Senate Passes Revised Sexual Misconduct Policy

After four years of delays, Columbia officially has a new sexual assault policy on the books.

The policy, which was created by a University Senate task force of mostly non-senator faculty members, students, and administrators, passed unanimously through the University Senate on April 2. The new policy created a standing Presidential Advisory Committee on Sexual Assault, which will conduct all future reviews of the policy instead of the senate.

Unlike during previous review processes for the policy, the campus remained relatively quiet during the months before the new version passed. A student group called Reforming Sexual Assault Policy, led by Melanie Brazzell and Kate Reber, both CC '06, was vocal in advocating for the policy's passage, but the group drew relatively few members. In contrast, hundreds of students put red duct tape on their mouths to protest administrative "red tape" leading up to the last policy's creation in 2000.

"I would say that most of the people we've encountered have been well intentioned, sometimes misinformed, and mostly there's just inertia in the bureaucracy, and so it just takes constant work to push people forward," Brazzell said in February.

Brazzell and Reber became the student faces of one side of the debate this year, with Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student senators Kacy Redd and David Bornstein on the other side. Redd and Bornstein said they approved of the policy as a whole but proposed seven revisions, nearly all of which were voted down.

Most controversially, Redd and Bornstein sponsored an amendment to allow people accused of sexual assault to have attorneys present at their disciplinary hearings. The amendment was ultimately voted down by a 43-9 margin after the task force and central administrators opposed it.

"The [accused] student is really in a difficult position because all the information could be subpoenaed, and so it could be used against him in a criminal court of law," Redd said in explaining why she believed the amendment should pass.

Critics of the proposed amendment countered that it did not make sense to treat sexual assault cases differently than other alleged on-campus crimes. Attorneys are not allowed in any student disciplinary hearing.

The Senate Task Force on Sexual Misconduct, which was chaired by Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of the Humanities Patricia Grieve, did not recommend any major changes, so most people likely would not notice a difference between the new policy and its predecessor.

"They just make the steps of the procedure more clear, and they also provide more support for students," Grieve said the day the policy passed. Some advocates for sexual assault victims had previously criticized the University for not making information for victims sufficiently easily accessible.

Many observers hope the revised policy brings an end to the controversy that has been a fixture of all discussions about sexual assault on campus for years.

After students helped change procedures that they thought were unsupportive of victims in 1999, advocates for the rights of the accused said the policy went too far in the opposite direction. The Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education, which was created by the 2000 policy, went through four directors in a little over three years. The last of those directors, Misumbo Byrd, resigned three weeks after calling on the senate to "rescue the office that you created from a slow and steady death."

Instead, the University eliminated the office altogether, replacing it with the Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Program. That office, headed by Maura Bairley, remains in existence today.