Six months after Dartmouth’s Summit on Sexual Assault, expert opinions are mixed about whether the summit reached its goals and proved effective. While participants had aimed to reconvene six months after the summit, College spokesperson Diana Lawrence said in an email that the University of California at Berkeley is hosting a meeting in February, and Dartmouth representatives have met with other institutions regarding a potential meeting in summer of 2015.
Lawrence said that since the summit, the College has presented information about what they have learned and implemented at Dartmouth with members of the New Hampshire Congressional delegation, which is currently considering proposed federal legislation. She said she is pleased to see increased national dialogue about sexual assault following the summit.
John Damianos ’16, co-chair of the student advisory board behind planning the summit, said his primary goal for the conference was to learn from the speakers in attendance. Summit presenters included David Lisak, a top researcher in the field of sexual assault, and several White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault members.
Lisak was unable to be reached for comment.
Damianos said that the experts were useful for learning at both the administrative and the personal level.
“Our goal was to learn from them how we can apply the most contemporary evidence-based approaches to Dartmouth,” Damianos said. “I think we made a very good step in the right direction. We were able to form connections with these experts.”
Damianos cited the proposed issuance of regular campus-wide climate surveys as a specific example of progress achieved as a result of the summit. This change follows suggestions by several expert speakers at the conference who said surveys are the most effective method of accurately monitoring campus climate.
Damianos said that he has joined with students from other universities who attended Dartmouth’s summit to create a student-run network that continues collaboration to combat sexual assault across the country. Schools represented in the network include Amherst College, Bucknell University and other New England liberal arts schools. Damianos said that hearing about problems specific to other schools helps add perspective and inspires solutions to Dartmouth’s problems.
Simona Sharoni, professor of gender and women’s studies at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, and co-founder of Faculty Against Rape, expressed skepticism about the summit’s effectiveness. Sharoni described the national impact as “minimal.”
The summit was not simply a result of a nationwide sexual assault epidemic, she said, but also a strategic and sometimes offensive public relations move.
“It’s a no-brainer that we need campus climate surveys — this has been an effective tool for decades,” Sharoni said. “The problem is that campuses use one-size-fits-all evaluation. They use language that is offensive to survivors.”
Sharoni said that even today, schools use surveys generated by for-profit companies instead of listening to experts about how best to structure them.
“If I had the choice between hosting a summit with national leaders for one day or listening to survivors testify on how the system failed them, I would do the latter,” Sharoni said.
A more effective summit also would have included more faculty, Sharoni said, as they are often among the most effective actors in reducing campus assault.
“Institutional memory on the part of students is difficult, but faculty stay,” said Sharoni. “Faculty who are tenured are a force to be reckoned with, and I see no attention to the role of faculty in holding administration accountable.”
Sharoni said that the makeup of the speakers in general seemed to favor the administration.
“It seems biased towards an administrative perspective, rather than an acknowledgement that the impetus to discuss this issue is because survivors said enough is enough and took risks, took great risks,” Sharoni said. “History is extremely important here. We have a new movement emerging that, if you looked at the conference, you wouldn’t know. You have to begin with survivors and their advocates.”
The lack of sexual assault survivors on the Summit’s panel was particularly disturbing, Sharoni said.
“It’s like we are on the battlefield, and there are wounded people, and we are talking about how to best treat the wounds without looking at the wounded,” Sharoni said.
Sharoni cited several effective administrative methods of combating campus sexual assault, including integrating information into freshman orientation schedules and teaching courses that touch on the relevant issues. Dartmouth, and colleges in general, also need to instate a true zero-tolerance policy and hold students, fraternities and athletes accountable, Sharoni said.
“I see nothing in the agenda from 2014 that is new,” said Sharoni.
Sharoni also said that accountability must come from within. Because so many colleges have been implicated for sexual assault violations at the federal level, it is no longer a damaging label for a college to have, she said.
Ruth Anne Koenick, director of violence prevention and victim assistance at Rutgers University, spoke positively about the value of conferences and dialogue for moving toward minimizing sexual assault.
“Whenever you can bring people together to talk about it, it’s a good thing,” she said. “People bring the lessons back to their own campuses and hopefully continue the conversation.”
Koenick said that though each campus is unique, any sort of meeting that brings people together to have “intelligent, intentional conversations about sexual violence” will have positive results. Koenick, who has been working in the field for 45 years, recalled a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when people refrained from discussing sexual assault at all.
“Forty, 35, 30 years ago, this wasn’t something we talked about,” Koenick said. “To have a school host something and say, ‘You know, we want to have a conversation about how to change things,’ what can be wrong about that?”
As for the future of sexual assault summits, Sharoni said Cornell University will host a summit with other Ivy League schools on April 28.
