Federal investigators are visiting four University of Alaska campuses this week as part of a system-wide audit of the way the university responds to sexual violence.
UA is one of 64 institutions of higher education nationwide the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights is investigating or auditing for compliance with Title IX, the law that guarantees gender equity in education. The 1972 law also encompasses the proper handling of sexual assault complaints.
UA doesn't know exactly how it got on the list of institutions undergoing "compliance reviews" by the Office of Civil Rights, said university attorney Mike O'Brien.
Unlike dozens of other institutions including Harvard University and the University of Akron, it is not being investigated in response to specific complaints, O'Brien said.
"We're amongst a group of schools not being investigated for a violation but are just being reviewed to gauge compliance with Title IX," he said.
One reason might be Alaska's "abysmal" overall rates of sexual violence, O'Brien said.
"How educational institutions are dealing with those problems is something of interest in the federal government," he said.
University officials say the scrutiny is welcome.
"This is kind of an unprecedented review," O'Brien said. "We welcome it."
The probe of the UA system has several stages, said O'Brien. First, the university sent 6,000 pages representing the documentation of every instance of sexual harassment or sexual assault since 2011 to the Office of Civil Rights investigators.
From 2011 to 2013, the UA system recorded 257 sexual harassment or sexual assault complaints at its three main campuses, in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau, plus the community campuses attached to UAA such as the Prince William Sound, Kenai and Kodiak campuses, according to statistics provided by O'Brien. Those numbers are not broken down by type of assault and could include anything from a student who was offended by the content of a poster hung in a dorm hallway to forcible rape.
A separate report on campus safety mandated by the federal Cleary Act shows 12 forcible sex offenses were reported on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus from 2011 to 2013. Five of the 12 were reported in 2013.
At UAF, the number of campus sex assaults reported to police from 2011 to 2013 was 27. That number includes "one report by single victim of 15 possible incidents of sexual assault over unknown period of time," from 2011.
Federal investigators traveled to Alaska to hear directly from students.
The team visited UAF on Monday and Tuesday and will be on campus at UAA on Wednesday and Thursday. Visits to the Kuskokwim campus of UAF, in Bethel, and to University of Alaska Southeast, in Juneau, are also planned.
Posters distributed at UAF and UAA invited students to a series of listening sessions.
Separate "focus groups" are planned on UAA's campus Wednesday and Thursday for groups such as female athletes, female students including international students, LGBT students and Alaska Native students.
Amy Klosterman, one of the OCR investigators working in Alaska this week, said field staff couldn't answer questions about their activities.
Word is the UAF listening sessions Monday and Tuesday were so well-attended that they ran over the allotted time, O'Brien said.
At UAA, officials have "moved aggressively" to ramp up response to sexual violence allegations, including hiring two full-time Title IX investigators in 2012, said Marva Watson, the director of Campus Diversity and Compliance at UAA. The investigators look into complaints as well as train faculty members, staff and students, among other outreach efforts.
"The level of commitment of to this and the importance of it in our organization is high," Watson said.
Ultimately, the results of the OCR's review will be made public, though there's no timeline yet as to when that will happen.