A top University of California, Santa Cruz, administrator declared Tuesday that the institution must go beyond "what is required by law or policy" when handling sexual assault and harassment cases.
Alison Galloway, provost and executive vice chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, wrote a blog post on Medium insisting the university must go "beyond compliance" on these cases, especially those involving faculty.
The chief academic officer in charge of professors, who is retiring at the end of 2016, announced in the post that she will hold a dialogue with Academic Senate leaders, students and faculty members to "define concrete mechanisms that administrators and faculty can adopt." A spokesman for UC Santa Cruz told The Huffington Post that they are still finalizing the details of the forum.
"We, as faculty, must do more than comply with mere law or university policy. Indeed, compliance to these standards is a basic job requirement. Sexual harassment isn’t just a compliance problem; it is a culture problem," Galloway wrote. "And beyond procedures and codes of conduct, we must hold ourselves -- and each other -- accountable for creating a culture of transformative service. I am speaking of service in the Greek sense of the word: caring for others and making their needs a priority."
“We, as faculty, must do more than comply with mere law or university policy.”
- Alison Galloway, UC Santa Cruz Provost
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is investigating UC Santa Cruz and reviewing how it handles sexual assault cases under the gender equity law Title IX. Five of the 10 campuses in the University of California system are currently under investigation.
Activists have complained for years that student-on-student cases were botched at UC campuses. But public accusations in recent months of sexual harassment involving faculty at the Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses further fueled criticism that the UC system is not taking sexual violence as seriously as it should. In some cases, faculty found responsible for sexual harassment were issued with a warning and allowed to keep teaching, as long as they didn't offend again.
Galloway did not directly address those controversies, but she said, "I have seen perpetrators not only remain in academia but advance to positions of leadership."
"Our students get it," Galloway also wrote. "A few weeks ago, I met with a group of students on my campus protesting for stronger protections against sexual harassment and for more faculty accountability. I agree with many of their points and know it is time to take action. I am starting with myself and with my colleagues on the faculty."
Those students are in a group called the Coalition for Survivors Rights, which demonstrated in the library earlier this month, disrupting Galloway's informal office hours. They demanded reforms on how the university addresses sexual violence, including ditching a controversial online session training for students from Campus Clarity that asked them about their sex lives.
"I'm glad that she agreed to bring our demands to Chancellor [George] Blumenthal, and I'm glad that she agreed to hold a town hall, but this isn't far enough," Rachel Kirkwood, a senior at UC Santa Cruz, told HuffPost. "The [campus] administration needs to bring this to the UC Office of the President if they're serious about making a change, and they need to support the students when they speak up."
Jack Davis, another student involved in activism around sexual violence, said he appreciates Galloway's comments, but they were a long time coming. He wants to see what concrete steps are taken and feels like Galloway failed by not acknowledging in her statement that sexual violence is happening on the Santa Cruz campus. "The absence of that admission disappoints me greatly, but I understand that she is in an incredibly difficult position," Davis told HuffPost.
Despite Galloway's planned retirement, she wanted to get reforms on sexual harassment "set in motion" before she leaves, UC Santa Cruz spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason told HuffPost.
"Changing campus culture is work that falls on everyone, and it’s likely there'll be some sort of group to carry the work beyond Alison's retirement," Hernandez-Jason said.
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Tyler Kingkade is a national reporter who covers higher education and sexual violence, and is based in New York. You can reach him at tyler.kingkade@huffingtonpost.com, or find him on Twitter: @tylerkingkade.
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