Senior Executive Vice President, Daniel Swinton, quoted in The Courant

Feds Will Investigate Title IX Complaint Against UConn

The senior executive vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management said cases can take from six months to as long as three to five years.

"It's a long process," Daniel C. Swinton said. "They'll come in and they'll do an investigation, which is really more like an audit. They'll ask to see anywhere between the last three to five years of sexual assault complaints …"

He said the Office for Civil Rights has the power to pull federal funding from a school, but has never done so. "What they are looking for is compliance," Swinton said. "They seek voluntary compliance" to Title IX regulations.

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Brett Sokolow, NCHERM Group President and CEO, interviewed in Campus Security Report on the civil rights investigation model

Brett A. Sokolow, an attorney who serves as the executive director of ATIXA and managing partner of NCHERM, a law and consulting firm specializing in higher education risk management, recently explained how the model works during a webinar.

“If you look across our entire society, you will find that just about every entity but colleges and universities uses a form of civil rights investigation procedures, so we really are the anomaly,” he said. Federal case law has established that students must be given due process rights prior to being disciplined. But too often, such cases devolve into episodes of he said/she said. That can further traumatize the victim or victimize a wrongly accused individual. The civil rights model ensures the rights of the accusing and accused party are roughly in balance. “It’s not about creating parity but equity,” Sokolow explained. “If we do something for one person, why not do it for the other?”

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