About FACE: A Former Dean of Students Rethinks Sexual Assault Response

The most unsettling weekend of my professional career was spent in a small hotel conference center in the company of people I had never met before and whom I have not seen since. It upended much of what I believed about myself and my profession and plucked me from a path I had traveled for twenty-five years, depositing me in an unfamiliar landscape that still feels, almost five years later, like a foreign land.

To say a weekend was “unset tling” is no small claim for someone who had spent nine years as a dean of students on two campuses. Deans of students regularly experience weekends that most people would find challenging. Suicides and suicide attempts, drunken fights and subsequent arrests, sexual assaults during large, chaotic parties, students hospitalized after accidents, alcohol poisoning, untreated chronic illnesses, large, newsworthy drug busts, hate-filled graffiti on a campus door. For a dean of students, a weekend on campus is considered a good one if, on Monday morning, no one has died and there is neither a reporter nor a uniformed officer sitting on the bench in the hallway awaiting your arrival.

The weekend that changed everything for me, ironically, took place two thousand miles from the campuses where I had worked, two years after I had walked away from a role and a title that I had worked years to achieve.

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