“Climate surveys” of campus sexual assault have long been viewed as a strategy to track the effectiveness of campus policies to crack down on sexual assault and to alert campus officials to emerging problem areas. “Results from the individual universities reveal which institutions are handling sexual misconduct well and which are not,” explains SurvJustice director Katherine McGerald.

The best known climate surveys have been conducted by the Association of American Universities, a coalition of leading American universities. The AAU conducted its first survey in 2015, and again in 2019. The most important question, of course, is whether the surveys show a decline in sexual assault rates. These are the results, as recently reported by the AAU:

“For the 21 schools that participated in both the 2015 and 2019 surveys, the rate of nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent increased from 2015 to 2019 by 3.0 percentage points (to 26.4 percent) for undergraduate women, 2.4 percentage points for graduate and professional women (to 10.8 percent) and 1.4 percentage points for undergraduate men (to 6.9 percent).”

In short, sexual assaults increased for undergraduate women, graduate women, and undergraduate men. Despite enormous expenditures of time and money, the problem got worse over the four-year period.

Oddly, neither the AAU press release or subsequent media coverage mentioned this important fact.

Also disappointing was the finding that among sexual assault victims, only 45.0% said that school officials were “very” or “extremely likely” to take their report seriously. Consistent with that gloomy assessment, campus police were contacted in only 11.2% of sexual assault cases.

These dismal findings didn’t come as a total surprise to many.

In 2017, SAVE published, “Six-Year Experiment in Campus Jurisprudence Fails to Make the Grade,” which documented a five-fold increase in the number of Title IX complaints to the Office for Civil Rights following issuance of the  2011 Dear Colleague Letter. The report also detailed numerous incidents of mistreatment of identified victims by campus officials.

The following year, the American Association for University Women reported that 89% of American colleges had received zero reports of rape incidents in 2016. This surprising finding either means that campus rapes are far less common than claimed, or that victims do not see the campus tribunals as helpful.

Serious shortcomings with campus sexual policies also have been documented for accused students, for faculty members, and by college administrators. The problem is both procedural and strategic. For example, why aren’t colleges doing more to address the root causes of sexual assault, such as widespread alcohol abuse?

The OCR’s Dear Colleague Letter on sexual violence was issued on April 4, 2011. Nine years later, the policy’s controversial approach is viewed by a broad range of stakeholders as broken. The conclusion is evident: It’s time for a major overhaul.