 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have a fantastic guest on a vital subject, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. We've been looking at all kinds of questions about the future of higher education for the past seven plus years. But one topic that we haven't really explored fully has to do with a terrible question of sexual assault on campuses. And this has become an incredibly contentious topic, featuring everything from federal policy to multiple lawsuits to changing policies and multiple campuses, pushback, all kinds, even film. This is a major, major issue. And I think we can think of no greater person to bring with us than Dr. Nicole Badera. Dr. Badera has recently published a powerful article. You can find it linked on the very bottom left-hand corner of the screen. The full title is, quote, I can protect his future, but she can't be helped. Empathy and hysteria in administrative rationalizations of institutional betrayal. As you might refer from the title, her research is a sobering, even damning account of how universities mishandle assault in a deeply sexual way, and how, perhaps, we can take steps in order to try and solve that problem. So without any further ado, let me welcome Dr. Badera on stage. I would hope, let's see, by the way, both of us share a common alma mater. We're both University of Michigan graduates, so I'm going to try to keep all that kind of chatter to a dull war as we go. Greetings, Dr. Badera. Hello. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Oh, my pleasure. I'm so glad to see you. I'm so glad to see you. Where are you coming to us from? Are you in Ann Arbor right now? I'm in Minneapolis. Ah, you were tired of all the cold and winter of Ann Arbor and decided to go to a different place, I see. Somewhere a bit colder where the winter is somehow even longer, yeah. Indeed, indeed, indeed. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us. I'm so happy you can. Let me just ask you to introduce yourself in the particular way that we do in the future transform. We find that often faculty introduce themselves in a kind of obituary style, describing everything they did in their lives, but we're a future-oriented group, and we'd like to figure out what you're working on for the next year. So, looking through 2023 and to the beginning of 2024, what are the big topics and the big projects that are top of mind for you? There are two main things that I'm working on for the next year. The first is turning this academic paper into a much broader book about how Title IX cases are handled on college campuses, and in that book, I interviewed victims, perpetrators, and administrators about their experiences with Title IX resources of all kinds, and investigations, but also the stuff that we don't think about as much, like the resources that are available to actually all students equally, which people are surprised to find out, but all of the resources that we make available to victims to heal from trauma right now are also required for schools to give to the perpetrators who harmed them, which can create and deepen disparities. So that's one thing is that book. And then the other thing is putting some of the findings of this book into action with another Title IX researcher who also published an article in the Journal of Higher Education. We've been banding together to do some consulting work with organizations that want to do better. One of the big findings from all of our work is that these problems, as much as we pretend that they're really complicated on college campuses, they're simpler than you think, and there's just a lack of willpower to do the right thing. So for the people who have that willpower and want those solutions, we want to help them navigate all of these systems that now we know very, very well. Oh, fantastic. So you have a book and a consulting practice coming up. Well, first of all, please, please let us know when that book is scheduled to hit print, because I'd love to spread the word. September 2024. Oh, so you're on target. Very, very good. Very good. Looking forward to that. By the way, in the chat, you have a fan here from Kenyon College. Joe Murphy says, we had a terrific faculty conversation about your article, Beyond Trigger Warnings. So that's another fan. So your fan legion grows. And your consulting practice, are you mostly working with colleges and universities or with other organizations? We're working with any organizations that want to address sexual assault and harassment in a really meaningful way. And for that approach, we recommend some really different things. So you're probably familiar with a lot of consultants that would come in and say, oh, here's a training on sexual harassment. We'll tell you how it's defined, and hopefully that makes it go away. Well, that approach actually increases sexual harassment within organizations. It makes the problem much worse. So we're doing the exact opposite of that, which is thinking about structural ways to address sexual violence when it's occurring and taking sort of two tax. One of them is recognizing where perpetration really comes from. We have a lot of myths in our society that perpetrators are inherently evil bad people that come from actually justifications for lynching and mass incarceration of black men. The reality is that most perpetration and most perpetrators are just responding to the environment they're in, where they receive incentives and benefits for participating in sexual harassment. The most common form of sexual harassment in the workplace doesn't involve the victim at all. It's sexualized comments about women that happen behind their back. And so when we think about that as the reality of sexual harassment, and the reason that a lot of men will engage in those conversations is because it's a way to try to bond with someone who might give them a promotion in the future. It feels really counterintuitive, but they see it as a kind of safe way to bond with other men, which is creating a lack of safety for women, queer and trans people in the workplace. And so recognizing that those are the dynamics, we think about ways to disrupt those dynamics and disrupt that the power that perpetrators get access to to be able to continue their abuse. So for example, things like distributing the number of faculty that it would take to remove a graduate student from a program, which is something that can happen when a graduate student is trying to be a whistleblower about sexual abuse they've experienced, they're often kicked out of their programs, especially if the perpetrator is their advisor, who in a lot of programs can just remove them without any oversight whatsoever. So thinking about those kinds of structural conditions that make violence possible and reward perpetrators for that type of violence, making sure that the ways that we're creating consequences for violence are consequences instead of actually more benefits. So one that you might be familiar with from your own academic worlds is often people who are considered unsafe to work with students are rewarded by getting fewer teaching responsibilities, which gives them more time to focus on research, allows them to get bigger grants, which makes them more valuable to the institution. So making sure that that's not the approach we're taking. And instead we're saying things like, well, maybe you can't be trusted to have research assistance and we need to be cautious about the power dynamics created in your research world is the same kind of thinking but applied in a more effective way. And then the other thing that we recommend is empowering survivors. A really simple example of this is that a lot of survivors have to incur financial costs as the result of their sexual assault or the result of trying to come forward. They often see their reputation harmed, people don't want to work with them within that workplace. And so things like creating a fund for graduate students who to make this really simple example, graduate students who are being mistreated by their advisor often are less productive than they would be otherwise. And one of the reasons that they hesitate to come forward and share their experiences is because they worry that the Title IX process, and I find this to be true in my research, is so all-consuming it'll make them even less productive and they worry about running out of funding. So it's something a lot of schools, including our alma mater of the University of Michigan is discussing right now is creating funds for people who've experienced abuses of power so that they'll get an additional semester of funding or an additional year of funding to compensate for that lost time and to give them time to be able to do what's really a service for the broader community of sharing that experience of holding someone accountable for the violence they've committed. So those are the kinds of things that we're trying to do and trying to help institutions find the courage to be able to implement on their own. Oh, that's fantastic. What a terrific, and the name of your consulting firm again is... Beyond Compliance. Beyond Compliance, which is a great, great name. Thank you. In the chat, John Hollenbeck describes, I think, accurately what you're talking about of predators talking with each other is locker room talk. Yeah, that's exactly... That's the best way to think about it. That's the most common type of sexual harassment is that type of locker room talk. Yeah, yeah. Oh, very good. Well, it sounds like you're on a very powerful course with a lot of work ahead of you. And I'd like to draw attention to this paper of yours. To this really powerful article. And by the way, to thank you for sharing a summary of it on Twitter. Not everybody, especially a lot of students, are not going to have access to paywall content. And I appreciate the Twitter summary. I've seen more than a few people tell me that that was how they learned about your article if they couldn't see it itself. And I also appreciate you just responding to us, pinging you out of the blue. Of course. One question I have is... And this is, I guess, aimed for everybody who hasn't had a chance to read this yet, which is why is this bias so stark within the very administration, the very offices designed to help victims? Why are these officials, and sometimes just part-time officials, so focused on protecting male students, especially male predators, at the expense of mostly female victims? What's the reason for this? Is it simply just inherited sexism? Or is there some particular form that this takes? I think some of it is just sexism that lives within most of us, if not all of us. But the other piece is, this is actually reflective of a much bigger sociological trend that we call the stalled gender revolution. In the stalled gender revolution, what we're talking about is feminist gains that have given benefits to women, but have not removed the unfair advantages that we give to men. And in cases of violence, you can see the way that this is happening on our college campuses already. Something that even the Devost Administration was pretty comfortable with, was saying, all right, if you are a victim of sexual assault, we're okay with you getting some additional resources from your school. We're okay with saying, we'll email your professors and ask them to give you a break. We're okay with giving you your tuition back if you're failing classes because of trauma. But what we're not okay with is holding perpetrators accountable for their behavior and removing men who are known to be dangerous from this campus setting where they might go on to harm others. And that's especially important when we're talking about perpetrators in a position of power, right? Where they hold power over their victims and they are introduced to their victims and they have that power over their victims because of their role at their school. And so that's really where this is coming from is that reluctance to address male privilege and male advantage. And it comes off as something that sounds really nice on paper. It sounds like empathy. That's what the administrators will say is, I empathize with these perpetrators. It's so hard to have something taken away from you. And I don't want to take anything away from them. But the mistake that administrators are making is assuming that this doesn't cause any damage. On a broader scale, right? We have this obvious example of serial perpetrators where we're just looking the other way and they're going on to hurt more and more people. But also for the survivors themselves, one of the things that I argue in the book that comes out of this project is that there are always consequences for sexual assault. The question is just who we ask to bear the burden of them. And one of the most common reasons that victims will enter the Title IX system and consent to an investigation is because their perpetrator still poses a threat to their education. And so they're having to contort themselves into pretzels to say, I can't take any classes my perpetrator signs up for because the school will just tell me to drop them. So I need to change my major. If I move into a dorm and my perpetrator happens to live there then I'm going to have to move off campus and not get my money back from that dorm and pay rent for a space I can't be in for the rest of the semester. That anxiety of running into a perpetrator even if they're not so closely together but that anxiety that you might run into each other or that you do can create a lot of trauma that just can't be fixed in the timeline. You know, no amount of therapy can make that go away in the timeline that our students are trying to graduate on. And so that's really what's at stake here and that's what administrators are not recognizing. That's a very, very powerful. Everything you said is so powerful and in one of these phrases there are always consequences to sexual assault. The question is whom we ask to bear them. I think that's, wow. Thank you for this. I want to get out of the way and open the floor to questions in a second but I do want to ask one more question about the other end of your paper about the findings and there is one that just really astonished me. This is probably me being ignorant of this but when you're talking about the policy implications you recommend that more Title IX officers include more survivors and their loved ones as I believe as staff, as consultants and as workers there but that's often opposed because let me get the quote here. Sometimes people believe that survivors and their loved ones are too biased to work in Title IX offices. I'm just wondering if you could say a bit more about that. My impression was that Title IX officers would include a large number of people who are deeply, who have sadly experienced too much of this. Yeah, the office that I studied I spent a year at one university doing an ethnographic study in addition to the interviews that I described and so I was interacting with these Title IX administrators on I would say on average a weekly basis for the average person and some people quite a bit more some people especially higher level administrators quite a bit less. During that time they went through a significant hiring process half of their investigators quit and they were looking to replace them and that's very typical. It's a really hard job for people to stay in for a few reasons. One of them is it just it doesn't pay as well as other administrative positions so they're eager to move somewhere else that's a pretty simple one. The other one is that for a lot of staff that come in they're very few I think one of the well let me step back a second one of the shocking things for me when I moved into the field is I thought people would go into a Title IX office because they cared about campus sexual violence they wanted to address it in some way I think that's an assumption that a lot of us especially academics who were very intentional about the jobs and the careers that we're seeking would just assume everyone acts that way but actually Title IX staff took their jobs in a much more typical way of someone who just needs to pay their bills and this is a job that came with pretty decent benefits a lot of Title IX staff they were already familiar with the school because it was their alma mater or they were in a graduate program and it would give them reduced tuition and so they just took whatever job was available very few of them had any background information and addressing sex discrimination and gender inequality in any way but one of the other things that I found so that's one of the reasons they end up leaving they realized they're in the situation and they either are horrified because they don't want to have to do this stuff for the institution they think it's gross and then the other version is they say I just don't want to handle sexual assault I didn't realize that's what this job was and so they leave so it can come from either thinking I want to support survivors more or I don't want to talk to survivors at all but there's a lot of turnover in these roles but as the results of that they were hiring a lot while I was there and one of the big contentious issues was the school did ultimately decide that it was inappropriate to hire anyone who was a survivor or had a close relationship with a survivor into this role they thought it was a sign of bias and they openly, overtly discriminated against survivors that were trying to get into these positions this doesn't mean there were no survivors on staff but they were survivors who never disclosed that they were victims and had to keep it secret while they were working wow wow oh that's and in your estimation this is not an outlier institution no you know it's funny I have not named this institution it was part of my IRB protocol and I will not name this institution but a lot of people have come to me very very certain that I studied their Title IX office just not while they were employed there so it is much more widespread than we would like to think and the other thing I want to point out that's kind of lurking in this comment is we don't actually have a very effective way to stream for whether or not there are perpetrators trying to get into these positions so when we're looking for just one side of you know what if you're taking a neutral perspective and saying you're wanting true neutrality which I would quibble with a lot that that even exists and a discussion of violence but beyond that you would think that they would be trying to sort out for victims and perpetrators and there was no sorting mechanism for perpetrators and this did mean that there were some perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment in the office if you read the paper there's a pretty clear example of a Title IX administrator going on about how they thought the Me Too movement as a whole was bogus and that victims are just too sensitive these days there was no check for that in the hiring process and so it wasn't that the school was looking to hire people who held these views but when you're sorting out survivors and you're not sorting out people who hold sexist attitudes you're just more likely to see people with sexist attitudes getting into these positions Wow okay that's a whole stratum of awfulness all right let me get out of the way let me open the floor to everyone again if you're new to the forum friends from here on out this is driven by your questions your ideas your comments I'm just a facilitator and and and we'll help you out and before even saying that questions are just popping up so I let me let me make sure people can do that in fact let me just let me change the display up so we don't loom so largely so people feel a little more comfortable and this is a question for our friend Barbara Mitchell at Medicine Hat I just I just can't get enough of saying that and and she says I'm curious about how sexual gender-based violence awareness and training increases incidents of GVD wouldn't bystander training consent healthy relationships help? You would think so you would think so the issue is that these trainings are pretty low quality and so there are a few different ways they're low quality the research is pretty clear for these types of trainings to work they need to last at least 10 to 14 weeks that's really different from the sort of first year student orientation or faculty orientation that we get which is like a 30 minute click through online module most of the time but the other thing is often one of the things that we find is that the people who are putting on these trainings especially when they're in person don't agree with the subject of the trainings themselves so let's say you buy a package your school buys a package about sexual assault and harassment and then it's going to be carried out by a dean I'll give you an example of something I experienced as a graduate student and tell me whether or not you think this training would actually improve sexual assault and harassment on campus when I was a graduate student the training they were giving to people who were going to be TAs or we call them Michigan GSIs we had to watch a play where two actors acted out a TA sexually assaulting one of their undergraduate students it was a kiss and then afterwards the dean who was hosting it walked on stage and said what do you think do you think this would be against our school's sexual misconduct policy and people in the audience including myself said of course yes this meets the legal definition of sexual assault and the dean said well it's hard to say it's hard to say and then the dean asked what do you think would happen if this student reported to the Title IX office do you think that this TA would get in trouble and we said yes this meets the legal definition of sexual assault and the dean said well if it was his first time probably not and this is often what these trainings look like in person that even if the slides look pretty good often the facilitators especially when they're members of these institutions that don't agree with having to do this that sometimes we hate to admit it but sometimes some of the people who get most interested in picking which trainings will be chosen by a school are people of history of violence themselves and are interested in protecting themselves as one of their primary concerns and so in that setting they will often mock and belittle the training as they are giving it or they'll stand in front a more benign version of this would be standing in front of the room and saying the version of do you think this is sexual assault yes or no and even if they say yes you're teaching your audience that this is something that's up for debate this is something that's unclear and that writer it comes through in a lot of these trainings the sense of it's okay if you don't understand this these are new standards this is an unfair standard for you these kind of comments come through a lot and it leads to these shifts the other thing that I found in my work both in this study and in others is if the school doesn't follow up on a prevention training with a real mechanism of response with a willingness to do something when violence takes place they undermine their own message and the people in the audience do not take the training seriously no matter how well it was performed well that certainly answers the question and makes it even more horrible I can see that story that you described so clearly Barbara thank you for that question thank you for that question and friends if you're new to the forum please this is a great example of a question against the q&a box the bottom of the screen with a white strip of longing just click the question mark type in a question and you can see of course that our guest is more than happy to answer thank you Nicole and thank you Barbara now let me give the floor over to Paul Henley from Stephen F. Austin State University former colleague of mine and he has a question let me bring him up hello sir can you hear me yes and see you I want you to know I cleaned up for you thank you thank you so much thank you this is all organized you just can't tell because I'm a creative so this is I'm just trying to I'm trying to figure out what this looks like on our campus because we end up in a situation where we had 677 individual reports this year and then when you when you start to whittle it down turns out that in this case this year anyway 446 were duplicates now we're down to 231 unique cases 30 of those cases not to rise to a potential violation 22 cases weren't in the jurisdiction of the 12 unique cases couldn't be identified couldn't identify a complainant in 72 unidentified complainant didn't respond to the minimum of three contact attempts and by the time you get down 17 are under review are under review and I just out of those you know out of those 17 we look it looks to be 10 moving forward with a formal investigation one's being completed three are in the final hearing one isn't completed the hearing process with no finding and one was completed and if resulted in the finding of responsibility with disciplinary sanctions so out of a grand total of let me see starting over here we got 677 reports and by the time you sift through all of the different levers and doors I'm looking at as of right now one case and that's a that's just how it works now yes that's very typical that's very typical make sure that okay well it sometimes it's good you know and everybody wants to be normal nobody wants to be average but I just looking for whether that's in the realm of the ridiculous or not and I mean it is right I think it's normal but also ridiculous okay just just check in to make sure I I'm I'm getting straight the idea that this is like the way the whole thing is working right now yeah and I actually have another paper on this very topic called the illusion of choice and it's about how and that one is open access you can find it on my website it's I'm sure lurking around somewhere on my Twitter as well but that's one of the things that I was interested in there are so many reports and yet very few investigations and what I found is that even for victims so if you asked a school what why this is happening what they would say is victims they would say the same thing that the police say actually and they would say victims aren't cooperative they're not responding to our emails and they would blame the victim for not moving forward in a lot of ways what I found is that even for survivors who really wanted to go through an investigation process they couldn't clear the hurdles the institution created for them to do so and it actually came through this confusing rhetoric of choice which is something the Trump administration has doubled down on and the Biden administration has not reversed in this idea on campuses right now students are given two what I would say are very bad options for addressing title nine complaints one well I suppose three one is to file a report a report and a complaint are different things in the title nine universe although most students and most faculty and staff wouldn't know that and so a student files a report which the school they've carved out this exception to say we don't have to take action of all you do is report so if all you do is report we're just going to ignore that from the very beginning which is a big betrayal because that's not what people think reporting is and so in a lot of cases victims will file a report and then that report will go absolutely nowhere for them to be able to clear that next hurdle someone within the title nine system has to tell them that they need to also file a complaint and that already gives the institution a lot of control who do you clue into this difference and who do you not that takes care of the bulk of complaints most people don't clear that threshold then if they file a complaint then they have those two choices one is to handle things informally and one of the things I found is that survivors were often deeply misled about what an informal resolution process could offer them and this has to do with the way that it's just written so vaguely with so much ambiguity on our college campuses that there's no clear definition of what an informal process is and so victims are just told literally in my field that they were told shoot for the stars write down anything you want and we'll try to make it happen and then the title nine office would call them and say none of these things are permissible through your title nine complaint. This is not an appropriate way to use an informal resolution and then when they said well can I then start an investigation some would never feel like they even had that option they would be so disenchanted with the whole process but others would say okay I'm interested in an investigation and what they're increasingly hearing now is well sorry you did an informal resolution you have waived your right to an investigation on campus so that's one of the ways when we're talking about that big number that aren't making it to the investigation period that's what most of what is happening and then by the time you get through all of these hurdles you end up with this other group of investigations that are happening way too late and the perpetrators especially if they are students are on their way out of the institution and so the cases just get dropped because they say oh the perpetrator has since graduated it's too late to do anything so this is really difficult for survivors there's no process in the title nine system that can offer them what they're really looking for which is an immediate intervention on violence that is very much affecting every week of their education and so instead they're being told and they're coming to blame themselves when they're told you just made a bad choice our title nine system has so many options for survivors you should have picked one that would have worked better for you but in reality there is no option that can give survivors what they need I'm I'm thank you for your thank you Paul and thank you for the question and the data which is astonishing it was something like 600 odd complaints down to down to one case that's very typical I'll add there is a paper by Tara Richards and some of her colleagues that found that the average college campus only holds a handful of perpetrators of any kind of sexual misconduct responsible per year and on average your average well this is in the state of New York so we're talking about a state system that's actually pretty progressive which you know the low bar but pretty progressive in how they handle title nine the average university in the state of New York only expels one perpetrator every three years for any kind of sexual misconduct so we've had so much attention on this idea that men are being removed from campus and you know it's been called in the New York Times they called it a witch hunt and now we have the data and there is no evidence that that witch hunt ever existed and I want to say too all of these numbers come from before the Trump era regulation came out reporters at USA Today have found that since Trump took office it's getting much worse and now many schools are back to investigating zero title nine cases per year like they did before the Obama era and just to make sure I understood that correctly you said the that one Sunni university only expelled a few students or was that that was that was average across all universities in the state of New York that was average friends the Paul Paul's question is an example of a video question so if you'd like to follow him please regardless of the state of your office you can join us at any time so just click the raised hand button Nicole thank you for that incredibly revelatory answer we have more questions coming in and I want to make sure everyone gets a chance Reina has a two part question so I'm going to put this up in a sequence just to make sure that you get this in a row I have to do it in a series I can't put them both up at the same time so here we go here's the first part I've come across the idea of intercultural betrayal trauma and how it comes came to be more traumatizing on Jennifer Gomez have you noticed patterns particular to Asian Americans immigrants because that's the that's the first part and then the second part of her question anyway put this up whoops and I just do this correctly and how noble social justice ideas of restorative justice and healing can be effective in harming or guilting the victim for the sake of protecting the community well first I want to say that I'm a huge fan of Jennifer Gomez's work and for anyone who hasn't encountered it yet you should really look into it it's really really great we've been talking about this concept of institutional betrayal Jennifer's work comes from that same concept but looks into the way that trauma is exacerbated when the violence is committed between a victim of a marginalized community and a perpetrator within that same community and the way that that happens is through white supremacy that when there are so few safe spaces and if we're thinking about a college context imagine that you're a predominantly white institution and the social group for people of your same race of your same ethnicity of your same sexual orientation the findings are also holding in LGBT communities the idea that that violence would come from within one of the very few places on campus that felt safe just adds a level of trauma because it feels like there's nowhere else to go and I think that this question to answer whether or not I found anything specific about Asian and Asian American students I did find that this was true as well that there wasn't a sense of I'm going to go and find you know just another group of friends my perpetrators and my friend group I guess I'll just go find someone else instead it led to a deeper sense of there's nowhere for me on this campus and instead I just need to withdraw I need to put my head down and graduate as quickly as possible or leave that's the other thing that's sort of lurking in the background of all of this is victims of sexual assault very often drop out because they can't sustain the trauma in this space and so I certainly found that in the Asian and Asian American participants in the study for international students I think it can be additionally difficult because they have very strict guidelines by which they must graduate before they lose their student visas and so it creates this additional level of of stress and it can compound these traumas quite a bit on the question of restorative justice I think that's a really good one because over the past few years there's been a real push from all kinds of people on college spaces to embrace restorative justice as an alternative to the title nine system and as an alternative to what's considered to be the punishment of the title nine system of removing a perpetrator from campus a lot of this push has been coming from white women scholars who seem to misunderstand the basis of what restorative justice is and what it's supposed to do so and a lot of schools have adopted processes that they say are like restorative justice but do not pass the smell test for what restorative justice is in any way so a very obvious example of this is that restorative justice must be entered with the consent of the victim and a lot of victims on college campuses right now are feeling pressured into restorative justice which is the exact amethyst of how it's supposed to work and restorative justice is supposed to have a whole host of options that are focused on promoting restoration for the victim not reducing punishment or consequences for the perpetrator which is what it's gotten contorted into on college campuses and so another example of the ways that college campuses are doing this differently and doing it in a way that is not restorative justice but their mislabeling processes as restorative justice is on a college campus if someone is going to enter a restorative justice complaint they don't the perpetrator does not have to confess to what they have done which in traditional versions of restorative justice would be step one everyone has to be on the same page that violence has occurred a confession is a part of it and so instead we're ending up with these strange examples on college campuses of restorative justice that look a lot more like just ignoring that anything happened and trying to keep the perpetrator out of trouble on a lot of college campuses victims that agree to do a restorative justice you know big quotes here but what they call a restorative justice approach lose their right to investigate through the other Title IX system through a formal investigation so this causes a lot of harm and I will say that the protection of perpetrators getting at this question it's not exclusive to white communities one of the things that I found in my research that surprises a lot of people is that Title IX administrators using these sympathy frames would do the same thing for all men regardless of their race and so it we really are talking about gender inequality and gender privilege in this space that's really it's a lot of focus on we all need to protect the perpetrator and this idea of hurting two people you know of a phrase that has kind of come out of this that this kind of thinking from these administrators and from broader communities a lot of students endorse these views too is this idea that two ruined lives is worse than one and that's used to justify shifting more of the harm and more and more and more of the harm onto the victim's shoulders to avoid hurting the perpetrator and that's how restorative justice has been contorted I see in the in the chat box someone asked so what is restorative justice restorative justice it's hard to explain in a single moment because it's actually a series of different practices but the core of restorative justice is focused on giving benefits to victims to restore the harms of trauma and violence and so instead of our traditional you know the Title IX system works this way it's all focused on what do we do with this perpetrator and restorative justice is focused on what do we do to help this victim how do we make sure that we can return them to their full citizenship within the society the issue with how it's being applied on college campuses is that it's still focused on the perpetrator it's saying we're going to remove expulsions we're going to remove suspensions we're going to do everything we can to keep this perpetrator in school and if the victim can get a couple of perks out of it then great those are two really different ideologies in how to think about what restorative justice is but in some restorative justice processes the perpetrators involved and in some they aren't and I just want to make that really clear that traditional restorative justice is focused on helping out a survivor and addressing the way this type of violence has harmed them across all aspects of their lives okay I I'd need to issue a role of thanks first of all Nicole thank you for multi-tasking and so easily and smoothly responding to the chat Lisa thank you for straight up asking that question and this is a great thing about I hope the form makes available is that people can feel comfortable asking any question especially if they feel that they've missed something along the way thank you Nicole for that a very very concise answer and of course the heartbreaking way this plays out when it's done badly and Reina thank you so much for that really really rich question covering a lot of ground I really appreciate it thank you we have more questions coming and I want to make sure everyone gets gets a chance to ask and here's one from our dear friend and supporter Roxanne Risken and Roxanne asks this are there any safety protections in place for students who are student teachers or student nurses who are off campus for reporting in a quicker way I don't know if I know exactly what you mean by that question but my response would be no one of the big failings of our society as a whole is that it's really difficult to report with any kind of expediency it's a very long process to give you an idea I spent a year on this campus and it actually wasn't long enough to see these reports through I had to keep coming back as these cases were coming to a close because I was meeting with victims and if perpetrators I didn't talk to very many perpetrators for a whole host of reasons but the offer was open to them too to meet at the beginning in the ends of their cases this meant I talked to a lot more victims because a lot of the time these cases are resolved without a perpetrators involvement at all and so there was no perpetrator interview the school just kind of made this go away for them without them even having to step in to defend themselves and so that's just one of the realities of the title nine system but yeah these cases were so long that a year in field work was not enough to see their resolution and so I ended up piecing together and modifying my study protocols to talk to people who had gone through investigations within the past four years as well because I couldn't get to the number of investigations I wanted because there were so few and they weren't wrapping up quickly enough to be matching the deadlines for my dissertation and so the answer of is there a quicker way to get through all of this I mean not really the closest that I've seen is I'm thinking about a couple of cases involving staff victims where if their immediate supervisor was interested in assisting them in the report things would happen quite a bit quicker which if we're thinking about pragmatic things that we can do in our own academic lives to support victims it would be instead of saying I'm just going to pass you to the title nine office to say I'm going to have your back and I'm going to be your advocate through this process I'm going to be another set of eyes I'm going to be someone who's endorsing the credibility of this complaint that can make a big difference but yeah unfortunately the answer is no there's not really a quick way and that's true of policing as well a lot of survivors turn to the college campus because policing is absolutely incapable of meeting survivors needs that if you report to the criminal justice system your case in the best case scenario most likely it's going to be dropped or not investigated at all but the best case scenario is you're looking at multiple years before it will come to its resolution that's not fast enough to intervene on an education although I will note one of the things that really surprised me in talking to some of the survivors who had done both tracks at the same time they reported to their university and to the police simultaneously many had more success in the criminal justice system which I never would have guessed considering how we know how terribly the criminal justice system treats victims of sexual assault universities are doing worse which I was really surprised by okay I want to circle back to that because we have a question kind of precisely on that point but I also want to make sure that Roxanne gets to say a bit more because she's awesome and I want to make sure that her question is treated well Roxanne go ahead please I thank you Brian thank you so much Nicole the topic has a lot of triggers in my life which I'm not going to go into but I have worked with I've worked at the university here in Connecticut where I'm from and a lot of students are afraid to report that absolutely and I've had students that had disabilities I'm wondering if my question is the proportion of students with disabilities might be even more at a disadvantage for reporting because they're already dealing with a lot of barriers entering college and if if you could talk about that for a few minutes yeah I have a relatively small sample so I couldn't do the kind of quantitative analyses to say this is how this experience differs based off of different characteristics but that being said I will say that the survivors I interviewed who already were getting ADA accommodations from the school which at this school were handled by the exact same office and the exact same people and that's pretty typical at universities and that race discrimination would be handled by the same group as well they'd already had such negative experiences in trying to access ADA that they didn't consider reporting they never consider it very seriously and so they might have gone to a victim advocate to get access to some resources to get some assistance in fighting with their professors about deadlines and things like that but that was sort of the extent of it because I mean really when we're talking about the Title IX system we're talking about a lot of interlocking types of oppression that are managed by the exact same staff the exact same office on a college campus so for victims who were also people of color who people with disabilities or all three of those categories the institutional betrayal had often started well before their sexual assaults I don't like any but could you write another book What is the plan then that is the plan I thought that the topic is so stressful for me and I was in college as a student many years ago and yeah it doesn't seem like it has changed much at all and that's like extremely stressful for me but I will get off and pray that you can help women and all of us and men who have been assaulted as well they're they could be victims correct me they can I don't know if your book takes the consideration men victims and sometimes we minimize that and just want to say women are victims but where are men are and people trans people we all could be victims of sexual you probably had mentioned this already but I'll get off stage thank you Brian thank you Ruksha please take care I wanted to follow up on that for a moment too which is that one of the things I found I interviewed some male survivors and this rhetoric around Title IX that's coming largely from conservatives but it's becoming more palatable to liberals the Title IX administrators in my research mostly identified as liberal there's this ideology that it's about protecting men right but when men were victims this view this this sort of stereotypes that's been created that the Title IX system is going to be biased towards survivors and that men need more protection led male survivors to not go to Title IX because they were afraid they would get investigated when they did go to Title IX that is not what happened but it was extremely rare that they would even consider coming forward or seeking resources at all so this rhetoric if we need to protect men the Title IX system is biased against men is hurting male victims too I bet thank you thank you for that for that very very nuanced and rich answer Nicole and thank you Roxanne thank you very much for for your questions and I'm holding them friends where we're starting to come close to the end of the hour and I want to make sure everyone's questions get aired and this is powerful rich stuff and just on a meta note I want to say how proud I am of this community treating this topic so seriously so thoughtfully and so bravely thank you all we have you were talking before Nicole briefly about police off-campus police versus on-campus authorities in our our Madison Wisconsin friend John Hollandebeck had a question about this with his typical direction he said could this be something a campus cannot deal with why is sexual violence handled internally the campus murder would not you know I'm gonna push back on the premise of this question a little bit because our public universities have their own police departments so even if a victim goes to the police they would still be dealing with their campus there is no off-campus option if violence happens on campus so they so even if you say I'm going off campus the campus authorities will still be involved yeah there were some murders intimate partner violence intimate partner violence murders that happened during my time in the field they happen more commonly than we think even on your own campuses there have probably been some in the past year and those too were handled by the university although they you're right they were mostly handled by the university police not all of them though some of them since intimate partner violence escalates over time some of those cases were involved in the title nine system too at this institution but yeah one of the big things that becomes really difficult when it comes to policing these types of incidents is if a victim lives on campus and their perpetrator lives off-campus then no jurisdiction will take these cases they'll say oh well the victim lives on campus that should be the university police and they'll say well the perpetrator lives off-campus that should be the city police and this is one of the things that provides a lot of cover for white fraternities as well that the police tend to respond the same way to write white fraternities where they say oh that's a campus problem oh that's a city problem because they're often literally one street away from campus in contrast black fraternities will be overpoliced where then both police departments will take ownership and say that's an R jurisdiction so yeah all of the breaking down of police departments and which places you can go to just give all these institutions more control and more leverage to take the cases they want and ignore the cases that they want wow oh that complicates this that's so and you saw this in in your field work as well okay so first of all as usual John thank you for the question and Nicole thank you for this for this answer this is just getting deeper this is more more complex we have a question from Tarleton State University Carl Ajo let me bring this up and Carl I can't remember if it's Ajo or Ajo if this is finished I'm just weighing you at this point so let me know there's a trend in several states including here in Texas to try to ban DEI offices of programming we're doing so make things harder for some sexual assault survivors by taking away some of their spaces absolutely for a series of reasons the most obvious is that DEI does cover sex discrimination a lot of the time as well and it it's these issues a lot of the anti DEI a lot of the anti CRT conversations are often taking aim at feminist studies queer studies all of these places that survivors find safe havens but the other really obvious reason is we often think of the typical campus sexual assault victim as a wealthy white woman but that could not be farther from the truth white women undergraduates made up about 10% of my sample of survivors and I was at a predominantly white institution with a student body who's about 70% white but about half of the survivors in my study were women of color and so when we're talking about taking away DEI initiatives creating hostility towards people of color that also means hostility towards survivors too there's so much overlap in these groups but then the other thing I'll note too is that part of why there's such a lack of interest in Title IX is because of who the victims are because it is part of this broader hostility towards the diversifying of our college campuses college campuses that during some periods of time did not allow women and did not allow people of color to attend and this idea of that's a them problem those aren't our real students those aren't our normal students it's unusual to have a student who's a survivor is still really embedded in our response one of the things I'll hear from a lot of well-meaning professors is they'll ask me for help and they'll say I think I might have a survivor one of my classes someday and how can I support them and how can I do right by them and I'll say you have many survivors in your in every single class every single semester you also have many perpetrators in every single class every single semester and so that's just this is a very normative experience on college campuses but yeah they're very much intertwined and one of the ways that I think the Title IX system is functioning to recreate white supremacy and to create hostility for people of color on campus is that again it's the same group of people who are handling race and gender discrimination at most schools and they would point at the two systems something I heard a lot from the administrators is they would say well how do you expect that we're going to be able to handle these complicated Title IX cases look at how poorly we do with race discrimination and they would say the same thing when people were coming forward with issues of race discrimination and racial harassment they would say well you know we're just we don't do this stuff in general look at how badly we handle Title IX and so the two systems being dysfunctional legitimized that dysfunction for the other one so yes they're very much intertwined you can't really understand what's going on especially on a broader scale without understanding both perspectives at the same time wow that's this gets this gets more and more sinister and more daunting but I you end your article and my sense of your work overall is one that's very constructive that's very positive you're not just saying this is awful and being misstructured that we need to really hear things we can do we had a question that came up in the chat and Kelly I hope you don't mind me hoisting this up from the chat she nicely links together the premise of the of the article that we based today's session on with the possibility of progress she says she or he sorry could you talk about this concept of ruining his life and how to respond to people who use that as an argument to avoid pursuing justice one thing I would say is that since I did follow the perpetrators as well I know that these allegations do not ruin lives that for the one perpetrator who was removed from campus during my year in the field he transferred to another university that was within the same city broader city limits he didn't even have to change apartments he had no interruptions in his education his credits transferred and in fact the dean of students got on the phone to facilitate that transfer so in terms of what a ruin life will look like all of these educational records are private once a perpetrator leaves a college campus this is not going to follow them in any way and so we should push back on that rhetoric of ruins lives in general because it's just empirically inaccurate but the other thing I'll say is that we can do that from a few different ways one is to just not use it ourselves and to not pressure other people that way but the other thing I found and this is the first substantive chapter of the book is that survivors were often socialized into this language of ruined lives into this needing to give mercy to their perpetrators through the title nine system they would come in very sure that they wanted to pursue an investigation that they wanted to remove someone from campus they wanted to make campus safer for others this was especially true when their perpetrators held a position of power over other victims and they knew other people could be affected but then along the way they would encounter this rhetoric from college administrators that would tell them you know you're violating his rights you are mistreating him you're what you're doing is on par with what he did to you and that would lead victims to start to blame themselves to minimize their own experiences of sexual assault and so that's a really big thing to think about is how a lot of this rhetoric about prioritizing the traitor really does come at the expense of the victim and I want to turn to an example I gave at the very beginning of a survivor and a perpetrator that want to take the same college class something survivors often hear is you know we're not going to ask your perpetrator to remove himself from that class because that wouldn't be fair to him and so if you don't like that he's there now you have to move and so actually when it comes to this idea of ruining lives to protect perpetrators we're actually asking victims to make those exact same sacrifices that we think are so unfair for the men who harmed them and we're operating in a logic that's just completely backwards and so I think it's really important to embrace this idea this like very empirically accurate idea that there are always consequences to a sexual assault it is perfectly reasonable for victim and perpetrator to never feel safe around each other ever again and in those cases I think it's completely reasonable to ask the perpetrator is the one to leave I think that's a very reasonable consequence for committing an act of violence against another person that's a very concrete action a very clear one and a one that well first of all Kelly thank you for asking that question that so nicely so nicely ties together so much with today's discussion and speaking to today's discussion Nicole thank you for being so generous with your time your research your thought and your heart this is this is an incredibly vital subject and I'm really really grateful not only to you working with us today this hour but also for you doing this work professionally thank you very much thank you for having me this was a great group this is one of my favorite conversations I've had on this topic in a long time I'm so glad to hear that now one last question for you is how do we keep up with you in your work should we follow you on Twitter or just keep checking on your web page yes Twitter is probably the best way to follow me these days if you're interested in the book you can go to my website which is just necolbadera.com and there is a tab that says book and you can join an email list to get updates for when it's coming out which also makes my publisher very happy that would be the main way I would say is on Twitter and then the other thing I want to offer and I'll put this in the chat but I know that this is a difficult topic and so sometimes people have questions that they wouldn't ask in front of a bunch of their peers in a public space so I put my email in the chat and you are welcome to send me an email after this as well that's incredibly generous of you thank you so much absolutely and in the meantime please accept our thanks we look forward to what you're doing next and enjoy this this slice of summer that is so precious to people in the far north country it's so amazing I'm going to be outside for the next four months oh enjoy enjoy thank you so much but don't go away yet friends let me just point out where we're headed for the next few weeks in fact beyond that and let me again just just second how grateful I am that that we've had such a great powerful discussion that says so much for all of you for your maturity for your kindness and for your deep deep thought we're going to ask will the recording be released of course probably hopefully tomorrow depending on a few things but always I'll show you the link right now in fact if you'd like to keep talking about this you can follow us on Twitter again here's me Brian Alexander or if you want the Shindig events you can find me in Mastodon note if you're using Mastodon this is my new handle could just switch servers hopefully this service will work and of course use the hashtag FTE we have all our recordings up on YouTube so you can just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and again this recording should be up as soon as I can get it crunched out and uploaded if you'd like to look ahead to our other topics because we cover the full range of higher education we have topics including the latest faculty data open education assessment the humanities teaching artificial intelligence the new campus economics just go to forum that future of education that us and you can learn more in the meantime once again thank you all for being with us I really appreciated wherever you are geographically I hope that may and then June are going to treat you very well please take care everybody be safe we'll see you next time online bye bye