Yesterday, Al Jazeera America carried an opinion
piece decrying the corporatization of colleges with respect to
responding to sexual violence. Dana Bolger, who wrote the opinion piece,
is one of the founders of Know Your IX.
Certainly corporatization is concerning, but Ms. Bolger would have
readers believe that all college administrators care about is the bottom line,
how they look in the press and how to avoid liability. As someone who
works with administrators every day, I find they are empathic, caring and
engaged in what is best for students, for the most part. Any field has
its corruption, but a blanket assertion of the evils of the corporate
university does a disservice to how hard most university administrators work to
make their campuses safe and responsive to student concerns.
Ms. Bolger also took issue with a previous Tip of the Week
we wrote, entitled "Twenty Steps to OCR-Proof Your Campus on Title IX.”
Bolger offered it up as a prime example of the corporate evil of
colleges, so I took another look at it to see what was so offensive in what we
wrote. Actually, I like the content so much we’re going to run it again.
View the original Tip of the Week here.
I’m sorry Ms. Bolger didn’t like the title, but I think keeping OCR off of
college campuses is a good thing when there is no reason for OCR to investigate
a campus. The Tip is about doing the right thing so that a campus is
compliant, and OCR has no basis to investigate. Bolger characterizes it
as advice to “avoid” an OCR investigation, but that’s smear language. It’s
advice to prevent an investigation. Read it for yourself.
Does Know Your IX just want more investigations for the sake
of investigations, or does it actually want colleges to do the right thing and
fully comply with or exceed the requirements of law? Hopefully, it’s the
latter. If that is all she can cherry-pick to mischaracterize us, she may
be hoping no one actually clicks the link. I wonder how many of our 20
recommendations Ms. Bolger actually disagrees with? I’ll hope she’ll post
on that.
Know Your IX has done much good with its activism and
advocacy, and Ms. Bolger’s leadership and courage is to be commended. The
credibility of Know Your IX and its work will be measured by the accuracy of
the complaints it files and the opinion pieces it writes. Fuzzy math
won’t help. Ms. Bolger adds 2+2 and comes up with 5 when she asserts that a
majority of the 61 campuses currently under investigation by OCR are listed by
The NCHERM Group as clients. Our client list includes 17 years of campus
clients. Some haven’t been clients in a decade, but used our services at
some point. Other campuses used our services for something completely
unrelated to Title IX. So, I’d like to help Ms. Bolger with her math. The
total number of campuses regularly using our consulting services on Title IX,
who are now being investigated by OCR, is ZERO. Maybe it’s because they
follow our tips of the week, rather than attacking them?
When Schools Put Their Brands Before Assaulted
Students
Originally Published June 10th, 2014
Twenty Steps to OCR-Proof Your Campus on Title IX
Originally Released August 26th, 2013
Brett A. Sokolow, President & CEO
The NCHERM Group, LLC
116 E. King Street
Malvern, PA 19355
(610) 993-0229
Click here to
read the PDF.
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