Provost Nathan Urban announced changes to the Title IX Office in a campus-wide email Wednesday.
The email formally announced changes that President Joseph Helble discussed on Nov. 30 in an installment of his Community Conversations series.
The university will hire a Deputy Title IX coordinator as a permanent staff member in the Equal Opportunity Compliance Coordinator (EOCC)/Title IX Office, he wrote in the email. An outside firm will provide the office with temporary case management and investigation support while they search for an individual to fulfill the position.
The EOCC/Title IX Office, which is currently housed in the Office of the General Counsel, will instead report to the Provost Office starting Jan. 1, the email read. The Office of the General Counsel will still provide legal advice and support to the Title IX Office.
Urban wrote they will create an advisory committee for the Provost that will be tasked with advising the Provost on initiatives aimed at reducing sexual misconduct on campus and improve their responses to reported incidents.
The appointing of this committee is the result of two reviews of the Title IX process that the university conducted over the summer. The reviews were conducted by an internal team, composed of Lehigh faculty and staff, and TNG Consulting, an external consulting firm that is versed in Title IX compliance. Each committee evaluated the office on response times, communication tone and structural issues.
According to the internal review report, the committee found “a serious and concerning delay in response time for reports filed by complainants,” believed to be a result of understaffing in the Title IX Office and declining coordination between the office and supportive services.
According to the internal review and external review reports, both committees recommended Lehigh increase staffing in the Title IX Office and move it away from the Office of General Counsel in order to improve Title IX responses.
Urban wrote Lehigh will continue to evaluate additional actions that will advance their goals of reducing sexual harassment and assault on campus.
“Lehigh is committed to creating an environment in which all people can engage in and contribute to learning, scholarship and creative activity,” Urban wrote in the email. “Consistent with this commitment, we work toward the goal of creating a campus that is free from discrimination, including sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.
8 Comments
Is there any data associated with these reports?
Yes. You don’t get to see it. It’s not about you, and not for you. Go carry your chronic misogyny away to the grave, Bob.
And a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to you too.
Another typical university response to add more administrative staff to increase costs driving up tuition.
The bloated administrative staffs at Lehigh contributed to its decline in academic reputation over the last 30 years. Need to create a commission to compare administrative staffing vs faculty/student over that period to expose the bureaucracy that has been created.
You could always just volunteer to tell the boys and men to rape and grope less, Pat. The less of that there is, the fewer problems the Title IX office has to handle. Could do some real economizing there.
We can expect an investigative report on the bureaucracy from The Brown & White sometime before the end of the century.
More misogyny from Bob. The average Title IX administrator salary at a private university ranges between $50-100K, considerably less than the cost of one professor, and a sliver of what Heble’s paid. Of course, at a university with few complaints, you need fewer administrators to handle the caseload. So if economy is genuinely what you’re interested in, Bob — if you’re really that anxious about Lehigh’s finances and the damage done by employing another person in that office — then rather than pooping on women, you can devote part of your retirement to coming on down to Lehigh and working with the students and faculty to reduce their propensity to sexually assault people.
misogyny – dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women. I will assume that you have a different definition for misogyny than is commonly used by all but your definition probably widens to include a disagreement with something I wrote. I’ll guess it is because I am pro-life. At very least it’s arguable that pro life is pro woman. many women but obviously not all agree. Stop the name calling and respond in a considerate manner.
I might suggest that a study could be done to determine a cause for the increase in the propensity of “students and faculty to … sexually assault people”. I’ll suggest that two things may be involved; 1. An increase in the lack of respect for a people that is due their humanity, 2. An increase in the conceitedness/selfishness of individuals.
More rules and administrators and yet the abuse continues. “The average Title IX administrator salary at a private university ranges between $50-100K” one can equate this with the increase in laws and incarceration and yet crime continues to increase. How do we get people to act humanely? Not by dumping on people who agree on the problem but have a different solution.
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