There were 54 reports alleging sexual misconduct by Indiana University employees across all campuses from July 1, 2015, to June 30, 2016.
This and other figures were included in a report compiled by the IU Office of Student Welfare & Title IX in response to a public records request from The Herald-Times. The office puts out an annual report detailing reports of alleged sexual misconduct by students, but it does not include complaints concerning actions by IU employees.
The office’s first annual report included data for the 2014-15 school year and was designed to address the pressing issue of sexual misconduct among students, said Emily Springston, IU’s chief student welfare and Title IX officer.
“And that’s not to devalue that this also fully applies — our policies and procedures and our efforts fully apply — to the behaviors of everybody in our community, but the issue at hand, particularly when we started this initiative, was sexual violence among students,” she said.
However, Springston acknowledged some instances of employee sexual misconduct involve students. For instance, IU fired Guoping Wang in May 2016 from his job as a senior lecturer in the Jacobs School of Music after a student reported he sexually assaulted her in November 2015. He was charged in July of 2016 with criminal confinement and sexual battery, both felonies. He pleaded not guilty, and the case is pending in Monroe Circuit Court.
Sexual misconduct among university employees received attention nationally earlier this week when Inside Higher Ed published a story on a soon-to-be released study from the the Utah Law Review. The study, “A Systematic Look at a Serial Problem: Sexual Harassment of Students by University Faculty,” looked at nearly 300 faculty-student harassment cases.
It found most faculty harassers are accused of physical, not verbal, harassment, and more than half of the cases — 53 percent — involve alleged serial harassers, according to Inside Higher Ed.