by Michael Hames-García, CSWS Director 2014-15, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies
I am sitting in my therapist’s office. Long after my first women’s studies course, after learning the basic tenets of feminist critique, I hear myself say the words, “I mean, I really shouldn’t have had so much to drink. I should have known better than to get into his car. It was partly my fault for being so stupid.” She interrupts me: “It wasn’t your fault, Michael.” The exchange is so clichéd. Bad dialogue from an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
Fast forward to the spring of 2014. As I was preparing to take over the directorship of CSWS, an undergraduate woman accused three members of the UO basketball team of rape. She reported the incident to the police and sought counseling at the university counseling center. Over the course of the next few months, the university apparently delayed its investigation until after the basketball season ended; then-President Michael Gottfredson characterized this delay as necessary while the police completed their investigation. Ultimately, the district attorney determined that there was insufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges. When the university did complete its own investigation, it suspended all three of the young men. By this time, the story had also broken publicly, and the administration was facing outrage for its inaction and apparent cover up.
In the midst of this outrage, I found myself frozen. Again and again, I felt compelled to speak out on the issue. I was the incoming director of CSWS. I felt I should speak. Meanwhile at least two colleagues spoke out as survivors of rape. When one told me of her experience as a graduate student, I found myself wanting to tell her of my own experience, but the words wouldn’t travel from my brain to my vocal cords. I broke out in a sweat, I felt myself begin to shake, but I could not speak. In public forum after public forum, my feet felt glued to the ground, my lips sewn excruciatingly shut. Eventually, I felt that this was the true brutalization of rape. The ultimate price of sexual violence is not to be found in the physical pain of the act, but in the silence it could command years later from an outspoken, feminist, radical, tenured queer man of color. I continued to be incapable of making myself speak publicly on this issue for months, while debate raged about the university’s inadequate sexual assault and harassment policies. A president resigned, committees were formed, climate surveys were conducted. I could not speak.
By December 2014, both a University Senate Task Force to Address Sexual Violence and Survivor Support (cochaired by former CSWS director Carol Stabile) and a President’s Review Panel had issued their recommendations. (I take some pride in noting that both committees included former students of mine.) The title of the senate task force’s report includes the only number I feel I need to include in the present article: “Twenty Students Per Week.” Rather than focus on the statistics, I’d like to single out a recommendation common to both reports: the call for a central office or senior executive with sufficient authority to address what both committees describe as the University of Oregon’s insufficient and unsatisfactory programs of prevention and response for rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. This is arguably the most important recommendation to issue from either committee, so it is telling that the reports are in broad agreement about it. The university’s response has been equally telling: in March 2015, it announced an assistant vice president position (not very senior, for those of you unfamiliar with the administrative flow chart) in charge of sexual assault prevention and response who would report to the vice president for student life, with “joint accountability” to the president. This decision treats sexual harassment and assault as a student life issue rather than as one affecting faculty, staff, and administrators as well. It also reflects a real inability on the part of the university administration to grasp what needs to happen to adequately respond to sexual assault and rape culture. A brief comparison of the “Sexual Violence Gap Analysis Recommendations” released by the Division of Student Life in December 2014 with the recommendations of the two review panels makes clear the mistake of asking a sexual assault prevention and response assistant vice president to report to the vice president for student life. The division’s four anemic pages of recommendations (the senate committee’s report is over thirty pages and the president’s review panel’s report is over sixty) are replete with meaningless jargon (“charge a cross-functional team of experts to advise the campus and executive leadership team on best practices and planning . . .”) and vacuous double-speak (“develop higher visibility and branding of sexual violence prevention efforts . . .”). As if the answer to the rape of students by students or to the sexual harassment of students by professors might be an issue of inadequate branding!
As a rape survivor, I have found this article to be among the most difficult things I have ever written. Not because it’s out of my area of professional expertise. Not because of the post-traumatic stress I mentioned in my opening paragraphs. It has been difficult to write because I feel a deep rage at the response of University of Oregon administrators to these issues. These administrators include people I had come to think of as friends over the years. I was on the search committee years ago that recommended Scott Coltrane for the position of dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I served with Frances Bronet on the search committee that recommended Michael Gottfredson for university president. I have thus had a personal desire to see these people do the right thing, and it has hurt me to see something else happen entirely.
There is a rhetorical maneuver on page 11 of the President’s Review Panel report that is worth noting. Buried in the middle of a paragraph is the following sentence: “There is clearly significant resolve by the entire University community to create a campus culture and infrastructure that prevent sexual misconduct and deal with it appropriately when it does occur.” This rhetoric positions perpetrators of sexual harassment, assault, and rape outside of a communal “we.” It can thereby define the “we” as innocent. That definition is wrong on at least two counts: the perpetrators are part of the community, and the community is not innocent.
I’d like to argue here for the necessity of a survivor perspective that is most assuredly not objective in any traditional sense that would compel disinterest and detachment. From such a perspective, two things that remain wholly unaddressed by the university administration are its complicity in fostering a culture where sexual assault occurs and its enactment of “institutional betrayal” (Smith & Freyd 2013 & 2014).
Too much of the University of Oregon’s recent communications reflect a primary interest in image management, rather than a genuine concern for survivors of rape, assault, and harassment. Indeed, the numerous e-mails and campus messages distributed under the names of the acting provost and the interim president—whether they were avoiding answering why striking graduate student teachers should not have adequate family leave, sidestepping a direct answer as to why a fired library archivist’s release of records was “illegal,” or dodging the question of who authorized the accessing of a raped student’s counseling records and why—read like the prepared statements of risk-averse attorneys rather than anything resembling compassionate human engagement. Indeed, on February 9, 2015, two months after having received both review panels’ recommendations, the University of Oregon administration, under then-Interim President Scott Coltrane and then-Acting Provost Frances Bronet, made the decision to file a counter suit against the rape survivor whose counseling records they had earlier accessed. Among other things, administrators claimed in the court filing that if the university did not countersue, “survivors of sexual misconduct will be chilled from coming forward.” Apparently, the top university administrators and their lawyers believed that suing a rape survivor and rummaging through her therapy records would encourage more survivors to come forward.
The therapy records. In one of my own therapy sessions, I explained to my therapist how my rape sometimes entered my sexual fantasies. The moment when she told me that this was common for rape survivors, I felt a leaden cloak lift from my shoulders. I hadn’t realized until that moment just how heavily the guilt had weighed on me. When I had found myself thinking about the rape during sex, it was hard not to think to myself that I must have wanted it at some level. I must have been responsible. That therapy session, nearly a year after the incident, brought me much needed healing, but what would a university attorney have made of my therapist’s notes from the session? How would they have played in court?
It is noteworthy that the administration’s actions came parallel to the firing of James Fox, former head of the University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives in connection with the release of unvetted archival records from the president’s office. As The Oregonian has reported, university publicists have mostly refused to give any specifics about the records, but they apparently included a memo from former university general counsel Randy Geller advocating dissolution of the University Senate and emails showing that a Register Guard opinion piece by Vice President for Student Affairs Robin Holmes defending the university’s response to rape allegations was largely written by members of the university’s strategic communications team. It is also noteworthy that assurances of the benevolence of the university administration came at the same time it was launching what was perhaps its fiercest assault ever on its employees, seeking to defeat the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation in a prolonged and devastating labor strike. In the course of that strike, messages from the senior administrators to faculty were unambiguous: we were to choose the administration over the graduate student teachers. Some department heads who did not act accordingly faced discipline from deans. In the treatment of graduate teaching fellows, the firing of Fox, and the suing of rape survivors, a common thread can be seen not just of institutional betrayal, but of retribution. Rather than encourage survivors to come forward, the university administration’s actions over the past two years send an apparently coordinated message: do not criticize us and do not hurt the brand, or you will pay.
So much is lacking in the administration’s responses to sexual assault. There has been no admission of guilt or responsibility, for example. As a survivor, I wonder if those in power at the University of Oregon have ever paused to consider their complicity, their role in betraying trust, or their role as perpetrators. By labeling them perpetrators, I am, of course, being deliberately contentious. However, if we are to learn from abolitionist perspectives on sexual assault, then we must reject the monster vs. angel dichotomy. If we only understand perpetrators as monsters, then we won’t see them among our loved ones, friends, classmates, or teammates. We won’t see them among our favorite students. We won’t see them among our most brilliant researchers. We won’t see them among our best teachers. We won’t see them in our family. Most tragically, we won’t see them among ourselves.
—Michael Hames-García is the author of Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (2004) and Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity (2011). A professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, where he previously served as director for five years, Hames-García also directed UO’s Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality Studies for six years.
List of sources:
Jane Doe v. UO Counterclaim. Case 6:15-cv-00042-MC, Document 7. Filed 9 February 2015. Accessible at http://www.scribd.com/doc/256331009/Jane-Doe-v-UO-Counterclaim.
“Jennifer Winters and Rita Radostitz ghost wrote VP Robin Holmes’ Op-Ed” UO Matters 28 December 2014. http://uomatters.com
Mangan, Katherine. “Just How Private Are College Students' Campus Counseling Records?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. (March 5, 2015).
Martin, Jill. “Student Sues University of Oregon, Coach over Alleged Gang-Rape.” 9 January 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/09/justice/university-of-oregon-title-ix-lawsuit/
Pryal, Katie Rose Guest. “Raped on Campus? Don't Trust Your College to Do the Right Thing.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. (March 2, 2015)
Read, Richard. “Archivist James Fox says UO Interim President Scott Coltrane’s team betrayed, scapegoated him.” The Oregonian/OregonLive.com. 17 April 2015. <Oregonlive.com>
“Report of the University of Oregon President’s Review Panel.” 9 December 2014. https://president.uoregon.edu/sites/president1.uoregon.edu/files/reviewpanelreport_web.pdf
“Sexual Violence Gap Analysis Recommendations.” University of Oregon Division of Student Life. December 2014.
Smith, Carly Parnitzke, and Jennifer J. Freyd. “Dangerous Safe Havens: Institutional Betrayal Exacerbates Sexual Trauma.” Journal of Traumatic Stress (Feb. 2013): 119-24.
Smith, Carly Parnitzke, and Jennifer J. Freyd. “Institutional Betrayal.” American Psychologist 69.6 (Sept. 2014): 575-87.
“Twenty Students Per Week: The Report of the University of Oregon Senate Task Force to Address Sexual Violence and Survivor Support.” November 5, 2014. http://senate.uoregon.edu/sites/senate.uoregon.edu/files/2014_11_06%20Senate%20Task%20Force%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
“UO Rape Case Shows Need for Sexual-Assault Confidentiality, Notice Bills: Editorial.” The Oregonian. 28 April 2015. <Oregonlive.com>