Faculty council considers civil rights office changes

The University of Missouri Faculty Council will consider changes to the school’s Title IX and civil rights policies.

The group went over the report from its Ad Hoc Committee on Civil Rights and Title IX Thursday afternoon at Memorial Union. The group will make any final changes, including a vote on its recommendations, at a later meeting.

The office, led by Assistant Vice Chancellor Ellen Eardley, expanded in December 2015 to include discrimination complaints based on categories like age, nationality or compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Eardley took over the Title IX office in April of that year, handling the school’s sexual discrimination complaints, which it still manages today.

The report includes revisions to how the school’s Title IX office holds hearings and clearly defining important terms. Tina Bloom, chair of the ad hoc committee, mentioned the school had no “compulsory process” in its Title IX hearings, meaning it can’t legally compel someone to take part in the hearings. The Title IX office held 24 such hearings in the 2014-2015 school year, designed to hear facts of a complaint brought to it, and decide if punishment is necessary. The proposal includes adding language to the rules to include someone’s non-participation in the hearing would be a “refusal to cooperate,” and subject to “student conduct action.”

Eardley said she was glad the Faculty Council took an interest in reviewing the policies around her office. The addition of all civil rights complaints has meant 13 more categories of discrimination to document, but also meant her office could direct students, staff and faculty affected by these problems to proper resources on campus, like mental health counseling.

“So that they feel safe, that they can stay in school and that they can stay employed and engaged in our community,” Eardley told ABC 17 News.

The revisions from the ad hoc committee include expanding on the definition of dating violence. It specifies that “emotional, verbal, physical or sexual violence,” and threatening self-harm or hurting others qualifies as dating or intimate partner violence.

49 of the 332 reports Eardley’s office received in the 2014-2015 school year included such violence. While the Title IX Office put out a report in September 2015 on what people were reporting, she said the 2015-2016 version was delayed due to the office’s expansion into civil rights complaints. Eardley said she expects the report to come out by the end of the calendar year.

“We’ll just have 13 forms of discrimination to report out about, and to describe the types of incidents that we’re seeing on our campus, so that people have a sense of the information that we’re collecting and what we’re doing with that and how we’re responding as a community.”

Eardley was also pleased that the office was able to connect 162 of the 328 people who reported with resources on campus.