Swarthmore College students win reform of sexual misconduct policies, 2013

Swarthmore College is a small, private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Originally founded as a Quaker school, it purports a deep commitment to social justice and equity. In the spring of 2013, however, the college experienced a period of protests and unrest in the student body over a number of overlapping issues. 

Among these, many students expressed concerns and frustration over Swarthmore College’s failure to adequately comply with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or Clery Act, by failing to report and address cases of sexual assault on campus, as the Clery Act requires. On 7-8 April 2013, the college held a referendum on the school’s Greek life, which is composed of gendered social clubs called fraternities and sororities. The referendum was held in response to student concerns over fraternities’ facilitation of sexual violence. However, the referendum did not receive wide enough support from students and ultimately resulted in no actual changes. During this referendum, a staff member approached some of the students involved and shared stories of Swarthmore College systematically failing to document and investigate reports of sexual assault, even destroying evidence in one case. Students raised these complaints during a time when similar campaigns were occurring across many US colleges.

On 15 April 2013, Rebecca Chopp, president of Swarthmore College, announced that the college would begin an independent review of its sexual misconduct policies. Some of the students raising the concerns, however, regarded this step as insufficient, given the school’s history of noncompliance with laws on handling reports of campus sexual violence.

On the morning of 18 April, two sophomores, Mia Ferguson and Hope Brinn, filed a federal complaint against Swarthmore College for violation of the Clery Act. They brought six allegations of misconduct against the college for: discouraging students from reporting crime to local law enforcement that could result in formal judicial proceedings; persistently underreporting sexual battery, sexual assault, and rape in the Annual Clery Security Report; persistently underreporting such incidents in the daily crime log; failing to issue reports of such incidents in a timely manner; failing to publicly report sanctions for such incidents; and intimidating, discriminating, and otherwise retaliating against victims of such incidents and their advocates. Ferguson and Brinn filed their complaint along with testimonies from ten other students. They also enlisted support from Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, who co-wrote a similar complaint against the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in January of 2013.

The next day, 19 April, Ferguson and Brinn began preparing to file a second complaint against Swarthmore for violating Title IX, a civil rights law enacted in 1972 preventing sex-based discrimination in all education programs that receive funding from the federal government. By the following week, students and alumni of the college began to organize in greater numbers. Ferguson and Brinn founded the Sexual Assault Prevention and Student Advocacy Group, or SAPSA, a group similar to the existing Sexual Misconduct Advisors and Resource Team but intended to address a wider array of legal issues; Ferguson later portrayed SAPSA as a response to the administration’s failure to deal with sexual assault appropriately. Alumni, meanwhile, circulated an online petition over the same failure.

On 26 April, Ferguson announced her filing of the second complaint against Swarthmore, this one for Title IX violations, in a press conference held in front of Independence Hall. She declared that Department of Education investigations were the only way for the school to address its “pervasive institutional problems,” expressing a need for drastic measures that elicited these formal complaints.

On 2 May 2013, President Chopp announced the beginning of the external review of Swarthmore’s sexual misconduct policies with support from a Sexual Misconduct Task Force with faculty and student members. She also pledged to fully cooperate with any investigation the Department of Education decided to pursue.

Activists took further action on 4 May, when Swarthmore’s Board of Managers held an open meeting with the divestment action group Mountain Justice to discuss fossil fuel divestment with students and community members. In response to another discriminatory action that occurred a few days earlier, Mountain Justice  decided to occupy the meeting and turn it into an open forum for students to voice their concerns. Around one hundred students entered the room and interrupted the first speaker, shifting the meeting from a series of presentations from the Board followed by a Q&A session to an open forum for declaring concerns, a change the Board accepted. The entering students held posters and banners confronting the Board. A number of students spoke on issues of sexual assault, including Brinn, who called on Swarthmore’s leadership to “take immediate action.” Other students proposed the creation of a victim advocacy group and called for accountability over the administration’s failures.

Following this meeting, on 6 May, students held a community action meeting in Parish hall during which they presented a list of demands to the college: the creation of an Office of Survivor Advocacy, immediate removal of confidentiality of sexual assault cases, immediate implementation of emergency alerts for sexual violence in accordance with the law, a public apology from the administration for their mistreatment of sexual assault survivors under federal law, and at least one all-gender bathroom in every dormitory.

Ultimately, the college addressed and met several of these demands. The college created two administrative positions: one to advocate for victims and the other to handle accused perpetrators of sexual assault during adjudication. The college also fired the Drug and Alcohol counselor and advisor to the fraternities, who was known for mishandling sexual assault cases. They also created at least one all-gender bathroom in each dorm. 

The college also took further action from May 2013 to December 2014, establishing a Title IX House to help address concerns over sexual violence, as well as a number of other improvements to their personnel, policies, procedures, training, and resources. In a statement to the news agency WHYY in July 2013, Ferguson expressed a measure of satisfaction with the changes but stressed that the student body would be watching Swarthmore’s implementation and continued support.