New York Magazine chronicled the crusade of Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University student who began carrying a 50-pound mattress everywhere, to represent the burden she carries after the university cleared the senior man she accused of rape. The alleged perpetrator, Paul Nungesser, told the New York Times this month that he has been unfairly maligned and humiliated thanks to Sulkowicz’s allegations.
At the University of Virginia, a Rolling Stone article describing a supposed gang rape at a fraternity spurred broad criticism of the way the school deals with sexual assault allegations and prompted an ongoing effort among administrators to fix their approach to campus rape. Rolling Stone later retracted the article, after the Washington Post found deep factual irregularities in the account.
The New York Times detailed Hobart and William Smith Colleges’s botched response to a student’s claim that she had been raped by several members of the school’s football team. The student body rallied around the woman and the college’s board vowed radical changes to the school’s culture and policies, BuzzFeed reported.
My colleague Claire Suddath documented the grassroots campaign to bring colleges to account for failing to properly adjudicate their claims of sexual assault. A group of female students are filing complaints with the Department of Education, charging that the colleges violated women’s rights under Title IX. In the process, Suddath reported, the student activists are “changing the way discipline occurs in the quiet, self-policed world of the college campus.”