Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), who has authored a bill to change the way the United States military tries sexual assault cases. Photo from gillibrand.senate.gov.

The military’s sexual assault epidemic is a national disgrace

By Spenser Hickey

News Editor

Since World War II, as many as 1,000,000 men and women have gone into the service, eager to serve their country, only to be sexually assaulted by their comrades. Most never reported it and only a very few that did saw their assailant be convicted and thrown out of the service.

The number of military sexual assault survivors is greater than that of servicemen and women killed in action in every conflict the U.S. has taken part in—combined.

According to recent testimony by Marine Commandant James Amos, 85 to 90 percent of sexual assaults remain unreported in today’s military, despite twelve months of efforts by the top brass to effect change.

Now, after so many decades, Congress is planning legislation to fight the problem, either by putting control of sexual assault cases at the highest levels of military authority (as Ohio Rep. Mike Turner’s bill advocates) or removing it from the military’s control all together (what Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is calling for).

Under the current system, an officer in charge of the case can change the verdict on a whim, even without being present at the trial, because the alleged rapist is a husband and father, and it’s thought they don’t do that sort of thing. It’s happened.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with any system that tries to handle sexual assault cases in-house — it creates a recipe for potential injustice. Look at the Catholic Church or Penn State; look at the allegations of failures in reporting and violations of survivors’ rights at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Dartmouth College.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have balked at Gillibrand’s call for sexual assault cases to be overseen by civilian prosecutors, saying it would undermine unit discipline and trust.

“The role of the commander should remain central,” said U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. “Our goal should be to hold commanders more accountable, not render them less able to help us correct the crisis. The commanders’ responsibility to preserve order and discipline is essential to effecting change.”

But it’s not essential, though, as several nations have proven.

In the militaries of England, Canada, Australia, Germany and Israel, for example, unit commanders do not have control over sexual assault cases, and their militaries aren’t falling apart.

When asked about the methods foreign militaries use to combat sexual assault, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they’d “look into it,” so maybe that’s why they’re convinced commanders need to retain their control — they aren’t actually aware there are other systems that actually work better.

Military commanders have frequently claimed social change is a threat to unit discipline and order in response to government pressure, whether it was for racial integration, allowing women to serve in active duty or overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And now it’s being marched out again, hopefully to the same lack of success as in the past.

While congressmen and women from both parties have been united in their pressure on military officials to carry out effective changes, one took the opportunity to put his foot in his mouth and make one more misguided statement about the causes of rape.

“The hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things to occur,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), in a statement that bumbled him into the realm of Todd Akin and so many other politicians — from both parties — who have made callous or misguided remarks about sexual assault.

While his statement was slammed in the media, conservative news site RedState posted a strong defense of Chambliss’s remark, claiming “the liberal media” was deliberately ignoring the context of the statement, and that the context excuses it.

The whole six-and-a-half-minute speech Chambliss gave, the “context” RedState offers, has nothing to do with hormones, but with how the military has failed to create an environment that makes men too afraid to commit rape; instead they’ve created an environment that explicitly or implicitly permits it.

But then Chambliss made his claim, wholly unrelated to the speech he just made, that it’s the natural hormones that make this possible.

As RedState writer Erick Erickson puts it in his defending piece, it’s because 17-23 year old men are “horny” and a commander was “encouraging soldiers to hook up on base as much as possible” — and when these base impulses are added that to a broken system of reporting and prosecution, rapes are going to happen.

(Side note: if Erickson’s name is familiar, it’s because he, along with Lou Dobbs, recently lost a heated on-air debate on gender roles and sexism with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly — and I doubt he’s learned much from it.)

Here’s the thing though, Sen. Chambliss and Mr. Erickson — hormones, as you put it, are “natural.” That means we all have them — so if all the men in the military have these hormones and many are in these systems where they can get away with rape, why don’t they all do it? And why are some of the alleged rapists outside that 17 to 23 age range?

Chambliss’s and Erickson’s statements presume that if a young man is in a room with a woman he’s physically attracted to, and there’s little chance of punishment involved, he’ll have sex with her whether she wants to or not, because the hormones take over.

It’s a disgusting premise for us young men, that we all have some repressed rapist on our shoulders; and it’s one that completely ignores the gender dynamics of rape survivors in the military (more men have been raped than women, according to DoD estimates) and the more common reasons most rapes occur in the military.

As with any crime, the motives behind these rapes differ from case to case, but “natural hormones” are one of the least common factors. Military sexual assault, like prison rape — another systemic failure of reporting and justice — is primarily a crime of predation and power rather than passion, targeting the people offenders see as weaker and subjecting them to what they consider to be the worst humiliation.

It’s not about sexual desire, but establishing and reinforcing power and control, and sadly the military already has a power-based hierarchal system that is being exploited by sexual predators who target their subordinates in the ranks.

In addition, rape — often against women and children — has been one of the oldest weapons militaries use against their enemy’s populations to further subjugate them and weaken their morale. It’s seen in ongoing regional wars around the world; in the invasions of the Germans, Soviets and Japanese in World War II; and in hundreds of other conflicts going back to before ancient Rome and Greece. War and sexual violence have been entwined since the first groups of humanity took up arms against their neighbors.

In the case of our current military, I see some of these assaults as a violent physical expression of a broader attitude infecting the services — that women are weak and good only for sexual subjugation. It’s part of a last-ditch effort to keep the military exclusive to men, and sexual assaults are an unseen salvo in this mostly undeclared war.

When it’s not directly about power, it’s because men think they have a right to use women or men for their own sexual gratification, regardless of their wishes. While Chambliss’s solution — that the military stop rape by making men fear the consequences too much do it — might work sometimes, it’s still not the right solution.

Instead, the military, and our entire society, need to teach men to treat people with respect and dignity, and to value the consent of their partner. That’s how we take back the military and end the invisible war.

But enough of Chambliss, Erickson and their wildly off-kilter perspectives on the causes of rape, which thankfully have been slammed by politicians on the left and right — let’s look at something else in this debate, something favorable a politician said.

“I cannot overstate my disgust and disappointment over continued reports of sexual misconduct in our military,” said Arizona Senator John McCain, a Navy veteran. “We’ve been talking about this issue for years and talk is insufficient.”

He recently said that he could no longer recommend to women in his constituency that they join the military, due to the rampant sexual assaults.

It’s a bold move for a politician to tell citizens not to join the military, and I applaud McCain for doing so. But he missed one particular statistic about rape in the military: over half of survivors are men, not women.

It’s not that surprising, when you consider that there are six times more men than women in the military; and men are less likely to report assaults than women, due to the aggressive hypermasculinity of military culture, which portrays being assaulted as the ultimate weakness in an environment where power is paramount. Like I said, this is about power, not passion.

“The biggest reasons men don’t come forward (with sex assault reports) are the fear of retaliation (from fellow troops), the fear of being viewed in a weaker light and the fact there are very few, if any, services for male survivors,” said Brian Lewis, a Navy veteran and rape survivor, in an NBC News interview.

In light of this, I’d say everyone, regardless of gender, should think about the risks before enlisting in the military. I know I won’t enlist as long as the problem continues. Not just because of the danger, but because I refuse to be part of an institution where rape is an occupation hazard.

That’s not hyperbole, not a slick phrase I made up — it’s an actual judge’s words, based the number and frequency of assaults, from a 2011 lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.

“If they actually had systems of accountability that prosecuted and imprisoned perpetrators, you would get rid of the rapes right away,” said attorney Susan Burke, who represented the plaintiffs — 28 veterans who were raped during their military service — in the 2011 lawsuit.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say a new system would end rapes entirely – it should be based off the civilian criminal justice system, and sexual violence is still a serious issue outside of the military. But it would certainly be better.

The current system has failed most veterans who turned to it at every step of the way.

It’s failed at preventing assaults; it’s failed at offering comfortable reporting of them; it’s failed at prosecuting assault cases; it’s failed at punishing those convicted in accordance with their crime; and it’s failed at treating survivors’ mental and physical scars as a result of their military sexual trauma.

The civilian criminal system is not without its flaws — look at the absurdly lenient sentences of the Steubenville rapists, or the grotesque case of the Central Park Five (teenagers of color wrongly convicted in the 1989 rape of a white woman).

But it’s still an improvement over the current military system, and it’s long past time for the military brass to swallow their pride and adopt a new system – or for the government to compel them to do so through legislative mandate.

Each day last year, an average of 38 men and 33 women in our armed forces were sexually assaulted by those they served with.

They’d each made the noblest choice an American can make — stepping up to risk their lives in our defense.

I’m hard-pressed to think how their commanders, as well as our collective response to the problem, could have let them down more.

For an in-depth view into this crisis, watch “The Invisible War,” available on Netflix Instant.

I’m going to try to be funny, but I can’t promise anything because I can’t stop crying. I cried five minutes ago making notes for this column.  Maybe that’s funny to you. I’m a mess and I need cake.

I’ve been crying about the Tonys every day for the past week. The Tony Awards recognize the greatest achievements of the Broadway season. Some have said the Tonys are like the Super Bowl for theatre nerds. I can’t comment on the accuracy of that comparison because I’m not familiar with the Super Bowl.

I am vaguely aware of Super Bowl commercials and the fact that a minute of advertising time costs millions of dollars because ratings are so high. So I guess the Tonys are not like the Super Bowl at all—ratings for the Tonys are laughably low and every few years executives threaten to pull the telecast from network television. PBS could pick it up, but then Republicans would threaten to defund PBS just to block my gay rights.

I do know that a Super Bowl trophy can’t help you get an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony).

I’ve mostly been crying because of “Kinky Boots,” a new musical about a drag queen named Lola (Billy Porter) who reinvigorates a shoe factory with sparkling stilettos. Based on that plot description, I avoided the show while in New York for spring break with my mother and aunt. They were perplexed. The flashy billboards all over Times Square boasted a creative collaboration between esteemed playwright Harvey Fierstein and pop-rock sensation Cyndi Lauper.

One afternoon my mother came right out and said, “I walked by the theatre where ‘Kinky Boots’ is playing. Why aren’t we seeing that?”

“Oh, trust me, it’s not going to do well,” I said.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a lesson in why you should only trust me sometimes. “Kinky Boots” now has the most Tony nominations of the season, 13 in total, and is a major contender for Best Musical, the night’s top prize.

The Tony campaign for “Kinky Boots” has been vigorous and tugs at the heartstrings. My heartstrings are no exception, resulting in tears of regret, shame, and sorrow for not seeing it when I had the chance.

Every time I went to broadwayworld.com this week, the same “Kinky Boots” ad would pop up and I would cry because: a) I can’t stand that the guy doing the voiceover emphasizes the wrong syllable of “Kinky” at the beginning of the video and b) I pompously thought the musical was unworthy of my time.  I hadn’t even heard a full song from the show, yet the ad left me sobbing uncontrollably, a part of me hoping that “Kinky Boots” would sweep the Tonys even though I actually saw (and loved) its strongest competitor, “Matilda.”

Let me be clear: I am not an authority on the Tony Awards. I’ve only seen three of the nominated productions. The rest is merely (obsessive) conjecture. First I saw “Matilda,” based on Roald Dahl’s classic novel. With a book by Dennis Kelly and score by Tim Minchin, the musical tells the story of a five-year-old girl who loves books and mischief, but the adults in her life try to stifle her intelligence. Four actresses alternate in the title role (I saw the dynamite Milly Shapiro), and tonight they will receive Special Achievement Tony Awards for their performances.

While reviews for “Kinky Boots” were only lukewarm, critics loved “Matilda.” New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley called it “the most satisfying and subversive musical ever to come out of Britain.”

In an attempt to compare the two musicals, I listened to the cast recording of “Kinky Boots” since many consider Cyndi Lauper’s score the show’s strongest element. I was underwhelmed. Maybe all the hype has to do with Jerry Mitchell’s direction and choreography, but I found nothing in Lauper’s songs particularly brilliant. Tim Minchin’s music and lyrics for “Matilda” are much more substantive and sophisticated.

The other two nominated productions I saw were both plays. Christopher Durang’s “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” is a family comedy about three middle-aged siblings whose parents named them after Chekov characters. Hilarity ensues when Masha (Sigourney Weaver), a B-list movie star, returns home for a visit, yet there is great heart and depth amongst the chaos of this farce. Kristine Nielsen’s uproarious turn as Sonia should earn her the Tony for Best Actress in a Play, but she will probably lose to veteran Cicely Tyson in “The Trip to Bountiful.”

Tom Hanks will likely take the Tony for Best Actor in a Play for his Broadway debut in longtime pal Nora Ephron’s play “Lucky Guy.” The play was an utter disappointment for me, even though I desperately wanted to love it. Ephron, one of my favorite writers, died last summer and “Lucky Guy” is her final completed work. A bio-play about controversial tabloid journalist Mike McAlary (Hanks), “Lucky Guy” is a tribute to New York City and the dying form of print journalism, two of Ephron’s greatest loves. Unfortunately, she tried to infuse journalism in the structure of the play, telling us the story via a chorus of reporters instead of showing us the action. The technique proved boring and the entire play suffered as a result.

Voters could go the sentimental route and award Ephron a posthumous Tony, but her problematic script makes this highly doubtful. Expect Christopher Durang to nab Best Play instead, or even Richard Greenberg for his complex drama “The Assembled Parties.”

Here’s a summary of who will probably get each award, who I think should get it and who might surprise us and take it home.

Best Play

Will Win: Christopher Durang, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”

Should Win: Christopher Durang, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”

Possible Upset: Richard Greenberg, “The Assembled Parties”

Best Musical

Will Win: “Matilda”

Should Win: “Matilda”

Possible Upset: “Kinky Boots”

Best Revival of a Play

Will Win: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Should Win: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Possible Upset: “The Trip to Bountiful”

Best Revival of a Musical

Will Win: “Pippin”

Should Win: “Pippin”

Best Book of a Musical

Will Win: Dennis Kelly, “Matilda”

Should Win: Dennis Kelly, “Matilda”

Possible Upset: Harvey Fierstein, “Kinky Boots”

Best Original Score

Will Win: Cyndi Lauper, “Kinky Boots”

Should Win: Tim Minchin, “Matilda”

Possible Upset: Tim Minchin, “Matilda”

Best Direction of a Play

Will Win: George C. Wolfe, “Lucky Guy”

Should Win: Nicholas Martin, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”

Possible Upset: Pam MacKinnon, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Best Direction of a Musical

Will Win: Diane Paulus, “Pippin”

Should Win: Diane Paulus, “Pippin”

Possible Upset: Matthew Warchus, “Matilda”

I didn’t realize how hot this race was until I looked up the nominees for this category! “Matilda” was one of the most magical nights of my theatergoing life, but based on video clips alone, Diane Paulus deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award for her reconceived, circus-themed revival of “Pippin.” Here’s another clip to show you what I mean:

Best Actor in a Play

Will Win: Tom Hanks, “Lucky Guy”

Should Win: Tom Hanks, “Lucky Guy”

Possible Upset: Nathan Lane, “The Nance”

Best Actress in a Play

Will Win: Cicely Tyson, “The Trip to Bountiful”

Should Win: Kristine Nielsen, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”

Possible Upset: Amy Morton, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Actor in a Musical

Will Win: Billy Porter, “Kinky Boots”

Should Win: Bertie Carvel, “Matilda”

Possible Upset: Bertie Carvel, “Matilda”

Best Actress in a Musical

Will Win: Patina Miller, “Pippin”

Should Win: Patina Miller, “Pippin”

Possible Upset: Laura Osnes, “Cinderella”

Best Featured Actor in a Play

Will Win: Danny Burstein, “Golden Boy”

Should Win: Danny Burstein, “Golden Boy”

Possible Upset: Courtney B. Vance, “Lucky Guy”

This is Danny Burstein’s fourth Tony nomination, and he deserves this one solely for losing last year for “Follies.”

Best Featured Actress in a Play

Will Win: Judith Light, “The Assembled Parties”

Should Win: Judith Light, “The Assembled Parties”

Possible Upset: Shalita Grant, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”

Though I loved Shalita Grant’s performance, Judith Light (“Who’s the Boss” and “Ugly Betty”) is poised to win her second consecutive Tony in this category.  I cried for her last year and I’ll cry for her again.

Best Featured Actor in in a Musical

Will Win: Terrance Mann, “Pippin”

Should Win: Gabriel Ebert, “Matilda”

Possible Upset: Gabriel Ebert, “Matilda”

Best Featured Actress in a Musical

Will Win: Andrea Martin, “Pippin”

Should Win: Andrea Martin, “Pippin”

Andrea Marin, best known as crazy Aunt Voula in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” is set to win her second Tony for her role as Pippin’s grandmother, Berthe. In her six-word Tony nomination story, which can been seen here on Facebook, she writes, “never too late to start living!” Weeps people.  Weeps.

The Tonys will air live tonight, Sunday, June 9 on CBS at 8 p.m. eastern. For my live blog of the telecast, follow @ryanjhaddad on Twitter or weepingonwheels.tumblr.com.

The Alpha Sigma Phi house on Fraternity Hill.

By Elizabeth Childers

In 2010, when Ohio Wesleyan took over ownership of the fraternity houses on Williams Drive, it was decided that there needed to be an agreement between the Fraternities, their alumni, Residential Life (ResLife), campus foodservice provider Chartwells and groundskeeping and housekeeping provider Aramark on what each party would bring to the table to do the best for the university and the fraternity chapters. This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed then, and it was decided it would be up for revision every three years. This year was the first year the MOU is to be revised. However, there has been some discourse between the administration and the fraternities, and frustrations have been high.

“It’s a common agreement on paper,” said Dana Behum, Assistant Director of Student Involvement for Fraternity and Sorority Life, about the MOU. “It’s not as binding as a contract, but it is an agreement from both parties…It is a partnership between the university and fraternities.  And that includes a lot of folks.”

Behum was the “in-between” person for the fraternities in their relations with the rest of the administration involved with the MOU. Wendy Piper, Director of Residential Life, said her department was involved in the original creation and in the revision.

“There is a change in the required occupancy level,” she said.  “The 2010 MOU stated chapters had three years — until Spring 2013 — to reach 80 percent occupancy. The revised MOU states chapters must achieve 85 percent occupancy by spring 2015 and 90 percent occupancy by spring 2017.  There is also a change for those chapters who elect to have the university operate their kitchens, which allows chapters more options. The revised MOU allows chapters to decide if they want all of their meals to be provided in the house, if they want a combination of in-house meals and on-campus food points, or if they want to close their kitchens and have members choose one of the existing on-campus meal plans.”

Should a fraternity chapter on campus who currently has a house is unable to meet the occupancy requirement by the deadlines set, they are at risk of losing their house to other housing options on campus who may be able to fill those houses. Behum said in that event, the fraternity can petition to stay in their houses because they are not guaranteed housing in that specific house the next year.  As of spring 2013, two fraternity houses had to submit petitions to ResLife, and both have been permitted to continue living in their respective houses.

“They say, ‘We would like to petition to remain in our facility’ and Residential Life comes back and says, ‘Please share your plan to recruit more or how do you plan to correct this,’” Behum said about the petition process. “So they have a full calendar year to reach the occupancy level….They have to have a plan on paper to achieve it in the next year.”

Behum said it was not the university’s intent to remove the fraternities from their houses, because they would then have to fill them with random students. The goal, she said, was to keep the houses both filled and still in the hands of the fraternities.

Other sections of the MOU deal with how Buildings and Grounds responds to issues in the house and the renovations to be made to the house. It also outlines how the fraternity houses are cleaned.

“The gentlemen on campus asked for a lot more detail regarding cleaning the house…they requested more detail and solidity in when B&G (Buildings and Grounds) would be responsible for repairs like a broken window or mold in the basement,” Behum said.

Behum said some fraternities were more concerned with the B&G section than others.  For example, one of the fraternity houses had sewage leaking into their kitchen—which has been taken care of—and needed other remodeling and adjustments in the past month. Other concerns include cracking foundations and more plumbing issues.

“The common theme our men are unhappy with is the turnaround time with large projects which need to be fixed,” Behum said.

Fraternity reactions, according to Piper, varied depending on the chapter and on what section of the MOU they had questions about.

“The occupancy level has surfaced as a concern; however, chapters that have historically demonstrated higher occupancy seem to have found this change less objectionable than those that have struggled with occupancy,” she said. “They also seem to appreciate that occupancy will be calculated on a three year rolling average, which will allow chapters to recover from (a) ‘lean’ semester of membership. Chapters that continue to self-operate their kitchen seem overall pleased to continue to have that option.”

Behum said the hike in the house occupancy is part of a campus wide initiative to bring OWU to full capacity. Piper said it is a goal to use residential facilities on campus to the best of abilities.

“As a residential campus, our goal is to make use of all residential facilities on campus, and for many years the fraternity houses had occupancies that were low,” Piper said. “Under the 2010 MOU, the chapters were given three years to reach a level of occupancy equal to at least 80 percent, which we felt was a reasonable goal given that their combined average occupancy (in 2009-2010) was about 66 percent. The expectation under the revised MOU aims to bring the fraternities to an occupancy level comparable to other university residences, which has been between 93 to 96 percent over the past five or so years.”

Behum said because fraternities were not filling their houses, “the document challenged them to put emphasis on recruitment.”

She said the fraternity chapters on campus as a whole met the 80 percent occupancy goal fairly quickly, and many of them exceeded it since the original MOU was signed.

The MOU revisions also deal with events such as the Delta Tau Delta fire that were not addressed in the original agreement.

“…Some of the actions that were taken as a result of the fire, which had not been explicitly stated in the 2010 MOU, were incorporated into the MOU to guide future actions,” Piper said. “For example, after the fire, Residential Life relocated the residents and made a concerted effort to keep them located in close proximity to one another wherever possible so that we were not in effect dissolving their community. The MOU now states that in the event of a disaster or emergency that requires students to relocate, the university will work to provide a living arrangement where chapter members are grouped as reasonably as possible.”

Behum said in her experience, the MOU is more of an open dialogue between the university and the fraternities.

“Although it may not be a perfect agreement and my not reach everyone’s needs, it is a living document that we revisit now every four years instead of three…if men are upset (though) we can open the document again…it’s to regulate communications between the university and the fraternities.”

Behum also said there are disadvantages to the MOU in that it can be difficult for all sides to be heard and can be a difficult conversation to have.

“There are fraternities who are having a difficult time getting a response for projects that need to be dealt with, and what better way than to talk about it frequently, get all the right people in the room and get things in motion,” she said. “While there may be disadvantages to different groups…but ultimately it is a positive.”

Some fraternity members at OWU are frustrated by what the MOU revisions. A member of one house involved in listing the revisions the chapters wanted said he felt their voices really weren’t heard or really considered during the final decision. Even though many of the fraternities were not satisfied, they felt they had no choice to sign it, since refusal would give the university the right to remove them from their houses. The member requested not to be identified for fear of himself being singled out, either as an individual or a fraternity.

“The first time the MOU was drafted and signed, the fraternities were very apprehensive about it, but they signed in good faith,” he said. “On paper it sounded great: the school would take care of the houses and provide everything, cleaning services…However, over the past couple years it really hasn’t been done to the best of the school’s ability.”

One example he gave of the school falling short on their promises was on the renovations and plans promised three years ago. He said despite the plans to do rather extensive renovations on all of the houses, in reality the renovations executed were small, inconsequential things compared to the major issues the houses had. Where a house was having large and costly foundational or plumbing issues, the university would instead tear out lofts, replace old locks in the building or paint and consider those renovations, rather than dealing with the larger issues in a timely manner.

He said in the case of the plumbing issue, which eventually caused a sewage line break in Alpha Sigma Phi, the school is only now being forced to deal with it since it is considered a hazardous living condition. Another house is facing similar problems with their plumbing.

“Each house has their own unique problems, and the school really hasn’t done anything to fix them,” he said.

As to the occupancy level for each house, he said there were some tensions.  The fraternities are concerned about the 90 percent occupancy because of how recruitment fluctuates.

“There was no real compromise with that, and it is frustrating because this is supposed to be a negotiation between two parties, but we’re kind of being forced into a corner because if we hadn’t signed by the deadline, the school had the right to take all our houses away, and that wasn’t something we wanted to risk,” he explained.

He said the only real compromise was the three year average for the 90 percent occupancy, even though they’re not quite sure how that will work in 2017.

The member said the decision to move the revisions from every three years to every four also puts the fraternities at a disadvantage. Behum said many of the fraternity men weren’t apart or even on campus at the time of the MOU’s creation, and many of their complaints could come from the fact they see it as new information since they never had to deal with it before. Now, however, any student involved with any MOU revision will be unable to be involved in the one previous and the one after, making continuity in understanding what revisions should be requested very difficult for the houses.

“We wanted to keep it at three, so the freshmen now would have an understanding of what we went through, so they would have something to base their arguments on later,” he said. “But now, with the revision every four years, that’s not really possible.”

Though alumni of the fraternities were involved through the Alumni Inter-Fraternal Council (IFC), the brother said undergraduate members didn’t have enough time to fully understand the MOU.

“We kind of knew about it — we had a draft, but we didn’t have the opportunity to argue our case,” he said. “The person we really were able to talk to was Dana (Behum).”

Fraternity members were only directed to speak with Behum, and were not given the opportunity to meet with those who had the power to discuss and make changes to the MOU.

“They kind of just put on a play, saying we had a month to review it, and then never talked to us about it,” he said. “Then, a week before the deadline, they contacted us, saying, ‘Don’t forget to sign it.’”

The member said at that point the fraternity presidents got together, requested one more week to suggest revisions, and then went through the MOU line by line and listed the changes they wished to make. When they submitted the changes, they were not considered and the presidents were forced to sign because of the deadline.

“Collectively, all the fraternities didn’t want to sign, including the alumni, but we were kind of forced to,” he said. “It just comes back to the fact the school has the upper hand.”

The brother said the Alumni IFC met with the school about those changes and the alumni from his chapter said they tried to make the same suggestions on behalf of the students, but the university administration still did not make the changes to the MOU.

“Students were allowed to go to the first two (MOU meetings), but then students were no longer allowed to go any more,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to argue things that affect every day life when you don’t have the perspective of someone living in the house every day. The alumni know about the huge problems but they don’t know about things like they’re not cleaning our bathrooms or picking up the trash or not taking care of things that break. Things that happen every day.”

He said there was one person at the meetings representing all of the fraternities, but that since it was really only one perspective and one voice, it wasn’t really heard in the decision making process.

The member said while the fraternity presidents were arguing against the changes made and attempting to have their voices heard, they all became rather close and “a united front against a single enemy.”

“Most of the fraternities don’t like what’s going on at all,” he said. “No major negotiations were actually made.  It was more of the school saying, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’”

As to food plans, the brother said the university was trying to direct all the fraternities to use Chartwells.  The fraternities were able to decide whether or not to keep their kitchens under a separate contract (three of them have outside contracts with companies who supply them with chefs) or use Chartwells. However, the MOU states that particular section can be revised every year, “meaning we’ll have to fight every year to keep our own kitchens.”

The brother also said he was unsure as to why the university would continue with an MOU not really agreed upon by the fraternities when a large portion of donated money from alumni come from former members of the fraternities on campus.

He said the Greek alumni money is divided a certain way — 80 percent to the houses and 20 percent to the university to use as they see fit. He said he felt that 20 percent should’ve gone to preventative measures in the house, such as the sewage or foundational problems, before they became an immediate living hazard. However, he said, the university refused to release their financial records of that money in light of all the renovations that haven’t been made.

“Why would you piss us off when all the money you’re getting is from our alumni?” he said.

Trying to decide what movie to see last week, my friend and I were left with few options.  I am not a Trekkie.  I don’t do superheroes.  I love Robert Downey Jr., but not when he ‘s covered in iron.  And while I adore Jay Gatsby, I cannot bring myself to watch his demise for a third time in three weeks.

I can’t handle that Gatsby has more beautiful shirts in his bedroom-within-a-closet than I could fit in my entire house.

I can’t handle that I’m attracted to Tom Buchanan even though he’s an absolute tool.

I can’t handle that a poorly timed summer release has cost Leonardo DiCaprio his long-overdue Oscar.

I can’t handle that I am so much like Gatsby, always reaching for the unattainable green light CGIed at the end of the dock.

We settled on “Mud” starring Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon (well, not starring Reese Witherspoon).  I knew nothing about this movie.  I presumed it was a small-scale indie getting a (sort of) wide release because of the names attached.  Cinematic offerings are generally devoid of intellect in the summer months, so I was hungry for even the tiniest morsel of something truly good.

Last summer I went into “Beasts of the Sothern Wild” knowing absolutely nothing and emerged drowning in a sea of tears.  The masterful meditation on nature and youth took me by surprise, and from the first shots of “Mud”—two young boys riding down a river—it seemed the two films might be similar.

The boys, Ellis and Neckbone (yes, that is his name), stop on what appears to be a deserted island and climb up to what appears to be an abandoned boat hoisted in the branches of a tree.

A boat in a tree.  How did this boat get to the top of this tree?  Who put it there?  Did the person swim off the island?  Did this person drown?  Did this person disappear into the ground?  These questions do not enter the boys’ minds as they rummage through porn magazines in the magical boat.

I can already tell that the five-year-old girl in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is smarter than both of these boys combined, and they’re more than twice her age.  The actors, Tye Sheridan as Ellis and Jacob Lofland as Neckbone, are strong, but the same cannot be said for the material they’re given. Things are going downhill quickly.

Suddenly Ellis notices a bag of recently purchased food in the boat and exclaims, “Somebody lives here!”

So they leave. Not because they’ve just broken into someone’s boat, but because “it takes twice as long to ride upstream” and they can’t be late getting home. Oh. Okay.

But then—surprise! They find eerie boot prints in the sand and discover the mysterious Boat Man standing on the shore, eyeing their boat.  Boat Man is Matthew McConaughey, and his name is actually Mud.

Mud, as a name, lies somewhere between Boat Man and Neckbone in terms of plausibility.  We never learn why he is called Mud, but covered-in-dirt-because-why-bother-to-bathe-in-the-river McConaughey lives up to the name. Though he makes a valiant effort to disappear into his character through all the grime and sloppy speech, he is still Matthew McConaughey, gorgeous as ever, much more so here than in last year’s Magic Mike, a movie better-suited for his attractiveness.

We are introduced to Mud via a technique used too often in writer-director Jeff Nichols’s screenplay: putting together characters who’ve never met and throwing buckets of exposition at the audience. With no apparent creativity, we are spoon-fed character backstory and description, left with nothing to glean for ourselves about the people onscreen. Intellect? What intellect?

Mud asks the kids to bring him back food, and they do. They don’t ask him why he’s on the island, how he plans to get back to the mainland, or why they should help him; they just accept a promise for his boat-in-a-tree in exchange for their assistance. Sometimes Ellis rides out to Mud by himself in the middle of the night, which doesn’t appear any less stupid in the movie than it sounds here. We’re meant to infer that Ellis is endearingly innocent, but it’s difficult to root for a protagonist who just seems dumb.

Not only is a boat Ellis’s main source of transportation, but he lives on one, too. The houseboat is a major component of his father’s livelihood, but his mother, who technically owns the property, wants it torn down so she can move into town because she “needs a change.” Literally, that’s all the justification she gives for breaking up her family. Ellis expresses his angst by slamming doors and punching walls, all the while riding off to visit Mud, unbeknownst to his so-important parents, in order to escape his crumbling home life.

Mud is far from a stable influence on this child. In fact, Mud is wanted for murder. This surprises Ellis, but I wouldn’t call it a spoiler because, hello, the man is hiding away on an island.

Don’t worry, Mud did it all for Juniper, the love of his life. Mind you, her story is awful and tragic and Mud had every right to defend her; but murder is a bit extreme, and murder causes other people to want to murder you. Specifically the father of the man you murdered, who is wealthy and powerful and scary and says things like, “Let’s have a prayer circle for the death of my son’s killer.”

Neckbone is skeptical about helping Mud escape the police. This redeems his character a bit because it demonstrates that, unlike Ellis, he has some semblance of a brain in his head. Ellis is determined to help Mud find safety. He respects Mud. He idolizes him. Most importantly, he thinks anything done in the name of love is worth fighting for. He agrees to bring Juniper to the island so she and Mud can escape together, and Neckbone helps because he wants to protect Ellis from, you know, death.

Never mind that Juniper is only onscreen for three seconds. Never mind that she is Academy Award-winner Reese Witherspoon and has about as many lines as a mime in a silent movie. Never mind that her character is so underdeveloped it’s impossible to sympathize with her. And never mind that she doesn’t actually care about Mud’s feelings at all.

Ellis has jumped on the love train, in the name of Mud’s love for Juniper, in the name of his own love for a high school girl way too old for him (I can’t even bring myself to delve deeper into that awful subplot), and in the name of the love lost between his parents  Everything is about love. Love. Nothing else matters. Not even when you’re being followed by murderers.

In this sense, Ellis reminds me of Jay Gatsby. How come I so strongly identify with Gatsby, yet I can’t connect with Ellis at all? Gatsby’s one great love, Daisy Buchanan, has broken his heart, but Ellis is far too immature to know what love means. Though the adolescent has never felt real love himself, he is willing to put his life in harm’s way. We just don’t care. Gatsby has earned his delusional dreams. Ellis and his uneven screenplay have not.

“Mud” is now playing in select theatres nationwide.

Former Ohio Wesleyan provost and current professor of psychology David Robbins.

View an interactive version of this story at Transcript Investigations.

By Noah Manskar, Editor-in-Chief

and Suzanne Samin, Transcript Correspondent

Someone wanted students to know about the ongoing faculty salary dispute at Ohio Wesleyan.

A small lime green flyer was posted, showing a run-down of faculty salaries in comparison to other colleges that are members of the Great Lakes College Association (GLCA).  On the flyer, OWU ranked 10^th out of thirteen.

The flier had no other writing or comment—simply the figures there, in multiple locations on campus for students to see.

While the subject of faculty salaries floated in and out of students’ minds, the facts were very much up to speculation. Some people had heard, from their professors or otherwise, that salaries were lower than they would like it to be. Others had never thought twice about it. But these fliers, many of which were posted on the doors of student residences, started a new conversation.

As this conversation began, a larger one had been going on among the faculty, administrators and Board of Trustees for decades about whether this was a problem, and if so, how the university would fix it.

While the perspectives vary and the arguments vary even more, there is one thing everyone can agree on—the issue is very real, and the faculty is demanding it be acknowledged.

A Broken Commitment

Over 100 OWU faculty signed a letter sent to the Board of Trustees dated April 3 explaining their grievances with the newest agreement announced by University President Rock Jones at a faculty meeting in March.

The letter, which opened with a statement about how rare it is for faculty to directly communicate with the Board of Trustees in a form of opposition, immediately addressed the faculty’s long battle for “salary correction.”

“For nearly a decade, the faculty of Ohio Wesleyan have (sic) seen their salaries fall in comparison to our peer institutions,” the letter said. “…On occasion, they have sunk to the embarrassing position of dead last. We have watched, even during the period of salary correction, a variety of other projects, improvements, and goals repeatedly jump to the head of the institutional agenda, each one deemed a higher priority than bringing faculty salaries in closer conformity with those of similar rank and experience at the institutions with which OWU so often compares itself.”

The letter went on to explain that each year that passes without bringing salaries to par with those at peer universities according to the median salaries for professors at each rank in the GLCA is income lost to patient, loyal faculty who “deserve the dignity of being paid as the dedicated, accomplished, long-serving professionals we are.”

According to the faculty, their salaries continue to be inconsistent with OWU’s place as a nationally recognized institution, and putting other budget priorities ahead of them “needs to end now.”

Professor of History Richard Spall is the chair of the University Governance Committee, which serves as the faculty arm for OWU’s “shared governance” policy. In this system, the faculty, administration and trustees all collaborate to make important decisions for the university.

Spall said he was brought onto the committee in 2008, shortly after it held the first meeting to resolve this problem. In January of 2009, the Board of Trustees presented their agreement to make increases in salaries.

“At the time of the discussion, it was completely understood that the commitment was to raise Ohio Wesleyan salaries to the median of the GLCA by rank,” Spall said.

GLCA schools have three ranks of professors—full, associate and assistant—each with a descending level of commitment and, by extension, salary. In order to increase salaries by rank, OWU would have to increase each level of salary to their respective medians.

Spall said the Board of Trustees promised this within five years. The following year, the first stage of this increase was implemented.

“The year after that, because the university was in difficult financial straits, a pause was imposed. And so no further progress was made in the second year,” he said.

The faculty letter addresses this: “(W)e have made precious little progress in improving this situation, and we know everyone acknowledges this is simply untenable. The state of faculty salaries at each rank remains egregiously low and the cumulative effect of this chronic condition is a source of urgent faculty concern.”
According to the letter, four years into the adopted salary correction, full professors earned only 87% of the GLCA median; associate professors only 85% of the median; and associate professors only 89% of the median of their counterparts.

The ordinal rank of OWU faculty salaries for full, associate and assistant professors is only ninth, tenth and eleventh respectively, and the faculty believes it could very well sink to the bottom again.

Spall said much of this concern is coming from the fact that in 2012, the university recommitted itself to the goal of increasing faculty salaries in the 2012-2013 academic year.

“Most recently, the board has informed us, through the president, that they regard reaching the median in the GLCA as meaning not by rank, but across all ranks,” Spall said. “And, that is… that is a lower goal. Second, they have decided that even though we have been reassured that the pause year didn’t stop the clock; it was just we didn’t make progress that year. We have now been informed that they regard the pause year as having stopped the clock.”

Because of this, the faculty, in general, would receive a salary raise across all ranks so that the gross income of OWU professors would meet the GLCA median. This means less money. Paired with the pause year, it means less money over a longer period of time.

The faculty letter responded to and commented on this development.

“…It is clear that what faculty have unmistakably understood to have been promised is not what is currently contemplated,” it said. “We cannot disguise the fact that what is presently planned with regard to faculty salaries is not acceptable. It is inconsistent with what has been routinely promised is the goal…with statements that say the faculty are valued. It is unworthy of a great institution and of those who are entrusted with its mission, integrity, and reputation.”

According to Spall, in every discussion the University Governance Committee has had with the Board of Trustees or the administration, the committee has always defined the negotiations as by rank, or asked to double-check. On either occasion, the trustees have confirmed it and not challenged it until now.

In response to this development, the committee called a meeting of all teaching faculty, to answer questions and concerns about the Board’s and administration’s new plan to increase faculty salaries to the GLCA median across ranks. While the committee called the meeting, Spall said instigating and organizing faculty protests is not on its agenda.
“If individual faculty members want to take action, that’s up to them,” he said. “…On the other hand, we did tell the administration that we wouldn’t be putting out fires for them either.”

Dale Brugh, professor of chemistry, said he felt the committee’s main purpose in this situation is to be a liaison between the faculty and the trustees. Based on its recent reports, he said it’s been questionable how big a role faculty play in governing the university.

“I think the point of contention is whether or not there’s a real cooperation between administration and the faculty,” he said. “There’s supposed to be—there’s supposed to be this system of shared governance where we know what’s going on, the administration knows what’s going on and both sides contribute equally to the running of the institution. And I think part of the issue now is that perhaps there isn’t shared governance.”

Spall said the faculty is united in terms of not taking action that would harm OWU students. However, he said faculty morale is the lowest he has seen it in his 29 years with the university because of the trustees’ inconsistency.

Brugh said he is “disappointed” with the most recent developments in the debate because he thought there was a clear agreement between the faculty, the administration and the Board.

“We thought we had an agreement that started three years ago, and I think everyone trusted the administration that they would follow through on their commitment,” he said. “And, you know, you get a promise from somebody and you just say, ‘Okay, they’ve promised me something,’ and over time it becomes maybe evident that they’re not going to deliver, and so when you fully make the realization that they’re not going to deliver, that’s when it looks like it’s all boiled up.”

However, the issue does not seem to be a simple matter of financial infeasibility.

“They aren’t making the argument from the point of we can’t afford it,” Spall said. “They’re making the argument from, ‘That’s not what they agreed to.’ And yet this was articulated on so many occasions publicly, including (by) the president at faculty meetings, and now they’re asserting that it was never understood that way.”

The letter brings up an additional problem: a reallocation of funds that should have been added to the faculty salary pool.

“It recently came to our attention that funds for the faculty salary pool that, at most institutions, are the core of monies to keep institutional compensation on par have routinely been removed from the compensation budgets for other purposes,” the letter said. “Last year alone, the presumed salary correction amounted to a commitment of only $100,000 of ‘new’ money for the purpose, which is why our average salaries increased only 0.7%. The loss of appreciated faculty salary pool funds over a period of years is in large measure how we came to this troubling position, for the decline correlates closely to the siphoning off of these funds for other purposes.”

Spall said this is a concern for the faculty.

“We do know that some time in recent years, four or five years ago, someone in the administration began diverting funds that would typically recirculate (sic) into the salary pool for other purposes,” he said.

He said over time, each faculty member gets small raises, which oftentimes put their salary significantly over the standard for their position. When a professor changes schools, retires or dies, that extra money is put back into the faculty salary pool and distributed amongst the remaining faculty. Over the past few years, this money has not found its way back to the pool, and has instead been redistributed to unknown areas.

The perceived miscommunication and lack of transparency within the administration and board of trustees has frustrated the faculty, which they made clear in their letter to the trustees.  This dishonored agreement, paired with what the faculty considers to be an unorthodox reallocation of funds, are what make their case.

Understanding the Data

In the past two years, Ohio Wesleyan faculty salaries have been ranked in the bottom third among the twelve Great Lakes College Association (GLCA) that reported data to the American Association of University Professors (Antioch College did not report). Faculty in every rank—full professor, associate professor and assistant professor—make less than 90 percent of the median GLCA salary for each.

In 2012, OWU’s average full professor salary of $81,800 was ninth of 12 in the GLCA. The average associate professor made $61,000, 10^th in the GLCA; and the average assistant professor made $53,300, 11^th in the GLCA.

Full professors made 88.8 percent of the GLCA median; associate professors made 84.7 percent of the median; and assistant professors made 89.7 percent of the median. The difference between the median full professor’s salary and the OWU’s average full professor salary was $11,700; for associate professors, $12,050; and for assistant professors, $6,100.

The salary for the average Ohio Wesleyan professor across ranks in 2012, according to university data, is $67,695. OWU ranked 10^th of 12 in the GLCA that year, and that average professor made 90.8 percent of the GLCA median across ranks.

The difference between OWU’s average salary and the median was $6,856. This indicates it would cost far less money to bring salaries to the median across ranks than on a by-rank basis.

In 2011, Ohio Wesleyan’s GLCA rankings for average full and assistant professor salaries were the same—9^th and 11^th, with salaries of $80,000 and $52,500, respectively—but OWU’s average salary for associate professors was last in the GLCA at $58,300.

Full professors made 96 percent of the GLCA median; associate professors made 83.8 percent of the median; and assistant professors made 88.2 percent of the median. The difference between the median full professor’s salary and OWU’s average full professor salary was $3,050; for associate professors, $11,250; and for assistant professors, $7,000.

Across ranks, the average OWU professor made $67,228 in 2011. That salary is 91.8 percent of the across-ranks median, and $6,033 less than the median.

Full professors made $1,800 more in 2012 than 2011, an increase of 2.25 percent. Associate professors saw an average correction of $2,700, or 4.63 percent. Assistant professors’ salaries increased an average of $800, or 1.52 percent.

Across ranks, the average OWU professor made $1,767 more in 2012 than 2011, an increase of 2.78 percent.

Unlike those for faculty, salaries for three main administrators—the president, vice-president for Finance and Administration and Treasurer, and provost—have been near or above the GLCA median recently.

According to data from the 990 forms universities file with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from 2010—the most recent year for which data is publicly available—Ohio Wesleyan’s president, Rock Jones, made $267,406, eighth of 12 in the GLCA in 2010. His salary was 97 percent of and $8,296 less than the median.

Comparing equivalent officers at GLCA schools, OWU’s Eric Algoe, vice-president for Finance and Administration and treasurer in 2010, made $165,696 that year, fifth in the GLCA. His salary was 107.4% of and $11,396 more than the median. Jim Galbally replaced Algoe on an interim basis in the fall of 2012. Dan Hitchell took his place in January of this year.

Looking at GLCA provosts, David Robbins, OWU’s provost in 2010, made $186,353 that year. His salary was the highest in the GLCA for his position, 114.6 percent of and $23,775 more than the median. Charles Stinemetz replaced Robbins as interim provost in the fall of 2012; Stinemetz was officially given the provost position this past February.

According to Michael Long, chair of OWU’s Board of Trustees, these three examples may be outliers. He said the Board’s analysis shows “that on the whole, the officers are just below median collectively in salary.” He also said some faculty are “well above” their rank’s median, as some administrators are.

A Deep History

The debate over faculty salaries is a longstanding issue at Ohio Wesleyan, and it has a complex historical context.

According to David Robbins, professor of psychology and former provost, the current dispute has its roots in a sequence of events starting in the mid-1970s. Shortly after Robbins’s arrival to the faculty in 1973, he said, a “slight downturn” in full-time student enrollment forced the university to hire fewer faculty than it had in the previous decade. The student body was replenished in the late 1970s with a flux of students from private schools on the eastern side of the country. According to Robbins, they were relatively smart with moderate SAT scores, but had “motivation problems.”

“Classwork was not their first priority,” he said. “They may have been more interested in sports, or more interested in fraternities or partying.”

Frustrated, the faculty told then-Dean of Admissions Fred Weed to stop admitting those students and to tell schools to advertise OWU to their brighter students. Not wanting their students to be rejected altogether, the schools directed the sub-par students elsewhere, but didn’t send more talented ones to OWU in their place, causing enrollment to drop drastically.

According to Office of Admissions data, OWU had 2,351 full-time students in 1979. By 1983 it fell to 1,646, and reached its low point in 1985 at 1,387.

Robbins said the situation created a “budgetary crisis.” To cut costs the administration, led by former University President Tom Wenzlau, cut several academic departments—including Community Studies, Speech and Social Welfare—resulting in the termination of 12 tenured professors, which Robbins said was “quite traumatic in our environment.” A tenure freeze was also instituted, so all new faculty were on hired on a temporary, term-by-term basis.

Two cost-saving salary programs were also launched. One was an early retirement severance package, where professors stopped working before age 65, the usual retirement age, for one or two years’ pay. This cost money up front, but Robbins said it was a long-run savings because it further shrunk the faculty.

Another program was three-year unpaid leave, targeted at younger faculty who might have wanted to “try different things” in other fields, according to Robbins, without giving up their job at OWU. Robbins said both programs still exist today “with some modification.”

Additionally, the Board of Trustees furnished what Robbins termed a “risk investment” of around $6 million to “offset” budget deficit the low enrollment created.

Robbins said the “rocky road” enrollment has traveled has had lasting effects on the university’s financial stability.

“(W)hen 70 percent or more of the operating budget is based upon tuition, room and board, that creates problems with building a budget year after year,” he said.

Because the budget is so variable annually, it’s become difficult to rectify the faculty salary problem since salaries are commitments made over several years.

When the enrollment crisis was somewhat assuaged, David Warren replaced Wenzlau as university president in March of 1984. Robbins said Warren was a “dynamic” president who brought attention to OWU from the beginning of his term—the president’s house wasn’t yet available when he started, so he moved into the dorms with students, which was covered on national television.

According to Robbins, Warren was the “architect” of the university’s honors program, which was the inception of merit-based financial aid at OWU. He said its goal was to “improve the profile of the class, bring more students to campus and recover at least a little net revenue from room and board and whatever tuition they may be paying.” It also hoped to attract students who might not qualify for merit scholarships, but would still contribute to improving the university.

“The theory was, also, that that student from Galipolis or wherever who was extremely capable that got a no-need scholarship might also bring a friend, who might still be a good student, but not quite eligible for the honors program,” he said.

The plan was successful. By 1989, five years after Warren’s inauguration, full-time enrollment was 1,904; in 1990, five years after the low point, the university had 1,992 full-time students. But financing the honors program and its merit scholarships came at a cost to the university’s endowment.

According to Robbins, there are two primary subsets of OWU’s endowment. One is the permanent endowment, money the university invests in various places. Only the interest this money earns can be spent; the initial investment, known as the principle, cannot be touched. According to OWU’s 2010 990 form filed with the IRS, the university’s total endowment that year was $186,632,438. Of that, 64.438 percent, approximately $120,262,210, was permanent endowment.

A second category is quasi-endowment, money given by donors to the general endowment fund not specified as a contribution to the permanent endowment. This means the university can spend the principle as well as the interest. 5.411 percent, or $10,098,681, was designated as quasi-endowment in 2010. The initial funding for the honors program came from the quasi-endowment in the mid-1980s.

A third type is term endowment, funds that must be spent within a designated time period. In 2010 30.151 percent of the endowment fund, about $56,271,546, was term endowment.

Robbins said the university projects a 15-percent return from the endowment each year, five percent of which goes into the operating budget. That payout rate is maintained even when investments don’t yield 15 percent, leaving less money to add back to the endowment and adjust for inflation.

“That hurts, because you’re cutting into that stability, that growth,” Robbins said. “But we weren’t taking out principle—that’s the important thing.”

Because the first merit scholarship money came out of quasi-endowment principle, the program shrunk the overall size of the endowment, which caused it to yield less interest. This gave the university less money from the endowment to use for the operating budget and, in turn, the faculty salary pool.

Robbins said Ohio Wesleyan commissioned a team in 1986 to develop a plan for raising faculty salaries to fourth in the GLCA. It contained two faculty, himself and Joanne Harvey from the economics department; two administrators, Provost Bill Benz and Bob Holmes, vice-president for University Relations; and two trustees, current emeritus trustee Phil Meek and former trustee Bob Mecum.

The solution they found was to raise salaries annually by the GLCA average plus three percent. Robbins said two factors made this strategy a difficult one to maintain.

For one, the GLCA average is a “moving target.” Each school tries to keep its salaries as high as possible relative to its peers, and each adjusts its salaries on an annual basis to stay away from the bottom of the list.

“So you’re always trying to play a little bit of catch-up on the basis of if the other schools are trying to compete against you of not wanting to be beneath you in terms of average faculty salaries,” Robbins said.

Second, when professors retire or die, they’re usually at the top of the salary list and get replaced by someone at an entry-level salary, which Robbins said makes the average look lower than it actually is.

Robbins said there was also a debate then over whether to evaluate salaries alone or total compensation, which equals monetary salary plus fringe benefits. The sextet settled on a salary-based solution, which Robbins said he advocated for because benefits are more variable and harder to measure between schools.

“(I)t’s a little better today, it’s more standardized today, than it was back in the ’80s, but some institutions might include costs that other institutions would not,” he said.

The goal, though, was never achieved. Many more have been set, but none of them have been met, either—other things, like facility improvements (dorms, athletic facilities and the JAYwalk, for example), get in the way, and the Board of Trustees is reluctant to give additional funds from the endowment because of how much it has shrunk.

“Each president has come in and made a promise to increase salaries, and we try,” Robbins said. “But the bottom line has always been that the Board, in their fiduciary responsibilities, want to see a balanced budget, and from their fiduciary responsibilities, do not want to get in a situation like we were in back in the ’80s, i.e. using principle out of the endowment.”

According to Robbins, more money for the salary pool could potentially come from increased revenue as a result of a decline in the number of students receiving need-based aid, a reduction in merit scholarships or an increase in the size of the student body.

Another source is the annual fund, money given by alumni to the school’s general operating budget rather than to a specific department or cause. In recent years the annual fund has grown and been used to offset reduced payouts from the endowment in balancing the budget.

The Administration Responds

At the April 15 faculty meeting, University President Rock Jones presented a plan to raise faculty salaries to the GLCA median across ranks in three years. In his presentation, he acknowledged some financial obstacles Ohio Wesleyan has faced in recent years.

The university’s net tuition revenue is about $2 million less now than it was in the 2008-2009 fiscal year, when University Governance Committee chair Richard Spall said the salary initiative was first discussed. Additionally, data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) indicates net revenue per student is $12,548 lower than the GLCA median without OWU included.

Jones said the budget model he and the administration have prepared will add to the faculty salary pool from budget reserves. It will also “build a base” for further growth by bringing in large freshman classes, since tuition is the university’s largest source of revenue—over 70 percent, according to former provost and current professor of psychology David Robbins. Jones said the pause in salary increases was a result of a revenue decrease brought by a small freshman class.

According to Michael Long, chair of OWU’s Board of Trustees, the faculty salary pool will increase $600,000 over the next fiscal year, with the total compensation pool increasing $720,000. Jones said the salary pool will grow $1.6 million over three years; additions to the benefit pool make the total expansion over $2 million.

With that increase, Long said the difference between OWU’s average faculty salary across ranks and the GLCA across-ranks median will decrease from $6,625 to $3,559, moving the university from 10^th to ninth among its peers.

With the GLCA median salary across ranks increasing at a projected two percent, the budget model will raise OWU’s average across-ranks salary to the median by the end of the 2015-2016 fiscal year. Average total compensation, measuring fringe benefits plus across-ranks salary, would hit the median in the next fiscal year and extend about $5,000 past the projected median in 2016.

Long said the budget model hasn’t been voted on, but the Board’s Finance Committee “expressed appreciation for the model’s intention to move faculty salaries to the median, while also asking questions about OWU benefits in relation to other GLCA institutions.”

The trustees’ written response, dated April 13, to the faculty’s open letter to the Board said salaries are their “number one priority,” which Jones said hasn’t been the case in the recent past. He said there’s historically been a larger gap in faculty pay between OWU and its peers than for administrators and staff, so the issue will require more attention.

Jones said he thinks the salary issue is an “essential” one.

“The faculty has the responsibility for developing the curriculum and delivering the education that is why we are here, and they should be compensated fairly and equitably,” he said.

According to Jones, the additions to the salary and benefit pools will “take a toll on other aspects of the university”—they don’t allow for any increases to program or department budgets and will result in smaller raises for non-faculty.

While the faculty feel the administration and the Board of Trustees committed to raising salaries to the GLCA median on a by-rank basis, the Board resolution from January of 2010 did not specify whether the initiative would move forward by rank or across rank. Long said the Board is still considering which standard is best.

“This issue remains to be addressed, and the faculty’s open letter to trustees has caused us to seek more information about this distinction and its impact,” he said.

According to Long, no Board records indicate which framework would be used, either. Jones said the Board was “less clear in its understanding” than the faculty and has continued to evaluate which model to use.

The Board’s letter to the faculty said the trustees have also considered comparing Ohio Wesleyan’s total compensation—salary plus fringe benefits like healthcare, tuition remission and others—to its GLCA peers instead of salary alone. If this were the case, OWU would fare well. According to IPEDS data, OWU’s fringe benefits as a percentage of salary is highest in the GLCA at 40.6 percent. The university’s standalone benefits package ranks third at $27,502. If salaries were at the median by rank, OWU’s total compensation across ranks would be third-highest in the GLCA at $106,760.

While the budget model uses the across-ranks standard, Jones said it was “certainly…not communicated clearly” to the faculty that that framework would be used.

Robbins said the original goal set by the administration and Board was different than the budget model Jones presented in April, and that he acknowledged the dissonance between the faculty’s understanding and the Board’s.

“I think the president is on record as saying that his goal—we may be mincing words here between a goal and a commitment—but his goal, and we talked before about the difficulty in reaching goals, his goal was to do rank-by-rank,” he said. “But as he indicated in the last faculty meeting, the Board’s resolution talked about increasing faculty salaries without reference to rank-by-rank. So there is that perceived difference.”

Long said the university doesn’t have the financial resources to raise salaries to the GLCA median by rank. According to Dale Swartzentruber, associate dean for institutional research, two factors complicate using the by-rank system.

One is the fact that OWU has the highest proportion of full professors—45 percent—of any GLCA school. Swartzentruber said this happens because associate professors are eligible for promotion to full professor after five years in that rank, two years less than at most of the university’s peers.

“Because we have so many, it costs us a lot of money to try to hit the goal of paying the fulls comparably to the fulls at the other schools, (be)cause we have so many of them,” he said.

Another factor Swartzentruber said makes the by-rank framework more difficult is OWU’s “non-overlapping” salary policy. This dictates that the highest-paid associate professor can’t have a higher income than the lowest-paid associate professor, and the highest-paid associate professor can’t make more than the lowest-paid full professor.

According to Swartzentruber, a few professors hit the “ceiling” salary in their rank and start to get smaller raises than if they were in the next highest rank. He said the Faculty Personnel Committee, which handles faculty promotions, sometimes favors promotion if a candidate is at the ceiling.

“We don’t typically have very many people who are hitting that ceiling of the associates, so in some sense it’s kind of a moot point,” he said. “They can continue to make more money as associates, but occasionally we do have people that are at the top of the rank and are being deprived of raises that they would otherwise get. That’s the perspective that they have, is that they’re being deprived of the raises that they otherwise would have earned.”

Swartzentruber said the non-overlapping salary structure is uncommon. Robbins said he thinks OWU keeps the policy because it’s “equitable” for faculty.”

“When I stand up in front of my class and lecture about the role of the amygdala or the role of the hippocampus in influencing behavior, I want to be considered just as important as…(when in) the economics department, a faculty member stands up there and talks about economic trends, and when an education or and English faculty member stands up and talks about them, I should be valued in the same way,” he said. “What better way of doing that than paying us the same amount?”

In its letter, the Board thanked the faculty for “bringing to (its) attention that funds released when senior faculty retire have not been routinely returned to the faculty salary pool.” It said neither the Board members nor Jones knew the additional salary money was leaving the pool, and agreed that the practice should be reinstated.

According to Swartzentruber, it’s “not entirely clear” why the practice was stopped, but caused salary pool growth to slow in recent years. When raises were given to faculty, the additional money resulting from the difference between retiring faculty’s pay and their replacements’ was supposed to supplement the amount of money budgeted for faculty salaries.

“(I)t wasn’t necessarily a mistake that was made, but I think that the growth in the average salary at Ohio Wesleyan wasn’t as large as people thought it should be given how much additional money was (supposedly) being put back into the pool,” he said.

Because the money wasn’t being “recycl(ed),” Swartzentruber said, there weren’t as large additions to the pool as there should have been. Jones said this is called salary compression.

“Salary compression is more likely to happen in faculty ranks—this is not just here, it’s also at other places; that’s why you have to be very careful not to let it happen—when people are here for a long time,” he said. “When administrators are replaced or even hourly people, you have to pay the market to hire the person.”

According to Swartzentruber, these surplus salary monies weren’t specifically being taken out of the salary pool for use in another particular section of the budget. He said he thinks the money should have stayed in the pool, but that he doesn’t think it was stopped intentionally or that its discontinuation was the result of “incompetence.”

“I think what we were doing was not the proper thing, but it wasn’t malicious—it wasn’t that someone was saying, ‘Ah, now we can take that money and use it for that,’ or, ‘I hope a whole bunch of people retire, cause then we’ll have even more money to spend on this or that,’” he said. “…I think there was just a lack of understanding of the implications of our process.”

Jones said he is “perplexed” as to why it’s taken so long to rectify the salary situation at Ohio Wesleyan. He said salaries lost a lot of ground between 2004 and 2009, but he doesn’t know exactly what happened because he wasn’t inaugurated until 2008.

He said the recession that began that year has played a big role in reducing the resources OWU has been able to dedicate to salaries. 2008’s freshman class had $1.6 million in government aid that doesn’t exist today, which the university has had to make up for in scholarships.

“I think the model that we’ve developed is a first step,” he said. “But we’ll never be absent of the circumstances of the broader world, and if we had another significant recession and suddenly had significantly less money, there are many things that we want to do today that would be difficult to do tomorrow. So I think we need to all understand that we’re doing everything we can, but we are not immune from external forces.”

The Board also took note of the external factors than can affect the university’s finances.

“We must also remember that a good budget process does not eliminate the potential for a negative financial outcome in the event of low enrollment, economic recession, or similar adverse event,” it wrote in its letter.

Robbins said he thinks the issue of by rank versus across ranks has only become contentious recently because the faculty and administration were just “pleased” the Board said anything on the matter. He said most trustees come from a “different environment” than others associated with the university.

“(T)hese are, a lot of them, business people,” he said. “They come from an environment where long-term commitments like this are not made to their employees and where salaries are individually negotiated, sometimes benefits are individually negotiated.”

Jones said some of the goals the university has set in the past, like the 1986 salary enhancement’s ambition of getting salaries to fourth in the GLCA, were “unrealistic” because they weren’t financially sustainable.

“I would love to pay our faculty at that level, but the resources are not available,” he said.

Looking Ahead

To Jones, the faculty salary issue is a “complex” one that “has a lot of emotion charged behind it.” He said he thinks it will take “discipline” to make sure the administration’s plan gets carried out.

While he acknowledged the one-year delay in increases, Long said the Board of Trustees “has not reneged” on its 2010 resolution to get salaries up to the GLCA median. The Board’s letter to the faculty contained a “warm welcome” for the two parties to continue to discuss their “shared goals for OWU.”

“(T)he Board has remained committed to raising faculty salaries, and has allocated as much funding as possible to this goal, while continuing its obligation to consider other pressing needs as well, including compensation for non-faculty, resources for departmental and program budgets, and care for the facilities,” Long said.

According to Swartzentruber, Ohio Wesleyan isn’t alone in dealing with this problem. He said faculty here play a more significant role in governing the university than at other schools, which he appreciates—he started as a psychology professor in 1992 and moved into a full-time administrative role three years ago.

“Some schools, the faculty really just have to go along with whatever the administration thinks is best,” he said. “And the faculty here don’t tolerate that, and I think that’s appropriate. I like working here…. And although everyone would like to make more money than they currently make, the difference between what we make as faculty here and what we’d like to make is not, like, double.”

Chemistry professor Dale Brugh said the issue’s roots in the university’s history have exacerbated the problem—several faculty have been at OWU for between 30 and 40 years, and are especially upset now because they’ve “dedicate(d) their lives” to the institution. He said some of his peers won’t be satisfied unless the administration and the Board fulfill their commitment to the by-rank framework; others have talked of unionizing. Most want a “clear sense of openness” from the Board and administration, to “feel like (they are) a part of the process.”

“As a scientist, for me it’s important that people look at the same data—that the more people you have looking at the same information, the more likely you are to notice problems with it and to discover errors and to then make good decisions, to correct mistakes before they actually are made,” he said.

Robbins said he’s in favor of a by-rank solution. But he said he thinks the non-overlapping salary policy is good for the university, despite the confounding effect it may have on using a by-rank standard for increasing salaries. Unlike OWU, Robbins said, schools like Ohio State will pay an incoming economics professor more than the most senior education professor, which he doesn’t think is fair.

“That’s not who we are,” he said. “That’s not the kind of values system that we’re trying to place upon our students.”

Swartzentruber said he’s not sure the issue will ever be completely resolved.

“I think it’s human nature to expect that you’d like to make more, or to expect that you’re going to get a bigger raise than you actually got,” he said. “I don’t want to undermine the faculty concern, cause it’s a serious concern and we do, in fact, have an underpaid faculty here. It’s just a matter of, relatively speaking, how much underpaid are they?”

By Spenser Hickey

Assistant Copy Editor

and Noah Manskar

Editor-in-Chief

A man was shot Thursday night on the Woodward Elementary School playground at 200 S. Washington St., three blocks from the Ohio Wesleyan campus.

Delaware Police Department (DPD) officers responded to a 911 call at 8:15 p.m. reporting a fight outside the school, according to DPD Captain Adam  Moore. When they arrived, they were informed the fight had resulted in a shooting.

Joshua Mosley, Jr. of Columbus was arrested and charged with felonious assault after police conducted an investigation at the scene, detaining and interviewing seven witnesses.

Moore said Mosley “made some statements” indicating he committed the shooting. Some witnesses’ testimony also contributed to the probable cause for the arrest.

The victim, Darryl Ginyard of Delaware, sustained a gunshot wound to his upper body and was airlifted to an Ohio State University hospital. Moore said he was told the man went into surgery for his injuries last night.

According to Moore, in the coming days DPD will continue to collect evidence and determine any other involved parties, as well as figure out the motive for the crime. He said officers are “still pursuing the location of the weapon.”

“We know kind of what happened now; the next question is, ‘Why did it happen?’ or ‘What was behind it?’” Moore said.

Moore said the incident bears no relationship to Woodward Elementary School other than its location. He said it’s questionable whether the parties were trespassing because many local schools offer their playgrounds for public use.

“Obviously they were not using the playground for its intended purpose by getting into a fight or shooting firearms, but I really can’t comment on what the school’s policy is about who can use their equipment and when they can or cannot use it,” he said.

Around 9:30 p.m. a Public Safety (PS) alert was sent to OWU warning of a shooting on Liberty Street with the suspect still at large. The alert told students to stay inside.

Director of PS Robert Wood said PS was “not able to confirm immediately who the shooter was” with DPD.

The Babbling Bishops, OWU’s improvisational comedy troupe, were performing their final show of the year in Chappelear Drama Center. During the show, a member of the theater staff took a member of the troupe aside. After the show ended, the troupe informed the audience that “something had happened on Liberty Street.”

By then, many had already seen the first PS alert and a later one from around 10:20, saying police were still searching for suspects and that no students or OWU employees were involved in the shooting.

“Stay inside with doors and windows locked,” the alert said.

Shortly after the Babblers informed the audience the campus was on lockdown and the building was in “crash” position, Officer Jay McCann and Investigator Art Reitz of PS arrived to escort students from Chappelear to the residential halls.

“We’re going to move you in a couple of large groups,” McCann told the audience. “…It’s still an active situation, we are still asking you to stay inside (and keep) doors locked.”

After learning that almost everyone in the audience were going to Bashford, Thomson or Welch Halls, or Small Living Units on Rowland Avenue, McCann announced that they would move as one group, with one PS officer in front and another at the rear.

“Please stay close together, we’re going to go as quickly as possible,” he said. “And again, let me reiterate—until an (all clear) alert comes out, please stay inside. I know this is the last day of classes, I know this is Blackout Thursday…this is very unexpected, and it is a very dangerous thing …the police department is still advising us to stay inside.”

He told the audience he didn’t want to see a student encounter the alleged shooter and be shot.

“You know me well enough, I wouldn’t be telling you this if it wasn’t the truth, I need you to really follow this, okay? Get in your dorms and stay there.”

The audience filed out into Rowland Avenue. Many walked in silence; some had their arms around each other or held hands. They reached the residence halls without incident.

Shortly after midnight, another alert went out, updating that the investigation – now listed at Woodward Elementary, when previous alerts said it was on Liberty Street or off-campus – was ongoing, but that “the scene is quiet.”

“BE CAUTIOUS if out in area,” the alert concluded.

Director of University Communications Cole Hatcher sent a campus-wide email at 12:38 p.m. Friday saying no OWU students or employees were involved in the incident. The message encouraged students, faculty and staff to contact DPD with any relevant information and to sign up for the OWU Alert system that kept the campus informed as details unfolded.

“We hope to provide as much information as we can as quickly as we can, and we hope we succeeded this time,” Hatcher said.

UPDATE: As of 3:42 p.m. on May 3, DPDt issued an arrest warrant for Chante N. Durr on a felonious assault charge. Durr is also suspected in the May 2 shooting incident. According to the DPD press release, anyone with information on Durr’s whereabouts should contact police at (740) 203-1111 or file an electronic report at crimereports.com. DPD is also seeking information about the location of the gun used in the shooting.

UPDATE, May 7, 8:33 a.m.: According to DPD Captain Adam Moore, the warrant for Durr’s arrest was issued because investigation indicated she had been involved in the confrontation leading up to the shooting and had made some threats during the incident.

By Morgan Christie
Transcript Correspondent

According to sophomore Kristen Puckett, Day on the JAY is not just a tradition, but an event not to be missed.

Puckett, president of Campus Programming Board (CPB), said Day on the JAY, held this past Monday, is received very well compared to other events planned by CPB.

“It’s hard to get the word out no matter how fun your event is, because there are just so many events on campus all the time,” she said. “But Day on the JAY advertises itself.”

Residence Life Coordinator Meredith Dixon high-fives the CPB mascot.

Performing at Day on the JAY is the group’s prize for winning the “OWU’s Got Talent” competition in March.
In order to “spice it up,” CPB chose “rock n’ roll” as the theme for this year’s Day on the JAY, according to Puckett.

She said CPB decided the theme before the semester started.

“It’s the same for all of our events—someone comes up with a theme or idea and everybody just really likes it, so we go with it,” she said.

“The theme really helps us plan and narrow down fun things to have.”

In keeping with the theme, CPB commissioned an Elvis impersonator to perform on the JAYwalk for the event.
Freshman Jessica Gooden said she feels Day on the Jay is different from other campus events.

“Since it is spread out along the JAY(walk), I feel like more people take part in it and it’s just a fun time to hang out with friends and take a break from classes,” she said.

Sophomore Calvin Cagney agreed—he said the event is “really easy” to attend.

The JAYWalkers perform outside of Hamilton-Williams Campus Center.

“You can always stop by for a bit after class since it’s in the middle of the day,” he said.

Freshman Emma Keller said the food is an “awesome” part of Day on the JAY, but she also enjoys the other activities available.

“My favorite part would have to be the unique things we (students) get to do, like getting henna or playing in a bouncy house,” she said.

Keller also said she would like to see Day on the JAY occur more frequently.

OWU students line up for soft serve ice cream

Gooden said she thinks CPB should create “Days on the JAY,” where the event would last for more than one day.

“I could do with some more great fun in my life,” she said.

Rape and sexual assault are the most under-reported crimes nationally—54 percent of rapes are never reported to authorities, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).

In Delaware, most that are reported are quickly closed. According to a list of all Delaware Police Department (DPD) reports of sex crimes (including dissemination and display of harmful material, rape, sexual imposition, gross sexual imposition, pandering of obscenities, sexual battery, unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and use of nudity-oriented material with a minor) between Jan. 1, 2008, and March 1, 2013, 45.1 percent of sex crime cases have been exceptionally cleared, meaning no arrest was made even though the suspect was known; 20.3 percent remain inactive pending further information. 8.8 percent were declared unfounded accusations, meaning there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support the case.

In that same time period, Ohio Wesleyan’s Department of Public Safety received 22 sex crime reports, but only six were ever reported to DPD. Of those six, four were exceptionally cleared and two remain pending or inactive. One 2008 incident was said by PS to be reported to the police, but no corresponding DPD report exists. PS Lieutenant Cathy Hursey said DPD declared the case unfounded.

PS Director Robert Wood said the department is legally obligated to file a police report for any felony sex crime reported to the university, regardless of whether the victim files a report individually. Some, like rape, according to DPD Captain Adam Moore, are automatic felonies; but others, like sexual imposition, have misdemeanor and felony levels.

Even when it’s “iffy” as to whether a crime reported to PS is a felony, Wood said the university would rather report to the police than not—once a crime reaches the felony level, there is more at stake than the victim’s decision whether to report it themselves.

“(Y)ou’re really breaking the laws of the state, and what the state says and what the prosecutor says,” he said. “If you’ve got a rampant sex offender out there committing felonies, even if you don’t want to prosecute it, we have a responsibility—we might have a responsibility to prosecute it because of the other people involved—they’re a danger to the community.”

In non-felony cases, however, PS procedure leaves it up to the survivor whether to report to the police. Wood said the department would informally notify DPD of the incident, but it is still up to the victim whether to file a formal police report.

In addition to filing a police report, PS is required to release a weekly log of every crime on campus under the federal Clery Act. According to the logs from 2008 to 2012, there was one sex crime in 2009 reported to both PS and DPD, but it is not accounted for on the annual report of aggregate Clery data from that year. Wood said the incident might have fallen out of the Clery sex offense categorization when PS compiled the aggregate data.

According to Wood, it is in Public Safety’s interest to report any “reportable” incident, but in dealing with sex crimes, the survivor’s dignity is a priority.

“(S)omething I think we all try to do is give the power back to the victim,” he said. “In other words, we let them know that we’re not going to make you do anything that you don’t want to do, we’re going to be honest with you, we’re going to tell you what’s going to happen, but you tell us how we can help you. You’re in charge here. We’re you’re advocates.”

According to Detective Sergeant John Radabaugh, DPD’s policy is similarly deferent to the survivor. They can elect to initiate a “full-court press” investigation by gathering witnesses and collecting evidence, or do nothing at all, in which case the incident becomes exceptionally cleared. Sometimes survivors will choose to leave a case inactive in case they change their mind; an inactive rape investigation can be reopened any time within the 20-year statute of limitations.

When a case is left pending, Moore said, the publicly available incident report will only contain a “media report,” a brief, basic explanation of what happened and what the status is. Most other details remain inaccessible to the public.

Moore said DPD’s procedure for sex crime cases is founded on the want not to “re-victimize victims.”
“(S)exual assaults, a lot of times those crimes are about control and power, and I think once a person’s been a victim of one of those crimes and had the loss of control or power, we as a police department do not want to force them to do something that they wouldn’t want to otherwise do,…because in a sense, we’re taking away that victim’s power and we’re taking control, which is exactly what led them to being a victim,” he said.

According to Radabaugh, this sensitivity is the department’s attempt to assuage the incredible difficulties of reporting and prosecuting sex crimes. The criminal justice system, in tandem with a culture in which being a survivor of sexual assault or rape is shameful, sets up an immense amount of hoops survivors have to jump through to be successful in procuring justice for themselves.

“Look at it this way—(when) somebody is sexually assaulted, it is probably the worst thing that has happened to them up to that point,” he said. “So they have the initial traumatic event, they get the courage up to come in and talk to me, who they had never met before, about the worst thing that’s ever happened to them—which is likely the second worst thing that’s ever happened to them. And then I ask them to go to the hospital for an exam to collect a certain amount of evidence, at which point they go in, remove some of if not all of their clothing, are asked about the event another time by the nurse, and then I sit down and talk to them about what moving forward in the criminal justice system means. And it almost invariably means talking to several members of a grand jury with a prosecutor and stenographer in the room, and once an indictment is made, possibly going to trial in front of the person who attacked them, the defense attorney, the judge, the person who attacked them’s support system, and 12 members of a jury. And that has got to be a very daunting prospect to anybody. So moving forward is not an easy thing for a sexual assault victim.”

According to John Durst, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at OWU, the criminal justice system often places a larger burden on survivors to prove they were indeed assaulted. Because the locus of legal procedure in sexual assault and rape cases is consent, which can be subjective, a survivor pursuing a conviction has to go through a “greater sort of questioning” to prove what happened to them was technically illegal.

Senior Paige Ruppel, moderator of the Women’s House, said she feels alleged perpetrators often attempt “to prove that the survivor is guilty somehow” by asking irrelevant questions, like what they were wearing.

“That sort of rhetoric, I think, doesn’t come in as much into other crimes,” she said. “And maybe I just notice it more with these sort of situations, but I just really think that there’s something that’s not lining up.”

Socially, Durst said, American society engages in a false balancing act of the necessity of convictions and the harm of false accusations in rape and sexual assault cases. This ignores the fact that a minute minority of cases nationally are false accusations, and tips the scales against the survivor even more.
“(B)alancing that might be a little misleading—there may be two percent of all cases that are wrongly convicted, and 50 to 60 percent of cases that never even comes to the eyes of the criminal justice system,” he said. “But all that has to play itself out in a court system that’s framed in a sometimes difficult way to get a conviction.”

In Delaware, DPD cooperates with other resources for survivors to create a collaborative approach to justice and recovery. Organizations like HelpLine of Delaware and Morrow Counties, Grady Hospital’s team of sexual assault response nurses, the Sexual Assault Response Network of Central Ohio, victim advocates and others work with criminal justice personnel to make reporting, investigation and prosecution an easier process.

In Wood’s 35 years in law enforcement, he said, he’s never worked with a department more adept at handling sexual assault than DPD.

“They’re good at a lot of things, but Sergeant Radabaugh and I have worked together a long time, and I have complete confidence in this department with the way our students and our populations are treated,” he said.

Despite this, Moore said OWU students have mixed ideas about what the department does and what the best course of action is to take when deciding whether to report sexual assault. Messages from the media and peers, he said, can be “really, really powerful” in shaping someone’s perception of the police and “how interactions with the police are going to go.”

“(T)here are so many opinions out there and there’s so much in the media about what we do and how we do it, that a lot of times people have preconceived notions about what’s going to happen if they report to the police a crime or what have you…,” he said. “I think we can’t discount the power that happens, too—that they may or may not have accurate information as to what’s going to happen if they come forward.”

Wood said he feels reporting sex crimes most often does more good than harm for students.

“I’ve been here just about seven years, and I’ve never had a victim or survivor come back to me and say, ‘God, reporting to the police was the stupidest thing I ever did,’” he said. “Not one time.”

In addition to the public criminal justice system, students can also pursue sex crime sanctions through the intra-university Student Conduct system.

Michael Esler, coordinator of Student Conduct, said he receives an average of five sex crime reports each academic year; about three of them pursue charges fully, while the other two decide not to proceed. Reports can come from essentially anyone on campus—PS, Residential Life (ResLife), students who know the survivor or the survivor him- or herself.

One option a complainant has in the Student Conduct system is an informal resolution, a scheduled confrontation between the survivor and the perpetrator mediated by Esler. Few cases, Esler said, take the informal route—it’s usually reserved for situations when the survivor and perpetrator are close and want to continue their relationship.

The more common action is a formal hearing before the university’s Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel, a group of faculty and staff who hear every sex crime case during the year they serve. As mandated by a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the federal Department of Education, sex crime cases are decided using the “preponderance of evidence” standard, which is less stringent than the previous “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, also used in criminal courts.

If a complainant is hesitant to proceed with filing formal university charges, Esler said he will sometimes ask to meet with the perpetrator and report back to the complainant following the meeting. If the perpetrator reacts unfavorably, it will sometimes convince the accusing student to move forward.

Regardless of what the complainant does, Esler said, the university is obligated by the “Dear Colleague” letter to take some sort of action. The rule is fairly “open-ended,” but something must be done to “try to correct the problem, create a better climate on campus,” or otherwise alleviate the damage done.

Overall, it is the responsibility of the Student Conduct system to balance the “three-legged stool,” in Esler’s terms, of sex crime cases—the university must “balance the dignity of the person bringing the accusation,” “protect the rights of the accused” and “protect the interest of the overall community.”

“It’s not conducive to a successful academic career if you’re always looking over your shoulder worrying about being attacked, or whether your friends are safe,” Esler said. “That’s a huge concern for us, and so whenever I’m dealing with these cases, I’m always trying to keep in mind that there are three interests here that need to be balanced and protected; and there’s no formula for it, but you have to consider all three of them all the time. That’s the challenge.”

Ruppel said she feels the university system is much friendlier to survivors than the criminal justice system, in which survivors’ “agency is violated all over again.” Additionally, the abundance of resources and the support of ResLife and PS make it easier for survivors to successfully utilize their Student Conduct options.

“…I think that there definitely is a level of respect and privacy and anonymity that’s insured through the campus system that’s talked about very openly, and I really think that that helps people feel more comfortable coming forward,” she said.

Durst said he thinks the nature of university as an institution gives it better awareness of how intimidating sex crimes are to report. OWU in particular, he said, has a good number of administrative and academic programs, like the Women’s and Gender Studies department, that focus rather intensely on the issue. However, he said, the administration has itself to look out for in dealing with the problem, since colleges and universities have only paid much attention to the problem of sexual assault on their campuses in the last 10 years.

“(T)he university might have its own interests in mind to make sure that it does investigate—as I said, should—but that it does investigate and has a lower standard, in a sense that the university doesn’t want to be portrayed as a place where sexual assault goes unnoted,” he said.

Ruppel said the intimacy of a campus environment can be daunting for survivors, especially those whose perpetrators are people they know. The weight of being responsible for a friend’s suspension or expulsion can weigh heavy when deciding whether to pursue a sanction.

“…I feel like survivors are often put in the position where they have to choose between reporting and potentially losing a friend group or losing a community that they have built on campus, or not reporting and staying silent,” she said.

Ruppel noted that there have been many more reports of sex crimes recently than in the past—PS reports say the department received 15 reports between 2011 and 2012, about twice as many as the three prior years combined. To Ruppel, this reflects the fact that sexual assault and rape are still serious problems at OWU, but also shows the campus has become more “conducive to reporting.”

Esler said he is less sure whether universities are inherently better environments for dealing with sex crimes since they “reflect the general society,” but policy changes like the “Dear Colleague” letter to create better environments for survivors by providing “more guidance” and “stricter requirements.”

According to Wood, one facet of the criminal justice system that makes prosecuting sex crimes so difficult is its foundational principle of proving guilt rather than innocence. In American law, it’s more favorable to let a guilty person go than convict an innocent one. Combined with the cultural stigma attached to sex crime, this makes it even more difficult to secure a conviction.

“Based on that type of system, it does add challenge to the prosecution and conviction of sexual assault and people that commit that crime, and that’s just part of our judicial system that we think is important, I guess, in terms of the way that it’s structured,” he said.

Reform, though, is on the horizon. According to Esler, some portions of the “Dear Colleague” letter making it easier to prosecute sex crimes made it into the newest version of the federal Violence Against Women Act; other reforms like rape shield laws and rules prohibiting the admission of a survivor’s sexual history as evidence.

Despite this, though, Esler said the reliance on “circumstantial (inferential) evidence” sex crime prosecution often necessitates and the cultural shame around being a survivor still make the legal system incredibly difficult to navigate.

“(T)here are reforms out there, but there’s still a stigma, and I think people reporting it will sometimes shy away from it because the system can be harsh on them…,” he said. “A strong defense attorney will try to turn the tables and somehow make the person filing the complaint the guilty party.”

Additionally, according to Esler, most sex crime laws are enacted on a state-by-state basis because they are out of the federal legislature’s jurisdiction.

The lack of federal power has resulted in an inconsistent “patchwork federal system”—some state laws are easier on victims, while others make it more difficult to get a conviction. Therefore, it’s left to administrative agencies like the Department of Education to use their fiscal “leverage” where they can to make policy friendlier.

Durst said he thinks the reason behind the discrepancies between university and legal systems is procedural as well as structural—it takes a lot of political effort to change criminal statutes, so it’s rarely done.

“(I)t’s a very political—good and bad—process to do anything in terms of creating, modifying, doing anything in terms of the actual criminal code and the processes,” he said.

Regardless of administrative or legal reforms, Durst said. American culture and law are still patriarchal—men make the laws and dictate how they will be enforced. Because law is a reflection of societal values, Esler said, it will take a deeper cultural change to make the legal process easier for survivors.

“(A)s long as people don’t take rape and other sexual assault as seriously as they should, as long as men believe that this is something that isn’t that serious, we’re not gonna be able to make huge reforms,” he said. “So ultimately I think it has to be a societal thing, where people respect the dignity and privacy and integrity of other people, and unfortunately too often that isn’t the case.”
According to Radabaugh, American culture has a lot of myths about what sexual assault is—that you’ll only get raped if you’re in a bad part of town at the wrong time, and that it’ll be a surprise. These contradict the reality that a perpetrator is more likely to be someone the survivor knows. This avoidance of reality is why it’s so easy to believe those myths.

“(T)he myth is a lot more comfortable—that is one of the things that makes it so difficult to change, because the reality is uncomfortable,” he said.

“So it’s going to require, at kind of a very deep level, a change in the way that society understands what sexual assault is, and that is gonna take a lot more than just law enforcement, or just victim advocates, or just sexual assault nurse examiners, or just prosecutors. That’s going to take a lot of work….(O)n one hand that can be very frustrating for me, because I’m inside this working every day; on the other hand, I can see how it is comfortable to believe those myths.”

While awareness has undoubtedly increased, Durst said, the legal and cultural systems in place are “tediously slow” in making changes suited to that awareness. There are resources in place, but their limited reach and the patriarchal nature of the culture make it “a long ways off from being equitable or just.”

“What we’ve done is baby steps in the right direction, but…the larger state and federal court structured systems are still eons behind in terms of addressing that sort of thing,” Durst said.

To Ruppel, the problem is as relevant on the individual level as the systemic level—the amount of “irrelevant” questioning survivors have to endure in the court of public opinion is just as onerous as it is in the criminal justice system.

“(S)mall things like that that are just ingrained because of the rape culture we live in—that needs to change,” she said.

Marilyn Nims pouts, acting to the lyrics of one of the songs she performed. Many of Marilyn Nims’s songs were sung in a foreign language, emphasizing emotion and body movement as valuable tools of performance.

On April 16, concert pianist and professor of music Robert Nims accompanied his wife, mezzo-soprano professor of music Marilyn Nims, in a four-part faculty recital in Jemison Auditorium. Marilyn Nims sang 23 short songs in the Nims’s production of “Manners…The Way We Are,” celebrating her upcoming retirement at the end of the year.

During her 29 years at Ohio Wesleyan, Marilyn Nims said she has performed in 29 faculty performances.
“It is an opportunity for faculty members to model what they are teaching,” she said. “While performing, the faculty artist is illustrating those concepts in technique, musicianship, musicality, and communication which have been discussed in applied lessons. Faculty recitals also add to the cultural life on campus and in the community.”

According to the department of music website, Nims has “been an opera or oratorio soloist with many orchestras and choral groups including the Columbus, Mansfield, Central Ohio, Welsh Hills and Columbus Youth Symphony Orchestras, as well as Cantari Singers of Columbus and the Columbus Bach Ensemble.”

The website also said Nims has performed with the Robert Shaw Festival Singers in Souillac, France, and at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

She has also sung chamber music with the Marble Cliff Chamber Players, OWU’s Duvall Ensemble, Mid-America Chamber Music Institute and the sextet Vocal Colour.

Robert Nims retired from teaching in 2002. He was a professor of voice and Director of Choral Activities at Ohio Wesleyan.

Since retiring Robert Nims has been an adjunct voice teacher at Ohio State University and an interim teacher of voice at Capital University and Cleveland Institute of Music.

He is also an adjunct professor at both Ohio Wesleyan and Otterbein Univeristy.

Robert Nims played piano for each piece, starting with a German song called “Fischerweise,” or “Fisherman’s Song,” by Franz Schubert.

“It’s very easy working with my husband, since we know each other’s musicianship and musicality so well,” Marilyn Nims said of working with Robert.

“It’s also a pleasure working with faculty colleagues, who bring their own background to the mix. Our work with students usually involves some element of instruction, which is a different situation than working with a colleague.”

Many of the songs Nims sung were in German, while others were in French, English and Spanish.

“Being able to translate and pronounce foreign languages is essential for ‘classically trained’ singers,” Nims said. “The study of German, French and Italian is always a part of our preparation. Spanish is of late becoming an essential, and many schools now offer training in Russian and Czech.”

The audience was able to follow along in the program, which had the lyrics translated into English.
Between each piece, Marilyn Nims briefly gave facts about the songs the audience couldn’t find in the program, as well as exchange short banter with her husband.

She has a particular interest in the Spanish zarzuela, which is a form of musical theater. She has “served as (a) singer and Spanish diction coach for the zarzuela theatre at Jarvis Conservatory in Napa, California, and has made singing translations of two zarzuelas,” said the music department’s website.
Marilyn Nims used theater throughout the performance. Each song had a different movement or form of animation involved.

“Singers are most often presenting words as well as music, and since we face the audience directly, acting becomes an important factor for interpreting those words,” she said. “Some pieces seem to beg for physical communication; others seem best letting the music and words speak for themselves.”

Robert Nims played the piano during his wife Marilyn’s faculty recital on Tuesday, April 16.

Another at the end of the second section of the performance was Jake Heggie’s “Once Upon a Universe.” Nims again used movement to act as a young version of the Christian God being scolded by his mother for breaking his toys, a pun on the universe and God’s creations.

Marilyn Nims’s last song out of the 23 she performed was Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s “I Am Easily Assimilated,” a testament to her long, successful career making music as well as teaching it.