Wow. The Minaret, the student newspaper at the University of Tampa, has a really impressive response to a major on-campus rape accusation. They did an entire section of the school’s paper, clearly requiring weeks of work, trying to move the campus conversation beyond the specific details of the incident into a broader investigation of rape on college campuses.

Start with A Challenge to Our Readers, which lays out the decisions that the student staff made in terms of how they reported on the allegations and their aftermath and in terms of how they tried to frame the larger issues at stake.

Therefore, we challenge our readers to grapple with the many issues involved with this story as we’ve grappled with them. We made a prolonged and conscious effort to engage with all aspects of the story, and not to rush to judgment. We hope that our readers will do the same.

Though we apologize that a prolonged investigation has caused further anguish to those involved, we hope we’ve put forth our best effort to present a holistic package that encourages reflection and introspection rather than stereotyping and rash judgments. But it will be all for nothing if the greater issues are lost in a wave of name-calling and choosing sides.

Try to reflect upon the broader picture, and what it might mean for UT if 162 of its students are indeed sexually assaulted this year, as national averages imply. The person on whom you are passing judgment is likely to be a friend, a loved one, a classmate or even yourself.

The Editor’s Note on the article about what sexual assault is suggests the seriousness with which these students approached understanding rape on college campuses.

In preparing for this special investigation, The Minaret obtained a copy of the police report from public records, and interviewed the victim by e-mail and once in person, though she remained anonymous throughout the process. We also interviewed Callaway in person, but he declined three follow-up attempts. Additionally, we interviewed dozens of students, a prosecutor, a former TPD officer, the athletic director, Monnie Wertz, Gina Firth, Mike Gilmer and Dean of Students Bob Ruday. We read through hundreds of pages of related student newspaper and academic articles. However, we recognize that there are still untapped and underutilized sources. Therefore, we encourage people to post thoughtful comments on our website, theminaretonline.com and also to utilize our discussion boards.

Then please go on to read the rest of the article. It makes me want to cry, it is so thoughtful, careful, nuanced, respectful, and well-done. This is what college is supposed to be, a chance to really stretch your intellectual muscles and grapple with the hard questions slowly and in-depth. After carefully laying out the relevant Florida state law and the University of Tampa’s policy on consent, Steve Knauss comes to the real conclusion

Our students, and men in particular, should be motivated to act respectfully with women not because of a fear of punishment or as a nod to an antiquated patriarchal system, but rather because of a dignified ethical standard, simply the way one good, decent human being should treat another.

The paper’s reporting of the case itself is scrupulously even-handed, offering both students the chance to tell their side of the story and being carefully to repeatedly point out that the accused student was not criminally charged but was found guilty of “sexual misconduct” through a school grievance process. Particularly in delicate and potentially divisive situations like this, such an approach is important because it allows everyone at the university to make their own decisions based on the full array of the evidence. I never comment on guilt in specific cases that I read about in news reports, because I never feel like the news reports have enough information or that they are free from bias. Here, I feel like I got enough information that I could do so responsibly, although I won’t, both because the perpetrator’s guilt was already established through the school’s disciplinary process and because I think the more pressing issue is the school’s role in this case.

Unfortunately, it is precisely in this arena, as in most college students’ thinking about rape, that the special section fails to achieve its goals. The section brings together an array of information from different writers at the University of Tampa and from school newspapers across the country, covering the responsibility of men to end rape, the role of alcohol in rape, survivor stories, the school’s policies, and available resources. The focus is almost entirely on what individuals can do, although one article did make a good start at cataloging what the university offers and some of the things it does not. What was lacking was a focus on the broader context for the institution’s responsibilities. Excellent questions about how the University of Tampa has behaved in this case were raised by the articles on the incident and its aftermath, but they were largely not followed through on in the additional information provided.

It’s unfortunate that such an otherwise excellent project missed that opportunity, as the University of Tampa seems to be in this case a classic example of a school trying to do the right thing for its students, but often not succeeding. The survivor has a strong sense of how the school failed her, in terms of their decision to allow him to stay on campus despite their guilty verdict, their failure to strictly enforce his prohibition from the dorms, their failure to have support staff reaching out to her in the immediate aftermath of her assault (I understand the need for evidence gathering, absolutely, but surely someone from the residential life staff should have checked in with her and discovered that she had been left with no bed linens!), their failure to issue a warning to other students that someone convicted of sexual misconduct was on campus, and their handling of the hearing for her case.

On the plus side for the University of Tampa, her story is better than many we’ve heard in terms of the university’s response, but that does not mean that in any way they have fully met their responsibilities to her or to other students on campus. Although I would like to believe that the school’s decision not to suspend the perpetrator even for a year doesn’t have anything to do with his potential as a basketball player, I’m skeptical. Although I know how difficult it can be to get multiple faculty and staff members in one place at one time, holding a disciplinary hearing at 7 pm on Friday – and having a panelist leave before it is over!!! – is an inexcusable failure to prioritize a serious crime. Acquaintance rape is the same crime as stranger rape, and if you would notify students that a stranger rapist was loose on campus, you absolutely must notify them that an acquaintance rapist is as well. Legally, they are required to. A no-contact provision / exclusion from a dorm, particularly since that is the only real punishment meted out, must be strictly enforced with consequences if it is violated – the school’s first priority should be the safety of its students and a student who has to live in fear of an unwanted and threatening contact is not safe. Finally, sexual misconduct is a dangerously meaningless term. By lumping a huge range of behaviors under one umbrella, it trivializes a violent crime and keeps other students from knowing crucial information about their safety on campus. Many schools have separate categories for separate types of sexual offenses for exactly those reasons.

I did have problems with some of the articles from other schools that were selected for inclusion, especially one that perpetuates the idea that “drunken hook-up culture” makes the lines between consensual and non-consensual blurry. (For the 10,000th time, although, indeed, the fact that men and women like to drink together socially may make it easier for predators to find and incapacitate victims, the fact that either the victim and/or the perpetrator was drinking in no way makes the definition of consent blurry. Telling women who clearly did not consent that their rapes were “gray” because they were drinking is wrong and demeaning.) Others were excellent, including the UPenn article on men’s responsibility to end rape that Ashley linked to already. In general, I thought adding voices from other schools was a great way of drawing attention to the seriousness of the problem and of reinforcing the sense that those who see campus rape as a problem are not isolated individuals but rather part of a large conversation.

I hope that students at the University of Tampa take up the challenge laid down by their paper and begin an intense, thoughtful, and committed conversation about how they can hold their university, as well as themselves, accountable for ending rape on their campus. There are many ways the University of Tampa’s policies could be changed to ensure that other students will not have to endure all the frustrations that this survivor has, and I want to strongly encourage University of Tampa students to begin pressuring their school to do so.

I want to thank the editorial staff at the Minaret for their hard work to begin that conversation, and I hope their section becomes the benchmark that other college papers must meet or exceed in grappling with rape allegations on their campuses.

Update This post has been slightly edited for clarity and to include a link to the one article that directly addressed UT’s sexual assault prevention programs.