 My name is Dan Moguloff, I'm with the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs and really pleased to have with us today Professor Sharon Inklis and I'll let me read a little bio. Sharon Inklis is a faculty member who is currently serving as the Chancellor's Special Faculty Advisor for Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment or SVSH Advisor for short. She's been at UC Berkeley for almost all of her professional career after receiving an undergraduate degree in math from Pomona College and a PhD in linguistics from Stanford. She came to UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow in 1990 and joined the faculty in 1992. She's been a professor in the Department of Linguistics ever since. Professor Inklis chaired the Linguistics Department for eight years and has served in a variety of service roles for the campus, including the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects, the Privilege and Tenure Committee of the Academic Senate and as faculty lead for new department chair training. She was appointed by the Chancellor as the campus SVSH Advisor in 2017. And as is usually our custom, Sharon is going to set the table, a little introduction about what she does, where we are, where we're headed in terms of her area of responsibility. I have a few questions of my own and then we'll be reading questions from the audience so without further ado. Thank you Dan and thank you everyone for coming out. A somewhat short notice for this conversation. It's really great to see you here and I look forward to your questions. So, yeah, a few words about what this role is and how I got here. This is a new position, special faculty advisor to the Chancellor on SVSH, Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment and it was created in 2017 on the recommendation of some task forces and committees that were responding to a few years in which the campus was in some state of upset over whether it was handling SVSH incidents as well as it could, preventing, doing as much as it could to prevent SVSH from interfering with the work and lives of its students, staff and faculty. So in 2017, when this position was announced, I read the job announcement and I thought, no way, no human being could do that. It's way too hard and I'm not interested, even though I was really interested in the subject matter and the issues serving on the Privilege and Tenure Committee and serving on the 2016 Chancellor's Joint Administration Senate Committee on SVSH had acquainted me with the importance of addressing SVSH as well as we possibly can as a campus and the deep, deep impact that SVSH can have on students and employees. So I was very interested, but I'm a linguist. I'm a professor of linguistics. I'm not trained in preventing sexual harassment. I'm not trained in public health, law enforcement, investigations, any of the things that are part of a successful process. But I was a department chair for eight years and I know something about helping a talented, committed group of people become more than the sum of its parts and help people to be the best at what they do. And so when I was eventually talked into applying for the position, that's what I brought to it is this ability, I hope, to work with the many talented players on this campus from students in the Student Advocates Office or the Sexual Violence Commission or Greeks Against Sexual Assault to offices like the Path to Care Center, OPHD, our Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination or the Title IX Office, the Gender Equity Resource Center, Social Services at University Health Services, UCPD and the Gender Equity Resource Center and many more. I work with them to make sure that they are coordinating as well as possible with one another, that they have the resources that they need and that we as a campus are presenting a coordinated message to our students, our employees and the community about what our values are and what we're doing. So I think you were actually a little nice in your description, a little gentle in terms of what was happening here on campus a few years ago. I mean, we were really in the eye of the store. So talk a little bit about the road you think we've traveled since then and what we still need to do on the road ahead. Yeah, so in the period before 2016, there were a few years during which there were some high profile cases of SVSH on campus that were in the news. People were upset. They didn't understand what our campus process was and we were understaffed as a campus scrambling to keep up with all of this. And this led to a series of reforms and funding allocations that allowed us to really strengthen our campus process. So I would say that across the board, our prevention efforts, our survivor support efforts and our response efforts have all been strengthened through more staffing, better training of staff, and better information that's available to the community about what we're doing. So on a practical level, how does that play out? I mean, are more people coming forward with the report because they trust the system? Are we providing better care to survivors? What are the metrics that we can assess that sort of the path that we've traveled and the efficacy of the efforts you've described? That's a great question and I think we can answer it from a couple different points of view. One is just our own assessment of what we're doing. We know that we've staffed up. We know that our staff are well trained. But we can also look at caseloads. We can look at the number of survivors who are being supported. We've seen the caseload at confidential resources like Path to Care, which supports survivors at social services, which supports student survivors of sexual assault. We've seen the number of appointments increase greatly, which to us means that more people are aware of the resources and are using them. We also have tools like the My Voice survey, which was a comprehensive survey of the entire campus community that we mounted almost a year ago. It opened in January 2018 and closed in March. And that survey asked students, staff, and faculty on campus whether they had experienced harm, whether they were aware of the resources that they could go to, confidential resources, ways to report. And looking through all of those lenses, we have seen caseloads go up at our investigation and survivor support centers. We have also seen through the My Voice survey that people do have a pretty high level of trust in the campus process. We were pleased to see that. It's not as high as we would like it to be. And through our prevention and education efforts, we're working on that when we do the My Voice survey again. As we hope to, in three years, we'll be able to see if those levels of confidence in the system have increased. So it's interesting you mentioned the survey, and it raises the question of pervasiveness about how pervasive it is. And I remember when all of these high-profile cases were happening, I had a reporter ask me, and she said, why is this happening so much at Berkeley? And I said, innocently. I said, is it? I don't know. I mean, we've had, at the time, I think there were six or eight cases. We're a community of 50,000 people. I said, what are you norming against? I don't know. How many cases are at the company you work for? She didn't know. She said, OK. She said, never mind that. She said, why do you hide it so much? And I said, I don't know. How many cases did you have at NBC News last year? I mean, we're publishing. And so it seemed that we were almost in the category of our own, that somehow the impression was it's happening here more than in other places and that somehow we're less disclosive about. What have you seen? What have you learned both anecdotally and in terms of your engagement professionally and from the survey? Do we have a unique problem here? Are we sort of in line with what's happening, unfortunately, across the country? Yeah, it's a good question. And it's one that I asked, too, when I started in this job coming from linguistics. I didn't know if SVSH was more pervasive here than anywhere else, and so I consulted our experts on campus to ask them. And we did the My Voice survey to find out. And what we learned, what all of the evidence is suggesting to us, is that SVSH, so sexual harassment or various kinds of sexual violence, stalking, relationship violence, we have no reason to think that they're more pervasive here than in any other university or large organization that My Voice results are in line with what we've seen from other surveys of universities nationwide. Of course, one case is a case too many and we want to reduce the numbers as much as we can. But I think the fact that Berkeley is always in the spotlight can sometimes amplify how issues to people. I think as a campus, we definitely have a responsibility for improving, but we don't have a particular reason to think that the problem is different here. So let's just pause it for a second, that staffing, and no reason not to, it seems evident that policies have changed, practices have changed, staffing levels have changed. Well, what about the culture? How do we, is the culture changing? How do we know if it is? And is that something that we should even be concerned about? Yeah, we definitely should be concerned about the culture changing, we want it to change. And one of the reasons that I took this position was that Carol Christ had just been appointed chancellor, and I knew that one of her commitments was to changing the culture and building community, which is so important. SVSH prevention is just part of a bigger task of changing the culture generally to be one that's more respectful, more supportive, and inclusive of students, staff, and faculty. So how do you know if you're succeeding? And again, we have experts from the area of public health, for example, who know how to measure things like this, the way that we chose to measure it, or one of the ways was by asking questions in the My Voice survey, there's a whole set of questions. I don't know, how many people took the survey, probably, thank you for identifying yourself, I didn't mean to force you into doing that, but I appreciate it. Yeah, I would say this room has a slightly higher proportion of survey takers than on the campus as a whole, which is fantastic. Staff, how many staff are in this room? Staff had the highest rates of participating in the My Voice survey, 40%, it was really wonderful. We learned a lot from the people who took the survey, and specifically in answer to your question, we learned a lot from their answers to what we call the social norms question. So social norms are attitudes that people have about what kind of behavior, for example, is appropriate, what's appropriate behavior in the workplace, what's an appropriate way to work with one's student, is it appropriate to blame sexual assault on somebody being drunk, things like that. So we asked a lot of questions in the My Voice survey to assess people's attitudes, and we were really pleased in general to see that social norms attitudes were positive. So people do, in answer to those questions on the My Voice survey, generally believe survivors, they don't blame a sexual assault on the survivor being drunk, they do think that respect is important in the workplace. We also learned from the survey that although people individually hold those positive values which are needed to make up culture, a positive, healthy culture, and get it to change in a healthier direction, even though individuals tended to hold those values, they didn't believe that others did, and so part of changing the culture is getting people to realize that the things they believe are actually norms if you ask people individually, and that is part of changing the culture. It's also something we can measure the next time we do the survey. I'm gonna turn to some questions from the audience now and just to remind those of you may have come in late if you have questions in the process, in the course of the conversation, fill out a card, hold it up, one of our campus ambassadors will pick it up. The first question here actually is something that you and I have talked about in the past, and it's, do you believe that sexual assault among students, and I would actually expand it, sexual assault among anyone on campus, but in this case, students, is better handled by police, the courts, or campuses or why? And I wanna expand that a little because it's one of the questions I get a lot from people don't work on campus, which is why don't you guys just refer these things to the police? How did it happen that universities are in the role of investigating and adjudicating would appear to be crimes? I mean, the criminal justice system struggles with this stuff and we have to handle it. So talk a little bit about again, this in particular about in terms of students, but also generally where that dividing line is between the criminal justice system and campus responsibilities. And if you think roles and responsibilities are lined up right in that regard. Yeah, well that's a very complex question. So I'll try to tackle it bit by bit. So first of all, as a university, we have codes of conduct for our students and our faculty and our staff. And many things that fall under the umbrella of SVSH violate those codes of conduct. And it's very important to us to be accountable to our community to uphold those codes of conduct. And that is why you will see instances of sexual harassment, which is not a crime, or some kinds of sexual assault, which may be crimes, proceeding through the campus process that investigates and adjudicates violations of the code of conduct. There's a system-wide policy, the UC policy on SVSH, violations of that are if substantiated, violations of the faculty and student codes of conduct. So there is that link. But it's also really important to remember that survivors of sexual harassment, sexual violence, have a choice about whether and to whom to report if something happened to them. They might report it to the police and it might then proceed through the criminal justice system if the misconduct violates the law. Not every type of SVSH does violate the law. In fact, not every form of harm even violates the UC policy on SVSH, which is what we as a campus enforce. So survivors have a choice about whether to proceed through the campus process, the Title IX office, or to go to the police or to use the civil court system. Is that for students too? In other words, can a student who comes forward with an allegation that they were assaulted, do they choose where they want their case to be investigated and adjudicated? Well, every survivor has the choice of whether to tell anybody or not. And they do have the choice of who they go to. Interesting. And so in this case, specifically regarding the question that was asked, what would you counsel a survivor? And I know we're being generic and every case is different, but in a broad level. One of our students comes forward with an allegation or having been assaulted. Would you, what would you tend to recommend? Do you think those cases are better handled here or better handled in the district attorney in the police department? Well, I'll be honest, if someone came to me with that question, I would direct them to one of our confidential resources on campus such as the Path to Care Center or social services where they can speak freely without knowing that the person that they talk to is not obligated to report what they're telling them to anybody and can advise or help the survivor decide what's best for them, which option they want to make the free choice to follow. So I am a responsible employee. I'm not a confidential resource. And so if somebody came to me and began to disclose that something had happened to them, I would immediately direct them to a confidential resource. So I actually wouldn't be in the position of giving that kind of advice. Interesting. So we turn to the next question we have from the audience here and it goes to the culture question but a little more specifically. How do we change the power dynamics of academia so advisors have less absolute control over the future of students? This power the person writes breeds abuse in their opinion. It's a really interesting question and it's a faculty member. I think about this a lot when I hear about things that are happening to other people I think back to my own relationships with students that I've advised what the power dynamic is there and it's really easy to forget when one holds power that that's the case. Very easy to pretend that we're equals talking to one another about an interesting academic issue whether it's in a faculty office or in the classroom. But there is a huge power differential and for many students or postdoctoral researchers their future does depend on a very small number of people who write them letters of recommendation give them access to research labs and so on. So I mean there's two ways of thinking about this we could try to change that system somehow and I think there are small ways in which we can do that. I think it's always good for students or postdocs or people with less power to have more than one person that they depend on. So for doctoral students they have a dissertation committee of three or four that's more than one but there still is a small number of people. So we can try to structure our programs so that students have at least a few people that they can go to. But the other way of approaching it is to educate and train the people who have the power so that they're more aware of the impact of their actions and the need to infuse respect and inclusivity into everything that they do. I think often blindness towards the kinds of respectful interactions that are necessary or microaggressions, implicit bias, if those are allowed to occur it creates the kind of environment where worse things like harassment can take root. And so we do a lot of work, my office in cooperation with Path to Care and others on campus in equity and inclusion do a lot of work with academic departments on ways in which they can check themselves and make sure that every arrangement is as respectful and safe as possible. So I think we can approach it from both of those angles and that's very important. I'm sorry to interrupt. No, go right ahead. But it's also important to educate our students in what they deserve to expect in a safe classroom and advising relationship because they're going out into the workforce themselves and we want them to have good role models so that they can spread the culture of respect that we want to see here. Speaking of students, can you sort of get a broad brush description? Are most of the cases that we see, is it student, student and student or student and faculty or student and staff? Just the student population. What is that? Do we have any information on a broad level what that looks like? We do and this was very interesting to me too in my first year on the job because one of the things that this office that I hold was tasked with was writing an annual report that would cover the landscape of SVSH prevention and response activities on campus and do some quantitative analysis. What's happening to who and to what degree and of course the My Voice Survey shed light on this as well. So when you read about like marquee cases in the newspaper you might get the impression that very powerful faculty harassing very students is the typical case and there are certainly some cases like that and they are terrible and we want to prevent them from happening again but statistically what we find both at our Title IX office and also from the results of the My Voice Survey is that students experience the highest rates of incidents of harassment and violence as compared to staff and then faculty have the least. We also find that among, within each of those groups so for example among undergraduate students it is the perpetrator of the harm is most likely to be another undergraduate student. A peer, yes. Not a peer in the sense necessarily of someone you work with as a peer and on a project or something but a fellow undergraduate, yes. Do you find that a little depressing? I mean I do, it's sort of depressing in that the new wave of population who come to campus are carrying all of the legacy issues and problems that we've seen in the past. That every year we have to confront thousands of new students who among them are going to have this same sort of kind of incidence level. Well, I mean I'm unhappy whenever I read about any incident of SVSH but I don't find that particular statistic depressing in the way that you do. Partly I think it's understandable students on our campus both live and work in this environment and so the opportunities, the incidents of harassment are more likely to be among students who are living and working together. Faculty and staff work here but live separately. So in that, and so they're the sphere of people that faculty interact with is much broader than campus, yeah. But it's also an opportunity because unlike with staff and faculty we have the more opportunities to reach students when they come here through orientation to provide them with training and knowledge about how to prevent SVSH, what consent consists of and for students in certain organizations they get that training and education even more often. So speaking about training and education the next question sort of talks about that resource issue. Person writes, it seems that SVSH resources are scattered across campus. Can you talk about where people should go for different needs and should things be more centralized? Yeah, it's a great question. Also, so when I started in this position I somewhat humorously but with some seriousness used the metaphor of the campus being a mosaic that was missing its grout in some ways that we had a lot of, the tiles represented all these wonderful resources that we have on campus but they weren't as connected at least in people's minds as they could be and so I decided I would try to be the grout and flow among them. And yeah, so now I'm looking for a better metaphor because grout isn't really my lifelong aspiration. It's good when you have. I think it's a little higher then. But yes, so whether or not we centralize our resources in one place we can certainly centralize information about our resources and we are working very hard to do that. There's a new website that is associated with my office but is attended as a hub of information for the entire community. It's svshadvisor.berkeley.edu and it's a place where you can go regardless of whether you're a student, staff, or faculty, regardless of whether you want to find out about prevention or survivor support or what our university process for investigating and responding to claims of svsh is it collects all of that information and relates the different offices to one another. So for example, it has a section on confidential resources which I think was maybe part of the question that you read, what are some of the types of resources that we have available. So we have a number of confidential resources. Confidential resources is a technical term. It means that the person or office that is referred to by the term resource will hold information about svsh misconduct confidential and not reported to the authorities. And there is actually a handout on every other seat that has a list of campus resources including our confidential resources. So the one that serves the entire population, students, staff, and faculty is path to care, a confidential resource that does both survivor support and prevention education. For students, a confidential resource is social services at university health services. For staff and faculty, employee assistance or be well at work, I think it's known by both terms is a confidential resource. The ombuds offices for staff and students are also confidential resources. So that is a collection of offices that are in different locations, even in different sections of campus but they all perform this function of being a confidential resource. So speaking of confidentiality, this next question sort of touches on that as well and it goes as follows. The My Voice survey requires a login with an individual identification code or number. That can distort the data this person writes on how many people experience SVSH issues as it compromises anonymity. How do you mitigate that? Yeah, that was a very important consideration for the working group that designed and worked with an outside company on the My Voice survey and in fact we made the choice to work with an outside firm precisely so that they would be the ones to hold the data and we would never be able to link anybody's UC identifier with the answers that they gave to the survey. Anonymity or confidentiality is very important to any survivor or respondent in a case and so we will never be able to link an individual's identity to their responses. Furthermore, when we get the aggregated data it will be analyzed and redacted so that we will never be able through comparison of for example a person is in a particular unit on campus and is a certain age, we'll never be able to use that information to be able to identify anybody. So NORC, the research firm at the University of Chicago that we worked with on the survey is working with their data board to ensure that the kind of data that we get will never be able to be used to identify anybody and that's crucially important in a survey like this. This next question is interesting. It says, will there be any changes to CALS and by extension I would assume the UC's SVSH policy if when the new federal Title IX regulations are implemented. I'm assuming this person is referring to some of the equations that the Secretary of Education announced and perhaps you could for those who may not be up to speed maybe briefly summarize what those changes are, where things stand and again the impact they could have here on our campus. Yeah, I'd be happy to. So this question refers to two different things. One is the UC policy on SVSH which guide all campuses and how they investigate and respond to allegations of SVSH and the other is Title IX regulations to which the Department of Education led by Betsy DeVos has proposed some fairly significant implementational changes. Both the UC policy and the Title IX regulations are currently in a review period. The new SVSH policy is slated to come out in February. The UC one, right. So I'll start I think by saying what the major proposed changes are to the Title IX regulations that could affect us. So as many of you probably know, if you've been reading articles about Betsy DeVos and the proposed changes, many of them are geared towards ensuring respondents' rights or the rights of the accused in the process. A number of the proposals that DeVos has made don't really affect us because they ensure rights that we already provide. So our process for investigating allegations made to the Title IX office has opportunities for both parties, the complainant, that's the survivor, the respondent, the accused to be informed about the process to ask questions. But some of the changes, so that's a change that some campuses might have to make but not ours. Other changes that are being proposed would affect what we do quite seriously. And the office of the president, or so system like has named these. So the one that people talk about the most I would say is the requirement to hold a live hearing in which survivors are cross-examined by the accused or their attorneys. When you say live, do you mean public? I hope not, but I mean in person, hearing sort of trial-like where the survivor and the respondent or the accused are in the same room and can ask questions of each other. That is not the way our process works for students. We do provide the opportunity for respondents to submit questions and for the survivor to submit questions that will be asked of the other party in the course of the investigation and the determination of discipline. But we don't put them in the same room with one another. Doing so would be what Suzanne Taylor, our system-wide Title IX coordinator called inherently intimidating and wholly unnecessary. It's a re-traumatization of survivors that we feel is unnecessary and have designed our policies to avoid. So that would be a traumatic change to our policies. That's one example. I mean, just to play devil's advocate for a second, I'm to channel some of the things that I've read and I think many of us have read that these changes that DeVos announced were in response to the perception some have that the pendulum swung too far in one direction. There were anecdotal cases where it seemed that the respondents or people who had been accused of engaging in activity was, it seemed unjust and inequitable and that things had gone too far. Do you think there's any validity to that sense that some seem to have that the Secretary of Education seems to be responding to? Well, I think to anyone who's a party in a case or to their friends and family, that case looms large for them and affects their view of where the pendulum is. But in our view, we need a process that's fair and balanced and provides rights to both parties and that is why our UC policy on SVSH is being revised yet again to make sure that our process, our policies and procedures are as fair to everybody as they possibly can be. Sort of in the same general sense, sorry I misplaced the question I was gonna, this one, in the moment victims of sexual harassment sometimes don't know what to say or do. Is there any way to teach some useful approaches without seeming to endorse the status quo or blame the victim? This may be somebody you wanna refer to one of our offices or maybe there's some words of wisdom and guidance you'd like to offer. Yeah, so I think the question here is about people who are hearing from someone else that they suffered harm and one of the things that we learned from the My Voice survey is that survivors of SVSH often tell a friend or a family member first. They don't necessarily go first to the police or to a confidential resource on campus or to our Title IX office, OPHD. We do train our employees on how to be a humane and effective responsible employee and refer survivors who are disclosing harm to a confidential resource. But we also train them on how to do that in as kind of way as possible. So it's not an easy thing to do and people in the moment often forget what they've learned. And so, excuse me. I'm fine, thank you. One of the projects that the My Voice survey action team is working on, so this is a team that reviewed the findings of the My Voice survey and identified some key findings that we could respond to with actions of what we call action steps. One of the action steps that people are currently working on is producing some materials that are easy to find for friends and family, for people receiving information on how to support a survivor in a trauma informed way. So it's interesting, I have to say the questions are excellent that are here and they're very brass tacky. And I mean that in a positive way that clearly people want concrete information as you'll see from the next few questions. I mean, it sort of points the difficulty of communicating and providing information to a diffused decentralized community. Is that one of the frustrations of this job? Do you sort of feel like you could meet with every one of the 50,000 people here sometime? I do wish I could sometimes. And I meet with as many individuals and groups as I can. I'm always open to invitations to meet with anybody. So I'm not a confidential resource and I'm not a Title IX officer. I don't investigate, I don't provide confidential support. But what I can do is educate people about our process and I specialize and particularly enjoy working with academic departments on how to structure their activities, how to do prevention oriented workshops that help infuse some of the prevention principles into ordinary academic life. So speaking about prevention, we'll go right to the next great brass tax question. Can you describe what is in place as part of your work to address active retaliation against formal complainants and witnesses? Yeah, so retaliation against somebody who has reported an incident to our Title IX office or has served as a witness in an investigation. Retaliation is against the UC policy on SVSH. It's a policy violation and we very much want to stop retaliation, prevent it from happening and if it does happen, it's a violation that itself could be investigated and result in this one. Let's say you've witnessed it or experienced it, what do you do? Yeah, if you've been retaliated against for reporting or seen someone else, that can be reported to the Title IX office and they would look into it as a policy violation. So here's another interesting question. How can we best engage male allies, students, staff and faculty to improve the cultural norms? Well, we need every ally we can get, including males and engaging men is one of the priorities. I don't know if it's an action step all by itself but it's certainly part of the action step about changing undergraduate culture and providing more education to undergraduates. Getting men involved, whether it's as active bystanders which we train all of our students to be, whether it's leaders in the ASUC, the student government, whether it's leadership in Greek life, we benefit as a community if men are fully engaged. And I've been talking about students because in my mind, I'm thinking of some students who have been particularly active in engaging men but it's also true of staff and for faculty. I'll hone in just for a second on the student population again, something just reminded me, again, the kind of thing that I hear a lot and I think a lot of us hear a lot when we're talking to folks off campus. And that's the extent to which alcohol is a key driver of what's happening in the student population. Does that line up with the results of the survey and the anecdotal evidence and the sort of cases that you're seeing? How big is alcohol in and of itself a problem with that population group? Well, so alcohol abuse is of course a health issue. That's right, yeah, abuse, yes. Yeah, I can't speak with particular knowledge to alcohol use or abuse. I can talk a bit about the perception that it is often involved in SVSH situations and it can be a factor in reducing inhibitions, making people forget some of the things they know. It is not the cause of sexual assault or sexual harassment, it is sometimes correlated with it. A lot of harassment and assault happens at parties in housing where we also know alcohol is present and students at orientation are trained both in healthy habits around alcohol and in what consent consists of, affirmative consent. And so we do try to address that problem. It's part of the more general picture of creating a healthy culture. You're sort of, it seems like a bureaucratic question, but I think it also goes to people trying to sort out who does what. How is your role different or complementary to the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion? During a Title IX investigation is the level that actually there are two separate questions. Let's take these one at a time. So equity and inclusion would seem to overlap because certainly there's issues of equity and inclusion involved when it comes to both SV and SH. So talk a little bit about how that gets split out and divided. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing to think about and I do think about this a lot, the relationship between SVSH which is sometimes siloed and talked about as if it were an island versus more general issues of equity and inclusion which we have a whole division with that name to address. And I think that addressing SVSH, that preventing it involves the same principles that we appeal to and the same values that underlie our efforts to promote inclusion and diversity and respect. That when you have disrespect or lack of inclusivity it can lead to bullying, it can lead to people being excluded, it can lead to sexual harassment. So from a general conceptual point of view I think they're very closely linked and I work very closely with people who are in the division of equity and inclusion, for example the Gender Equity Resource Center or the subdivision of equity and inclusion that's called climate that has a lot of things in it. And sometimes I wonder why am I not there or why are they not with me? But a reason to keep them separate is that we have a tight online office and a UC policy on SVSH and a lot of rules that are specific to SVSH. So it is a coherent subfield but I think ultimately the closer we work together with equity and inclusion the more reasonable and coherent our approach will be. So I like that implicit suggestion that we join forces. Yeah, so this next question actually goes back and touches on that adjudication question that we're really set up to do that at any university is and I'm gonna actually broaden it. But the question is written is during a Title IX investigation is the level of substantiation different for faculty, staff and students? And in other words preponderance of evidence versus clear and convincing evidence. Let's just take that I wanna expand the field of this particular inquiry. Let's just take that one chunk though first. That's great. So I'll begin by saying that a lot of times when people talk about a Title IX investigation they might be thinking about the whole arc from the moment an allegation is made to the very end where discipline is imposed. But actually Title IX investigations are only part of that broad arc. They're just the investigation part and they are handled by our Title IX office, OPHD Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination. What that office does is the same for students, staff and faculty. It uses the same procedures. It applies the same standard which is an evidentiary standard called preponderance of the evidence more likely than not. So it doesn't the status of the respondent student, staff or faculty, the status of the complainant student, staff or faculty doesn't matter. The OPHD part is the same. The subsequent part, the disciplinary part is different for students and for faculty and for different types of staff. The adjudication procedures and the disciplinary options depend a lot on a person's employment status. For historical reasons and for legal reasons we have different codes for different types of employees and for students. And so the details, the logistics of how discipline is arrived at and imposed will differ for each group but we strive as a campus and one reason my position was created was to oversee this effort. We strive to be as consistent as possible to hold the same values, to hold people accountable in the same ways for misconduct regardless of status. So in that regard I think we're touching on an issue which has attracted a lot of public attention. I've noticed in my job that we run into reputational trouble when we forget that the public's looking over our shoulder or that we have processes here that people just don't get it. And one of those is the faculty conduct process. We do a Title IX investigation and we do another investigation once and they're both kind of opaque and we don't really know what's going on and it takes forever and it's not clear who has the last word. How should that, does that process, faculty conduct process which some believe was set up to handle a very different set of indiscretions or policy violations or and to protect academic freedom. Is it suited to handle these kind of cases? Does it need to be changed and do we have any hope of sort of gaining the public's trust with a system that's so opaque and confusing when it comes to faculty conduct? Yeah, so there's a lot of questions kind of packed in there. One is, yeah. Sorry. So or presuppositions I guess. So one is that the faculty process is opaque. I'm saying how it appears. I didn't mean to sort of render judgment but a lot of people look from the outside in and say, I mean they'll say the Title IX investigation found Professor X likely to and he's still teaching the course. What the heck are you guys doing? Yeah, so with all cases whether it's students, staff or faculty there are a lot of privacy and confidentiality considerations that prevent us from talking about any particular case and its outcome. So for students, their records are protected by FERPA federal regulations. We can't share their information with anybody. For staff and faculty again, employment law prevents us from sharing information about a particular individual's status and the outcome. That doesn't mean that we can't shine sunlight on the process and if you have seen the annual report or want to take a look at the copy that's outside on the table, you'll see some flow charts and infographics that we've developed to try to make the process as transparent as possible in general, not for any individual who's going through it but what the steps are and why one particular process might take a long time. So a case, an individual case can and always will be opaque. We're not allowed to talk about it but the steps that it goes through those should be visible and if they're not then we're not doing a good enough job in explaining what they are and making that information really easily accessible. Are you suggesting that some reforms might be in order then in terms of the faculty conduct process? We have made some reforms. So you mentioned the two investigations that used to be the case. It used to be for faculty but not other populations, students and staff. It used to be the case that after a Title IX investigation of a faculty member there would be a subsequent investigation by Senate faculty of the same events looking at the same evidence. That has been eliminated system wide. We no longer do that and another reform that we've made to the process is to shorten the time, particularly in the faculty adjudication stage. So the faculty adjudication process is complicated because there's two ways that a case might resolve. It might go through the Privilege and Tenure Committee which is the way that faculty impose discipline upon other faculty. It's like a hearing or the case could be settled without going to a hearing and the kind of interplay between those two processes could take a long time. We have shortened the amount of time that negotiations can take place. I realize in my questions I may be perpetuating something that isn't right and that is we're focusing on students and faculty and it seems as if staff somehow or sometimes get lost in the shuffle are not as visible. Talk to me a little bit about that portion of the campus population and what you perceive and where we are and what's unique about the challenges or opportunities in that regard. Yeah, I think it is true often when people talk about SVS-H they have a kind of canonical typical example in their mind that they're thinking about and often it's a white heterosexual couple where the man has the power and the woman doesn't. That's perhaps the example that we read about most often in the newspapers and on our campus maybe the man is a faculty member and the woman is a student. So that might be the example that springs to mind but it's not actually the typical case and so a lot of people are made invisible when we focus on that particular example. So people of color, staff, LGBTQ. What we found in the My Voice survey is that people in communities that are often called marginalized people of color, people living with disabilities experience SVS-H at higher rates and people in multiple such groups experience at even higher rates yet they're not the ones that are in the headlines that people immediately think of when they read about these cases. And staff I would say are another group that are not the group that people immediately think of when they think of our efforts to prevent and respond to SVS-H. So one of the responses that we as a leadership group on campus are making to the results of the My Voice survey is to elevate awareness of staff, of their importance, of their needs and also increase our efforts to make staff aware of the resources that are available to them. Interesting. Let me go back to a question from the audience thanks for that. Actually I'll just stay with staff for a second. And are there other new programs under consideration or reforms on the staff side or new efforts that we wanna be on the lookout for in terms of what's on the horizon? Yeah, well first I should start by saying that staff is a short word for a hugely diverse group of people who work in very different circumstances and have very different needs. And we are recognizing in general for the community but I would say especially for staff that it's really important that our information be accessible in a way that's tailored to different subparts of the community. So not staff as a whole, but people in different kinds of roles and different sectors of campus, people who work with computers, people who don't, people who are supervisors, people who are not. The needs for information resources are all a bit different and we need to tailor our resources much better. We're also talking about building prevention efforts and education into staff onboarding in a much more intentional way. And this is one of the action steps that has been undertaken in response to the My Voice survey. And we are working on that this spring. So that's something to look out for except that you've all been onboarded so maybe you won't see it. But if you are onboarding others, you may see it in the materials. Got it. So we have time for just a couple of more questions and both will come from the audience. Does the Title IX officer work to defend the university if there is a Title IX lawsuit? And I'm assuming that this person is asking because you're not involved with sort of the athletic side of Title IX and I'm assuming they're talking about a lawsuit involving sexual violence or sexual harassment. Anyway, so does the Title IX officer work to defend the university? Is information they collect used? And if so, how can we suggest students talk to them without their own legal representation? So I think the second part is based on some supposition or concern that our employees are somehow getting engaged after receiving confidential information from a survivor. Are they engaged in defending the university against allegations in the future? Right, it sounds like there's maybe a little bit of a conflict of interest question baked in there. Yeah, right. So our Title IX office aims to be a neutral office that investigates allegations and determines interviews, witnesses collect evidence and determines by a preponderance of evidence if there was a policy violation. They also work to intervene and stop harm that's occurring through interim measures. They are not the defenders of the university. When there's a lawsuit, we leave that to our crack legal team and two lawyers at the university, but yes. Here's a quick yes or no. Is the campus considering supporting UCOP membership in Calypso, which is a website for reporting? Yeah, I've read a bit about Calisto. It has a property that intrigues many people, which is that people can make a contingent complaint which is looked at only if somebody else makes a related complaint. Yeah, we use a different system for a different database at our Title IX office and a different method of intake. But this is something that I've been hearing more and more questions about. So I think our Title IX officer will be preparing a response and an explanation of the pros and cons of that particular system. Super, so we have reached the end of our time. I just wanna note that on February 27th and our next campus conversation will be joined by Oscar DeBone, the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion. I wanna thank all of you for really an incredibly interesting and probing set of questions and I wanna thank Sharon for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.