) such options as criminal prosecution, medical assistance, alternative housing arrangements, and academic assistance and accommodations.”She reported that she was raped as a freshman in 2011 during new-student week, and again as a sophomore in 2013 by a senior who spiked her drink with date-rape drugs. According to her suit, neither of the two assailants were expelled or suspended. In one case, the man conceded that she had not given consent and was found by the new Sexual Misconduct Board to have violated the sexual assault policy, yet the only consequence was a “no contact” order, requiring him to to stay clear of her. The suit also alleges that when the assailant violated the no-contact order, Carleton failed to discipline him appropriately. When she tried to appeal the decision, Carleton disallowed it. When she attempted to bring the second case forward, she says, a member of the administration admitted that she’d heard the assailant’s name in connection with sexual misconduct before but “discouraged [her] from filing a formal complaint because [he] would be graduating in a couple of months.”In January 2017 the judge ruled against Carleton’s motion to dismiss on some claims but allowed others to stand. In addition to asking for damages, the suit requests that Carleton impose at minimum a two-year suspension on students who commit sexual assault.§I don’t have any inside knowledge about what’s happening at Carleton now in relation to these issues, but informed by excellent reporting in the student-run Carletonian, as well as coverage in the mainstream press and a few conversations with students, I feel safe concluding that some of the problems we saw in the 80s persist on campus today.Thanks to the Carletonian, I’ve become aware that back in the spring of 2016, around 500 students received an email with the subject line “Campus Update on Sexual Misconduct” purporting to emanate from the dean’s office and naming ten current and former students. Within an hour Information Security had discovered the message from the phony account — an electronic echo of our old “castration list” — and deleted it from students’ in-boxes.The message was gone, but the incident sparked formal and informal conversations all over campus about what to do in cases of sexual assault, how to support survivors, and how to respond when the accused are publicly named and shamed. The director of the school’s Gender and Sexuality Center attended one meeting, according to the Carletonian, where she discouraged students from getting overly focused on the moral questions raised by the posting of the list, noting, “It shifts the dialogue away from the fact that sexual violence happens here. My purpose is to try to shift the conversation back to one about survivors and prevention.”That doesn’t sound like terrible advice in the moment, but on the other hand, it sounds as though once again students were being advised to ignore the problem of potential perpetrators being allowed to remain on campus.An incident on April 28, 2017, finally brought the Northfield police into the picture. According to coverage in the Carletonian, last spring an illicit Carleton social club held a scavenger hunt for new members during which copious amounts of alcohol were consumed and one of the initiates ended up at the hospital with alcohol poisoning.After the secret club was exposed, President Steven Poskanzer and dean of students Carolyn Livingston sent a joint email to the Carleton community announcing how they were dealing with the situation: 13 club members were being disciplined with three-semester suspensions. The seniors involved would not be allowed to attend graduation and would receive their diplomas only after they’d completed sanctions including alcohol training.It was only the next day, after a statement was released to the media by the public relations office, that students became aware that one of the participants was claiming to have been sexually assaulted after the initiation. The student who’d gone to the hospital had also undergone testing for rape and was pressing charges. Questioned by the Carletonian about the omission, Poskanzer and Livingston referred the student reporters to the office of public relations.By July, after appeals were made to the Judicial Hearing Board, 12 of the 13 suspensions were rescinded, and the 13th was reduced in length. The assault case is being handled in court.Even with preventative measures in place, assaults can and will occur at Carleton. When they do, is suspension really the appropriate response? The legal system has its own pitfalls, but dealing with such incidents internally, and trying to keep them under wraps, creates a level of accountability — to the survivors, the accused, and other students — the school can’t possibly live up to. Transparency begets trust, but what is the right way to be transparent?§Looking back on this era has been a jarring experience. Time’s 1991 article pondered the apparently controversial questions of whether a man could be raped or if a wife could be raped by her husband. City Pages reported that in 1990 Carleton’s judicial hearing board considered the case of a male student who admitted to engaging in sex with a female student who was unconscious and acquitted him. On campus and as a nation we lacked the crucial word, indeed the concept, of “consent.”And while the lack of that central concept hamstrung all of us trying to clarify the issue of sexual assault, and even the sexual harassment policy itself, the behavior of Carleton’s administrators cannot be fully explained by a deficit of language. The terms “mansplaining” and “gaslighting” weren’t widespread yet either, but these maneuvers were very much in evidence. Overall, I’ve been surprised to rediscover how bad it really was and also surprised by how resourceful and capable we were at only 19, 20, or 21.Writing this piece at this particular moment in our national history, I was engulfed in a completely unexpected upswell of outrage about sexual assault and harassment and its universality. The parallels between the stories I was remembering and the ones unfolding daily were impossible to ignore. Our Castration List had reappeared in a high-tech version as the crowdsourced “Shitty Media Men.” The informal alliance at Carleton between survivors and advisers was an early whisper network, the sort of vehicle the media were now describing as the safest way survivors could share cautionary tales. As I recalled “me too” scrawled on the bathroom wall, the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual harassment came out and #MeToo was everywhere.Even the backlash against accusers was painfully familiar. The scathing, shaming critique of “Grace” for “complaining about a bad date” after she described the hounding she endured after a dinner with Aziz Ansari was not unlike the attitude the Judicial Hearing Board and Carleton’s administrators gave survivors reporting rape. DeVos’s fretting over the the possibility that accused men would be unfairly robbed of their reputations and suffer a lifetime of consequences was the same admonishment President Lewis delivered to the sexual harassment advisers asking for harsher consequences for rapists. Calls for “due process” in reaction to the firings of high-profile abusers reminded me of the anonymous letter circulated among Carleton’s faculty in 1988 claiming that “sharks on a feeding frenzy” were upending the norms of ordinary campus life.While “due process” sounds reasonable and fair, it’s the utter failure of due process that has brought us to this point. If due process were working effectively to squelch predatory behavior and remove serial rapists from campus, there would be no need for women to warn each other through “shitty men” lists in any form. Survivors of sexual assault deprived of due process are the ones forced to choose between leaving school and putting their own lives at risk. When women face institutionalized disbelief, and are questioned on the basis of their morality, judgment, and personal worth, there will always be more victims than reports. Judges so routinely dismiss charges of sexual harassment that only 3 to 6 percent of cases filed ever even make it to trial. What we’re really grappling with here is reformulating our unconscious and pervasive devaluation of women.Still, here’s the sobering conclusion I draw now as I look back on these battles in the 80s: we lost. Each of the nine victims who reported assaults by Brian and Andrew lost, her case ending with terms that did not protect her. The student who appealed her case to the Board of Trustees lost. The four who sued Carleton in 1991 settled. The mock date-rape trial sponsored by SMASH ended in acquittal. A few days after the Pioneer Press article about rape at Carleton and student resistance came out in 1988, the paper published an editorial solemnly opining that “the outcome of specific cases may leave some participants or bystanders feeling betrayed or abandoned,” but this should not be taken as “convincing evidence that something is wrong,” as Carleton “is one of the most enlightened in higher education circles” (April 13, 1988). What more was there to do than report the crime, fight for a hearing, fight for an appeal, bring in nationally known speakers for a month’s worth of education, speak to the press, consult lawyers, and file a lawsuit?At the end of 1988, the administration let it be known that the following year they would replace the student sexual harassment advisers with a single staff member, who would report directly to the president.The most painful loss is this. At least one of the four women who brought the 1991 suit left Carleton permanently. City Pages reported, “Though Andrew finished his thesis and Brian graduated, all four women [who were party to the lawsuit] either withdrew from school for a period, took incompletes, or drew failing grades.” A classmate told me she personally knew of five women who left after being sexually assaulted by assailants other than Brian or Andrew.In the face of power, in defiance of shame, these Carleton students stood up to their attackers. Others challenged authority and tried to address systemic inequality. They were all resourceful, smart, tenacious, collaborative, and principled. Carleton erased them.I discovered that the loss and pain aren’t necessarily things of the past either. In the course of talking to more than a dozen alumni, two classmates told me emphatically they though they weren’t attacked at Carleton, they have never, and will never, return to campus because of events related to sexual assault and harassment during those years. A classmate who was active on the issue then had a startling experience in the 2000s. Working as a professor at another school, she heard that someone she knew was involved in an external review of Carleton’s soc/anthro department. When she casually mentioned that she had majored in the department back in the 1980s, the colleague said, “Oh, my gosh, I guess you know then the trouble they had. . . . Some crazy women students . . . it wrecked the department.”My friend says, “It really threw me for a loop, that what we had done, or what we were perceived as having done, caused so much ruckus that years later it came up in an external review. I remember just sort of collapsing in on myself.” Somehow, even 20 years on, it was being communicated publicly that the people who “wrecked the department” weren’t the members of the faculty who erred, or the administration who took the necessary disciplinary actions, but “crazy women students” who were making a big deal over nothing.The plaintiff in the ongoing suit says she was “sexually assaulted” and “violently raped,” but the Voice article, in briefly referencing the suit, says her assailant was charged with the more innocuous and nebulous “sexual misconduct.” As an alumna who cares, I have to ask: Has there been any meaningful change at Carleton?I do not write about this to humiliate Carleton, nor do I believe Carleton is an outlier among colleges and universities. Rather the opposite seems true. But Carleton needs to do better.Perhaps an apology is due. Perhaps those who left, delaying or losing their Carleton education because the administration failed to protect or support them, can be invited back to the community.In recent years many colleges and universities have chosen to face one instance of institutional failure after another head on, be it hazing causing the death of a student or profiteering from slavery. Carleton can choose to be a model too. A consulting agency called Hadley Rock Advisors, with which I have no affiliation and which was started by a sexual assault survivor, helps schools deal with sexual misconduct cases from the vantage point of empathy rather than risk management. Carleton might benefit from such an approach.After publishing the article that prompted this essay, the Voice reported it received several letters in response. One criticized the piece for failing to reference the 1991 lawsuit or its national impact (the Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights was signed into law by George W. Bush in 1992). The author, Thomas Rozwadowski, responded that the story they decided to tell was “about the nagging human questions that hover around consent.”I’m sure that thoughtful consideration of the boundaries between consent and assault is helping students navigate sex on campus (and programmers are even developing affirmative consent apps to help). But this reply needlessly minimizes the experiences of survivors in our own community. Sexual assault isn’t a matter of interpretation. It was a mistake to ignore what happened to young people at Carleton. It would be a mistake now to look away from our history, hoping that silence and time provide sufficient cover. Doing right means setting aside concerns about liability or protecting the brand to reach out to those who were harmed. It means fully acknowledging our history, seeking out any discrepancies between our current approach and the version of Carleton we are most proud of, and finally making clear to ourselves and others what we stand for and what we will not tolerate. We cannot be whole until as a community we say, “No more. Not here.” ■
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