Pictured Above: “Sexual victimization is all too common,” says a letter drafted by professor Diane Price Herndl (right) chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies Department, and sent July 10 to USF President Steve Currall.
Left Image Courtesy of USF
Right Image Courtesy of Diane Price Herndl
By Sophie Ojdanic
The women alleging widespread sexual misconduct at USF now have a key ally – the faculty of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
In a stern letter circulating among other faculty and staff, the department contends that the accounts of sexual victims “show our campus to be rife with the kind of violence that is simultaneously bullying and discriminatory.”
Those accounts “are heart-breaking and poignant – and ones that we have heard before,” says the letter, which was drafted by professor and department chair Diane Price Herndl. “Sexual victimization at USF is all too common and still … inadequately addressed.”
At what it calls a “powerful moment for USF,” the letter calls on President Steve Currall to “fully commit” to the university’s sexual misconduct policies and its “Principles of Community,” which were endorsed by leaders of the administration, faculty and student body on March 24.
Herndl urged “like-minded faculty and staff” to add their signatures to the letter. (See the full letter below).
When the letter was sent on July 10, it had 92 signatures, according to Herndl.
The faculty’s emphatic letter is the latest development in a scandal sparked by Chelsea Engel, a 2019 graduate who went on Twitter on June 23 to recount that she was raped by a fraternity member at USF Tampa three years ago.
She urged other women to share their stories, and dozens responded.
On a Twitter account called USF Survivors, 77 women anonymously shared their own painful stories and what the Women’s and Gender Studies Department calls “a widespread culture of discounting, ignoring and victim blaming” when the victims told others.
Meanwhile, 7,165 students have signed a petition calling for the suspension of Sigma Nu – a fraternity that figures in many of the allegations – and Currall issued a statement July 1 promising a review of the university’s processes.
Two days later, an anonymous writer who identified herself as “One of Many,” responded to Currall on USF Survivors.
When she was assaulted, the writer says, she dealt for months with the university’s Title IX staff – an experience that showed the university’s handling of sexual misconduct cases is “deeply flawed and fails to provide justice and closure to victims.”
“Predators prey because they are predators, not because they don’t understand university policy,” One of Many says. “The reason these assaults are occurring on campus is not due to lack of education, it is due to a lack of real consequences on the part of the university.”
In her case, the writer says, the Title IX staff “continuously moved the goal posts and made it more and more difficult to continue an already painful process.
“President Currall, you personally confirmed that these sexual assault cases are under review by the university offices that are ‘best positioned and trained to respond.’ If you are referring to USF’s Title IX Office, then you are clearly misinformed about your own university.”
In his statement on July 1, Currall said he was “deeply troubled” by the allegations of sexual misconduct.
“In light of the information recently shared on social media, I believe it’s important for us to reexamine our processes and outreach initiatives to ensure that we are responding effectively to allegations of sexual violence,” Currall said.
“Therefore, I have asked for a review of our internal processes to reinforce what we are doing well and identify where we can improve.”
Asked by The Crow’s Nest to respond to the letter circulating among the USF faculty, the administration referred the paper back to that statement.
“We will update the university community as soon as possible,” spokesman Adam Freeman said.
A student athlete’s story
As the sexual misconduct scandal widens, another female student has come forward to say she was raped by a male student in 2018.
That student, Rebecka Wilson, a senior who will graduate next month with a bachelor’s in biomedical sciences, was a member of the cross country team for two years and the track team for one.
In an open letter on Twitter to USF’s vice president of athletics, Michael Kelly, and an interview with the Tampa Bay Times,Wilson says her rapist was another USF athlete.
The university’s Title IX staff took a year before concluding there was no wrongdoing, Wilson says.
She told the Times she wrote Kelly in an effort to make him aware and help bring changes to the campus and athletic department.
“I know with absolute certainty that your own athletes have sexually violated their own teammates and peers,” Wilson said in her letter. “Your athletes have felt inferior to their abusers and you’ve allowed it to happen.
“The pedestal with which you put my rapist and all your other athletes is what gave him the idea that his short-term sexual pleasure was far more important than my life-long psychological well-being. It is the culture, attitude, and mentality that you foster under the roof of athletics that enables your athletes to commit heinous crimes and allows them to get away with it free of penalty.”
Kelly reached out to Wilson shortly after she posted the letter and they met to discuss possible changes in the athletics department.
“I felt like I was heard for probably the first time throughout this whole process,” Wilson told the Times.
Sexual harassment in St. Petersburg
The letter to Currall that the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies is circulating among faculty echoes a letter that the USF St. Petersburg Faculty Senate sent to administrators in September 2017.
That letter called on the administration to step up efforts to “reduce sexual harassment and other discrimination” on campus.
It condemned what it called “the culture of silence that often surrounds sexual harassment” and “the chaos” in the university’s policies and procedures on reporting and handling it.
The letter followed a report in The Crow’s Nest that the St. Petersburg campus’ top academic administrator, Han Reichgelt, had been abruptly ousted in February 2015 for propositioning a female professor and making sexually offensive remarks.
Until the newspaper broke the story and published internal documents about the case in November 2016, the reason for Reichgelt’s departure had been shrouded in secrecy for many months.
The Faculty Senate’s letter to administrators prompted the creation of a task force on sexual harassment. The task force, which had two students and 13 other members from the faculty, administration and staff, began meeting in February 2018.
In an email on July 9, Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock said the task force “was organized to review all USFSP internal policies and procedures regarding sexual harassment in place at that time [2018] and make recommendations for any changes needed in those policies and procedures.”
Tadlock expanded on the goal of the task force in consolidation.
“Now that we are one USF, the task force will meet as needed to support campus and university efforts to ensure we provide a harassment-free environment at USFSP,” Tadlock said. “I would add that our policy is clear — sexual harassment in any form is unacceptable and will not be tolerated on our campus.”
But Jill McCracken, a professor who helped draft the Faculty Senate letter and later served on the task force, had a different take.
McCracken told The Crow’s Nest that, to her knowledge, the task force has not met in over a year.
McCracken, who now has a partial appointment in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department in Tampa, strongly endorsed the content of the department’s letter.
“I think it is of the utmost importance that USF look into these allegations and conduct a thorough and transparent investigation not only of Greek Life at USF but of all Title IX processes and operations,” McCracken said. “But we do not want to stop there.
“USF administration must proactively foster a culture where sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination are never tolerated so that all students are safe.”
‘We must do better.’
This is the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies’ full letter:
TO: President Steven C. Currall
FROM: The faculty, affiliates, and friends of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
WGS stands with #USFsurvivors and calls on the USF administration to fulfill its federally mandated and explicitly stated commitment to our community.
In June 2020 our department became aware of a twitter hashtag, #USFsurvivors, where USF alums and current students were sharing their stories of sexual victimization at USF and various failures of response. In addition to not receiving appropriate and trauma-informed services from USF offices tasked with responding to sexual violence when they chose to report, survivors also reported a widespread culture of discounting, ignoring, and victim blaming when they told others. Many of these survivor narratives speak to violence within USF’s Greek system, including fraternity members engaging in multiple assaults, and members of fraternities and sororities failing to support, or even believe, survivors.
These reports are heart-breaking and poignant—and ones that we have heard before. Sexual victimization at USF is all too common and still, after concerted student, staff and faculty effort, inadequately addressed. Recent statements of support from administration, the Panhellenic Council, and individual Greek houses are good to read, but insufficient in terms of a response. Our university must be held accountable to provide the necessary resources—including personnel, training, and ongoing assessment—to appropriately and effectively meet the needs of our current USF students experiencing sexual victimization, and to thoroughly and conscientiously review our past actions to provide necessary redress to our alums. Any less, and we risk losing the trust of our students, even as we fail to meet the expectations of various federal guidances related to the Clery Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and Title IX.
Our department has a long history of working to improve services for survivors of violence at USF, more recently in 2018 when the USF Tampa campus began working toward outsourcing victim advocacy to a local community organization, transitioning our on-campus Center for Victim Advocacy and Violence Prevention (CVAVP) and its staff from advocacy to assistance in the process. This effort followed years of neglect of and poor leadership over the CVAVP office, leading to a small number of staff challenged to provide advocacy services to survivors on a campus with 50,000 students. In response, students, staff and faculty including members of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies mobilized, meeting with USF administration, holding rallies, and publicly sharing our concerns. The outcome was mixed; though advocacy remained on campus in the CVAVP and leadership changed, inadequate staffing was barely addressed. A more decisive outcome was the development of USF’s Coordinated Community Response Team (CCRT), co-chaired by CVAVP staff and a USF faculty member and containing experts (both academic and professional) on issues of campus response to victimization. However, the CCRT’s energy has not yet been fully realized, and its presence and effect at USF at the present time is muted, at best.
This is a powerful moment for USF to show its leadership and commitment on issues of support for its students. The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies stands with #USFsurvivors to call for President Currall to fully commit to practices that will lead to the realization of this statement in the Preamble to USF Policy 004 (Sexual Misconduct/Sexual Harassment (Including Sexual Violence)):
The University of South Florida (USF) community is most successful when it is based on respect and fair treatment of all people. USF strives to provide a work and study environment for faculty, staff, guests and visitors that is free of discrimination and sexual harassment, including sexual violence.
We are also not living up to our Principles of Community. We commit ourselves there to “building a culture of caring that promotes the integrity of our relationships and the sustainable well-being of our entire community” and to “reject the demeaning acts of bullying, violence, prejudice, and discrimination.”
The stories told by #USFsurvivors reflect anything but a culture of caring and show our campus to be rife with the kind of violence that is simultaneously bullying and discriminatory.
We must do better.
We ask President Currall to share his action plan on how USF will both respond to the survivors and move USF toward becoming environments free from sexual violence.
Resources: Center for Victim Advocacy and Violence Prevention. https://www.usf.edu/student-affairs/victimadvocacy/index.aspx USF Policy 004 (Sexual Misconduct/Sexual Harassment (Including Sexual Violence)). https://usf.app.box.com/v/usfpolicy0-004 USF Title IX Office. https://www.usf.edu/diversity/title-ix/. Title IX Coordinator: Araina Muniz, arainamuniz@usf.edu Coordinated Community Response Team. Co-Chairs: Megan Deremiah (Interim Assistant Director of CVAVP), mmderemiah@usf.edu and Dr. Chris Ponticelli (Associate Professor, Sociology), cpontice@usf.edu Associate Vice President of Community Engagement in the Student Affairs & Student Success. Dr. Ruth Atchley, ratchley@usf.edu
Catherine Hicks and Aya Diab contributed to this report.
