The Promise and Peril of Title IX Addressing Sexual Violence: A University Case Study, 1972–2017.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In this dissertation, I investigate the interplay between campus sexual violence laws, activism, and university structures within the context of one university. Title IX has transformed universities and curtailed some forms of gender discrimination—increasing funding for women’s sports, for example—yet it has had less impact on reducing sexual violence. Despite resources devoted to both preventing and responding to gender inequity in personal safety on campus, sexual violence at universities remains prevalent and clearly harmful. Using an in-depth sociohistorical case study of one institution that I call “State University,” I triangulated content analysis of 1,807 newspaper articles with 69 archival data sources, and supplemented these with purposively sampled interviews of 23 key actors. I ask the following questions: (1) how have activists sought to transform how universities approached sexual violence; (2) whether and how has the movement against sexual violence become institutionalized at universities; (3) how have Title IX and other linked campus sexual violence laws provided opportunities or obstacles for activists and formal organizations, including the university; (4) when and how have activists and university actors leveraged the ambiguity created by multiple laws on sexual violence; (5) when, how, and by which constituencies is sexual violence framed as a problem specific to the university for which the university as a formal organization bears responsibility; and (6) when and how do university constituencies demand that policies and practices extract accountability from organizational insiders?In the first empirical chapter (Chapter Three), I focus on the institutionalization of the movement against campus sexual violence at U.S. universities. I find that the movement has become institutionalized through the complementary processes of professionalization, formalization, and ritualization. I introduce the concept of hybrid activists, who productively link these three institutionalization processes. I show how hybrid activists provided movement continuity by fighting for State University to take new approaches to sexual violence, mentoring student activists, and routinizing student activism through ritual events (e.g., Take Back the Night or Sexual Assault Awareness Month). In the second empirical chapter (Chapter Four), I compare the multiple trajectories and interactions of federal and state law on campus sexual violence at State University to understand how sexual violence was rendered into a problem that universities were legally required to address. I find three phases or layers of how the university came to understand sexual violence as a legalized problem for the organization. In the first layer, the university came to understand sexual violence as both a social and legal problem. In the second layer, the university came to understand sexual violence as a problem of student misconduct. In the third layer, the university came to understand sexual violence as gender discrimination under Title IX. Nevertheless, the university diminished gender to an identity, rather than a power structure. I argue that the ambiguity created by the legally plural environment contributed to the variation in the trajectories of use of state law, the Clery Act, and Title IX by the university and activists. In the third empirical chapter (Chapter Five), using an organizational lens, I examine how several university constituencies (meaning sets of actors with specific institutional responsibilities) defined sexual violence and its perpetrators and how these constructions changed. The first constituency, student journalists, is often overlooked by scholars. I specifically focus on student journalists and show that they carried out enduring coverage of State University members committing sexual violence, while also covering local and national debates over sexual violence at universities. In particular, student journalists called for institutional accountability in addressing sexual violence. Other constituencies analyzed include feminist faculty and graduate students, non-academic offices and staff, and university leaders. Many of these constituencies and their constructions of sexual violence perpetrators overlapped in time periods. I argue that the ongoing contestations within State University over definitions of sexual violence and its perpetrators illustrates how student journalists are key organizational actors. Student journalists’ ongoing reporting on sexual violence, which contrasted with leaders’ public statements and leaders’ restrained organizational changes, kept sexual violence under discussion. The dissertation distinguishes itself from other work on Title IX and campus sexual violence by considering longer-term change; showing how activist, organizational, and legal processes within the context of one university intersect with broader political, legal, and movement processes to shift definitions of the problem of sexual violence, shape institutional responses to it, and refocus activism. The dissertation contributes a new analytic perspective on the importance of ritualization (meaning rendering ritual events part of organizational life) to institutionalizing social movements. I proffer the concept of hybrid activists, which expands the insider-outsider activist continuum beyond organizational location to include the productive bundling of movement institutionalization processes. The dissertation also contributes an analysis of legal activism in a legally pluralistic, ambiguous environment created by multiple linked laws on campus sexual violence. Multiple layers of law co-existed for how the university regulated sexual violence. Because I analyzed law as indeterminate, I show the consequences of the legal framing of sexual violence as gender discrimination that fell under Title IX, demonstrating that the contestation between the university and activists was not only about whether Title IX applied to sexual violence, but also about the very definition of what constituted gender discrimination. .