The Task Force on Under-graduate Grievance Procedures has released a draft version of its final report to the public.
The task force’s proposed solution has three components. First, according to the report, “grievance procedures need to be simpler and more effectively communicated to students, faculty, staff, and administrators. A single document, written in plain and simple language, should describe informal and formal grievance procedures.”
Second, “each school should have an ombudsperson available to assist with the informal resolution of student grievances against faculty members.”
Finally, “the university should have a single formal grievance process available to any student with a complaint against a faculty member about discrimination or harassment.”
Appointed by Chancellor Wrighton during summer 2002, the task force met nine times over the course of the fall 2002 semester to review existing university and school-specific policies for dealing with student discrimination complaints against faculty and administration. Three of these meetings were open to the public.
In the course of its investigation, the task force found that very few people on campus were even aware of the existence of formal grievance procedures, which are intended to be used when a student feels that a teacher has harassed an individual or a group of students based on gender, race, or ethnicity.
“Honestly, I thought you just went and talked to some guy about it, and he would get back to you,” said freshman Jonathan Liu.
Moreover, the task force found that only the School of Arts and Sciences has a written student grievances policy. Currently, the other four undergraduate schools rely on a variety of official, but informal methods for their dispute resolution, which have never been explicitly defined.
Dean of the School of Law Joel Seligman, chairman of the task force, explained another complication that arises when students feel a discriminatory event has taken place.
“The reality has been in the sexual harassment area that there’s some instances that people will believe they’ve been sexually harassed,” he said. “There’ve been other instances where they’re literally uncertain and are trying to decide… and want to think through what it would mean to go forward with a complaint.”
Problems with existing procedures include their age and relative obscurity. According to the report, no one has launched a formal harassment claim of any kind for at least a decade at WU. This means that current procedures are, for the most part, untested. The current sexual harassment policy was adopted in 1996-1997, but it has yet to be employed in a formal complaint. The university also planned to release a new policy on non-sexual forms of discrimination at the end of January or in early February.
While writing new grievance procedures, the task force had “mixed views about the degree of confidentiality that should exist and the role record-keeping should play in informal grievance procedures,” according to the report. In the process of investigating a discrimination allegation, it is nearly impossible to not at least implicitly identify the complaining student to the accused teacher, the report said. However, committee members also felt that many students would come forward only on the condition of anonymity.
The issue of record-keeping was similarly complicated.
“In our discussions, the question of what do we mean by confidentiality was probably the most complex conversation we engaged in,” said Seligman. “Some basically said, in effect, people seem more comfortable with us if we’re not writing everything down, if they understand we don’t have judgmental power-if we can just talk, reach a meeting of the minds.”
On the other hand, however, this would present certain problems.
“Other people said, ‘What if there have been a series of complaints about a specific individual over time?’ Without record-keeping, it would be difficult to identify any faculty members who have been the subject of previous complaints,” said Seligman. “So, it was a balancing of two very different kinds of considerations.”
The task force found that it was much more common for students to pursue informal complaints.
Freddie Dickinson, the student representative on the task force from the School of Architecture, mentioned the nature of discrimination cases.
“It’s kind of hard to create a draft for all situations,” he said. “[They should] have some room to judge each case on its own merit, rather than looking for some kind of flowchart to address the questions.”
The task force also obtained grievance procedures from 13 other universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and concluded that there was no standard approach.
Copies of the WU task force’s draft are available online at http://aisweb.wustl.edu/chancellor/announce.nsf.