Dickinson College Sit-In Ends With Stricter Policies for Sexual Assault

March 7, 2011, 2:16 pm

Students at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pa., ended their occupation of an administration building on Saturday after senior administrators agreed to demands for stricter sexual-assault policies, including alerting students of any reported incident and making expulsion the only available penalty for rape.

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eajmtp2

The resolution of this issue speaks well of both the students and the rest of the community at Dickinson College who addressed matters of great concern in a civil and open-minded fashion.

However the roots of the issue involved a set of thornier concerns regarding due process as can be gathered from the report in the Pittsburg Post Gazette: “Seeds of the sit-in were sown last month when a group of students drafted a letter asking administrators to intervene in a sexual assault case and expel a male student. The letter was never sent, but administration officials learned of it and expressed concerns about using the male student’s name in a meeting with the letter’s authors.”

As the protestors saw it the unnamed student’s presence on campus had contributed to a sense of “palpable fear.” While this fear was genuine, it obviously had to be counterbalanced against the unnamed student’s right to a fair and impartial hearing. The requirement for confidentiality in this matter was obviously a source of distress for the protestors. But their initial willingness to violate the rules regarding confidentiality was hardly justified simply by that. These conflicting concerns created the sort of problems that put administrators on the spot and their effectiveness in resolving them is what justifies their salaries. It is my sense that Dickinson College’s leaders more than earned their keep.

At the same time, there is a larger lesson from such problems. They underscore the need for collegiality and the importance of grounding students in an understanding of their roles as members of a community. They illustrate the need to provide students in general with a more solid knowledge of the principles and processes used by the college disciplinary and grievance system long before issues arise. In this case, the students have expressed their interest in such information by asking for a consolidated document describing what is involved in filing complaints. However the process as a whole should be taken further by the higher education community as a whole through reflecting on and discussing these types of concerns in a way that can reinvigorate our sense of shared values and purposes in the face of a tendency to let them lapse into discussions of legalisms and business considerations.
lawman

If there is to be only one penalty for rape, I would like to know the college’s definiton of the crime. I would also like to know what level of proof the college requires to demonstrate that such a crime was indeed committed. To me, due process is and should be a paramount consideration in any criminal allegation.
katisumas

I’m confused. Isn’t rape a felony? Isn’t it up to the criminal justice process to deal with it?

On the other hand if students do know that someone is raping women (or men for that matter) it’s understandable that they’d be afraid, particularly if they know who this person is and are terrified of encountering him after dark in a deserted area of the campus.

I don’t think “collegiality” applies to felony crimes.