Thank you for the auto-email you sent after reading the recent edition of the Fountain Hopper blog. Your email clearly demonstrates that you care about the issue of sexual assault at Stanford, and we are grateful.  This is a community-wide issue, and it is important for students to be engaged and informed.

Stanford has worked and continues to work diligently to ensure a safe campus environment in which sexual assault and relationship violence have no place, and to treat all victims of such violence with compassion and dignity. We would like to briefly provide some facts about the issues the auto-email raises, as much of the information that has been published recently about these issues is misleading.

First, Stanford does not have and never has had the intention of curtailing any federal Title IX investigation, nor could it do so even if it desired to. The university also has no desire to keep any sexual assault survivor from talking about any criticisms they may have of Stanford or its processes.

The settlement discussions that have been reported were initiated by lawyers threatening a lawsuit and demanding a financial payout for their clients in order to forestall such a lawsuit. Generally, when Stanford considers a financial settlement in response to a demand from a lawyer threatening a lawsuit, the university requires that the party receiving the money withdraw any other personal claims under which they could receive more money for the same matter – in this case, through the Office for Civil Rights process. In essence, this prevents two separate financial settlement opportunities. But such a step would not curtail any investigation.

When an individual complaint is filed under Title IX, it is the practice of the Office for Civil Rights to conduct an exhaustive review of all issues related to the institution's handling of issues related to sexual assault. It is incorrect that if a student withdraws a complaint, OCR will not continue reviewing the issues raised by that complaint. Stanford has been fully cooperating with OCR in its investigation of sexual assault at Stanford, and will continue doing so.

Second, there has been an incorrect suggestion that Stanford is resistant to reforming its sexual assault policies and practices. To the contrary, Stanford has undertaken aggressive efforts to strengthen the prevention and response to sexual violence at the university, and these efforts are continuing, including a major overhaul of policies and practices that occurred after a comprehensive review by the Provost's Task Force on Sexual Assault in 2014-15. We look forward to continuing to work with our campus community and the Office for Civil Rights to address our shared goal of ensuring a safe campus environment free of sexual assault and relationship violence.

Finally, while the university cannot publicly discuss individual personnel matters or student complaints, it would never tell a faculty member not to talk about sexual assault at Stanford. Stanford may ask a faculty member to use good judgment, and not discuss confidential information they may have obtained about a sexual assault survivor's actual case in public or with other students without the survivor's permission. In many ways, Stanford is similar to a small community, so even if a student's name is not used, it is very possible that someone could recognize the student from the description of the assault. We want sexual assault survivors to have the assurance that they have the agency to share their story – or not – at their own discretion. We also do not want to do anything that will make survivors less likely to report an assault to the university.

We welcome the partnership of everyone in the campus community as we work to make further progress in preventing and responding effectively to sexual violence at Stanford.

Sincerely,

Lisa Lapin on behalf of the university

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Lisa Lapin
Vice President for University Communications
Stanford University
Office 650.725.8396 | Mobile 650.483.2591
news.stanford.edu | ucomm.stanford.edu | @stanford