Compliance on Campus? Students, Sexual Harassment and Legal Regulation in American Higher Education

• In Event: 260 - Section on Sex and Gender Paper Session. Sexual Assault and the State

Abstract

Legal issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence in higher education are changing as the government establishes new federal regulations and investigates schools for failure to comply with relevant laws. Scholars of law and organizations have considered the ways in which laws and legal regulations are interpreted and represented in the courtroom and in internal organizational policies and practices, especially in the context of civil rights regulations for employers. In this paper, I examine how this literature on compliance relates to higher education by analyzing 250 schools’ internal sexual harassment policies and procedures for students. I find that many of the patterns of compliance in higher education are different from those found in studies of employment discrimination. Although the employment literature would suggest that large, public, and visible institutions are most likely to demonstrate symbolic compliance, I find that private liberal arts colleges are more likely to demonstrate symbolic compliance in their sexual harassment policies than either research universities or religious colleges. This suggests that educational organizations and other service organizations, like hospitals and prisons, differ from employing organizations with regard to compliance because the former must attend to different structures of accountability. These results suggest that we must be sensitive to the context in which relationships between the law and organizations are formed, particularly the relationship between the organization and the people affected by the organization.

Author

• Gillian Gualtieri, University of California-Berkeley