Assessing the Organizational Culture of Higher Education Institutions in an Era of #MeToo

Abstract

Sexual harassment was established as a form of sex discrimination in institutions of higher education (IHEs) under Title IX of the Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since then, decades of victimization surveys beginning in the 1980s show that sexual misconduct continues to be a significant problem for IHEs. Estimates suggest that as many as 25 percent of college women experience a sexual assault while in college, while as many as 34 percent experience attempted or completed unwanted kissing, sexual touching using physical force, threat of physical force, and/or verbal coercion during their college career. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors propose the Preventing and Addressing Sexual Misconduct Framework as a tool to assess and cultivate an organizational culture that is responsive to these concerning trends. Pulling from an interdisciplinary body of scholarship and the philosophy of the #MeToo movement, this tool is a starting place for the continued dialogue that is needed to more fully address sexual misconduct on college campuses.

The COVID-19 Pandemic as an Opportunity to Foster the Sustainable Development of Teaching in Higher Education

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COVID-19 and the Promotion of Digital Competences in Education

“…School organizations are extremely complex because they deal with individuals and aim at their education/training [16,17,18,19,20], and the specific organizational culture is a key feature to consider in the functioning and potential educational change in the organizational context [21,22,23,24]. Ozcan In terms of school culture, it is a distinctive feature of each school, that is, all schools have a culture of their own.…”

Can Respectful Employees Create Equitable Institutions? Promoting a Culture of Respect in the Higher Education Workplace

“…Research finds that training and education programs are most effective in changing behavior and altering attitudes when they explicitly present yellow zone behaviors that are ambiguous and blur the lines between professional and social interactions (Chawla et al, 2019; Dolamore and Richards, 2020). Yet, presenting potentially ambiguous situations may be in tension with university policies.…”

“…In light of growing understandings about the relationship between university culture and sexual harassment and assault, and in order to comply with federal legal requirements, universities are taking a multi-pronged approach to addressing sexual harassment in the workplace, including initiatives aimed at reducing yellow zone behaviors. More broadly, institutions of higher education implement a variety of means to foster cultural change to address gender and racial inequalities, such as creating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices and mandating education and training sessions for faculty and staff (Bisom–Rapp, 2001; Brown, 2019; Dolamore & Richards, 2020). We examine employee perceptions of one such training, alongside workplace experiences of sexual and gender-based harassment, here.…”