Most universities taking part in a massive effort to survey students about their experiences with sexual assault and harassment will release their individual, campus-specific results starting this week.
The Association of American Universities, an elite higher education trade group, organized a sexual assault climate survey of students at 27 institutions that was conducted in April. When AAU announced the survey last year, it said it would release the aggregate results of all the schools, but would allow each participating university to decide whether to publicize its own campus findings.
A number of concerned researchers worried that caveat would allow schools to conceal results out of fear of negative publicity. However, it doesn't appear most of the universities involved in the AAU effort will do that.
The Huffington Post reached out to each participating school to ask whether it plans to release its university-specific results in full. Twenty-four of the 27 responded yes, they are planning to disclose that information in the next couple of weeks after AAU releases the aggregate data, which it plans to do Monday.
Those schools are:
- Brown University
- Dartmouth College
- Iowa State University
- Cornell University
- Michigan State University
- Purdue University
- Texas A&M University
- Columbia University
- University of Florida
- University of Oregon
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
- University of Southern California
- Washington University in St. Louis
- University of Virginia
- University of Arizona
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Michigan
- University of Minnesota
- University of Missouri
- University of Pennsylvania
- Case Western Reserve University
- Ohio State University
Officials at one school, the California Institute of Technology -- Caltech -- said they will be releasing results, but were unsure of the specifics. Several said they were planning briefings with local media when their information comes out.
Case Western Reserve University said it would be releasing its full report to the campus community, in a location online that requires a school ID to access.
Two
other universities did not respond: Yale University and Harvard University.
The AAU survey is expected to be one of the largest collections of data on student experiences with sexual violence ever conducted. Multiple colleges have elected to conduct their own surveys, including Rutgers University, whose survey was done as a pilot test for a version distributed by the White House.
Campus climate surveys have been named as a critical component to addressing sexual assault by researchers, advocates, activists and lawmakers alike, because their anonymous nature can give a better sense of what students experience in college. Sexual violence is a dramatically underreported crime across the board, regardless of school affiliation, so the number of cases officially reported is typically unreliable as a gauge of the prevalence of such violence.
This article has been updated.
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Tyler Kingkade covers higher education and sexual violence, and is based in New York. You can contact him at tyler.kingkade@huffingtonpost.com, or on Twitter: @tylerkingkade.