Occidental College has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to resolve an investigation into the California campus’s handling of reported sexual violence.
The department said in a news release that the college had voluntarily resolved the inquiry before the federal office, known as OCR, had completed its inquiry.
In its letter of findings, OCR said it had concluded that “the preponderance of the evidence does not support a conclusion that the college violated Title IX, except with respect to the issue of promptness in several cases during the 2012-13 school year.”
The resolution of the Occidental investigation is notable because the college has seen some of the most heated and public protests of any campus over the issue of sexual violence. A report on the findings of an outside audit once stated that a “stark polarization” on the campus had threatened to stifle the college’s progress on the issue.
The department said that it had found insufficient evidence that the college had fostered a hostile environment or that the college had retaliated against students and faculty members who had pushed Occidental to change its policies.
Still, the department said its investigation had revealed “concerns in some areas.” They included “actions by college administrators to discourage students from speaking up about their experiences with sexual violence,” the department said, as well as a climate survey that suggested that students were not reporting sexual-assault complaints.
“The close of this investigation does not mean an end to our efforts to make Oxy safe for all of our students,” said Jonathan Veitch, Occidental’s president, in a letter to the campus. The college has made “significant progress” in dealing with sexual assaults, he said, but there was more work to be done. He cited the college’s resolution agreement with the department, calling it a “first step in that continuing process.”
In the agreement, the college pledged to offer mandatory annual training for all employees on the Title IX grievance process and how to prevent retaliation against complainants, provide OCR with three years of complaint files to monitor their prompt resolution, and continue to conduct an annual climate survey.
Mr. Veitch said a separate Education Department review of the college’s compliance with the campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act was still in progress.
OCR’s resolution of the Occidental case is just the third resolution of a federal sexual-violence investigation this year, and one of those inquiries was conducted by the Justice Department. Track hundreds of other investigations using The Chronicle’s Title IX tracker:
Sara Lipka contributed to this article.