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Special Oversight Committee on Sexual Misconduct Releases Report Ethan Corey ’15 Managing News Editor
Alissa Rothman’15 Managing News Editor
Last Wednesday, Jan. 30, the Special Oversight Committee on Sexual Misconduct released a report to the College community analyzing the problem of sexual misconduct on campus and reviewing policies and procedures for handling cases of sexual misconduct. The report, titled “Towards a Culture of Respect,� concluded with a list of over 60 recommendations aimed at improving the College’s ability to prevent sexual violence and build a culture of respect on campus. President Carolyn “Biddy� Martin formed the Oversight Committee this past October in response to public accounts of sexual assault at the College and pressure from students, faculty, staff and alumni. The committee was campus environment, resources for student affairs, sexual education, recent history and College policy throughout the school, including report to be presented to the Board of Trustees report, over 50 pages long, was divided into four sections: an introduction, a comparison of sexual misconduct at the College with other campuses across the nation, a review and analysis of the current state of affairs at the College and a diverse list of recommendations for changes in College policies and procedures. In the introduction, the report examined the College’s response to reports of sexual misconduct in recent years and concluded that although the College did not appear to be ‘sweeping cases under the rug,’ it had failed on a systemic level to provide adequate resources and due process for victims. “Though a support structure of caring individuals has long been in place for responding to cases of sexual assault it does not always quencing process for complainants was often unclear, emergency services ill-coordinated, mental health and other support services were unreliable, some personnel were poorly trained in how to deal with this problem, and the composition of the Hearing Board may have deterred victims of assault from bringing cases forward,� the report read. Although the report highlighted the fact that many of the issues related to the disciplinary process had been resolved by the Title IX Committee’s push for compliance with the April 2011 Dear Colleague Letter from the Rights, the committee noted that there were still many ways in which the College could improve its response to cases of sexual assault, the resources it provides for survivors and the atmosphere and attitude of the College towards sexual respect in general. Sexual Misconduct at the College To gain a more accurate picture of sexual assault at the College, the committee used statistics from the biannual National College Health Assessment (NCHA), which collects information about student health and wellbeing from 141 colleges and universities nation-
College Hosts Fifth Annual Fink Bioscience Symposium
Olivia Tarantino ’15 Photographer
President Carolyn Martin speaks at the open meeting to discuss the report put forward by the Special Oversight Committee on Sexual Misconduct. wide, to compare the College with other institutions. Based on the statistics, the committee ly differ from other elite residential colleges in its frequency of sexual violence. “In the most recent NCHA survey (2012),
one had been raped while attending a prefrosh event. This comports with national surveys of sexual assault on college campuses which show that freshwomen are the group at highest In addition, the report highlighted the
cent of Amherst men reported being penetrated without their consent in the previous year. In addition, nine percent of women and one percent of men reported that someone had attempted penetration without their consent, 13 percent of women and seven percent of men reported having been sexually touched without their consent, and three percent of women and two percent of men reported being in a sexually abusive intimate relationship. Several of these measures were a couple of percentage points higher or lower than the aggregate norm from 2010 of a comparison group of schools similar to Amherst, but these slight differences
sexual assault, estimating that alcohol was involved in as many as 90 percent of assaults that occurred at the College. Moreover, the report noted that a large proportion of assault
sonably conclude from these data that the incidence of sexual assault at Amherst is at or very close to the norm for elite co-educational four-year colleges in the NCHA cohort,� the report said. However, the members of the committee emphasized that the College still needed to strive to minimize the incidence of sexual misconduct as much as possible. “The best evidence available to us, therefore, suggests that the incidence of sexual misconduct at Amherst is no worse than at our peer institutions; it is also no better. Our committee feels strongly that this is not good enough. We should aim to do much better than the norm,� the report said. The report also attempted to characterize
sexual assault, but cautioned against laying the blame on one group or another. “Our committee spent a considerable amount of time researching and debating the question of who was perpetrating sexual assault and rapes on campus. One often hears that athletes are the ones responsible, or legacy admits or members of secret fraternities. Certainly individual members of all of these groups have been implicated in sexual
demanded a sex act that the other was unwilling to perform and forced it on them anyways. However, the report emphasized that most students who consume alcohol and have sexual relationships with other students do so without becoming victims or perpetrators of sexual assault. The committee also investigated trends in
cases suggests a fairly complex picture, and it will probably not serve us as a college to try to pin the problem on a narrow demographic,� the report read. However, the report did note that many sexual assaults involved male upper-class students in leadership positions or prominent roles in extracurricular groups, organizations and teams, speculating that these individuals used
en, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are crossed the line into sexual assault. The report semester of their freshman year and at least
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After a record number of registrations, the College recently held the fifth annual Gerald R. Fink ’62 Bioscience Symposium last Thursday. Held in the Cole Assembly Room, the symposium discussed “Current Issues Facing Science and Health Care,� which ranged from talks on genetically personalized medicine to how environmental factors affect the health of disadvantaged populations. The event is sponsored by the class of 1962 as part of their 50th reunion gift to the College. “When putting together this event we wanted to create an opportunity for alumni distinguished in their fields to return to the College and speak to students about their interests,� said George Carmany ’62, who along with Gerald R. Fink ’62, is one of the founders and organizers of the event. Dr. Fink, a professor of genetics at MIT and founding member of the Whitehead Institute, agreed. “The Class of ’62 decided to support this because they wanted to give back something to Amherst. Many in my class felt their success was due in a large part to the educations they received here,� Fink said. “What better way to give back than to come back and talk to students about how their careers unfolded?� After opening remarks by Mr. Carmany, an investor in health care in Boston, the former chairman of the Tufts Medical Center and a member of the Advisory Committee on Education at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Fink began his talk. During the talk entitled “The Genome and Health Care,� Dr. Fink discussed developments in the field of “personalized medicine,� which proposes the customization of healthcare being tailored to in individual patient by the use of genetic information. He also offered advice for students interested in science as a career. “Passion along with curiosity drives science. Without passion for what you’re doing you won’t be able to tolerate the large amount of hard work and struggles that science entails,� Fink said. The second speaker was Dr. Paula Rauch ’77, a college trustee and child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who discussed treating and counseling children in military families and families with seriously medically ill parents. The third speaker was Dr. Rajiv Desai ’84, director of the Neuroscience Institute at the Maine Medical Center, who discussed the development of his career and the evolving relationship between patients in physicians and the effect the increasing role technology is having on that relationship. He encouraged students to explore their options and not get too set on one view of their future. “Don’t feel like you have to be on one track,� Desai said. “You don’t have to be at a big name university to do research.� Continued on Page 2
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