Marshall students discuss interaction with president over university’s mishandling of sexual assault on campus
Students discuss their conversation with University President Brad D. Smith about the school's failure to keep them safe and their demands for change.
Nov. 22, 2022 • Written by Kyle Vass
If you ask a Marshall University student how to get to the student center, they’ll tell you it’s next to the fountain.
They’ll assume you know where the fountain is because how could you miss it? The 13-foot Harry Bertoia sculpture that pays homage to the 75 Marshall athletes, staff and flight crew who died in a 1970 plane crash is located in the center of the campus. It’s also key to the school’s identity.
In fact, the first thing you see when you enter the Student Center is a big-screen television playing the film “We Are Marshall” on a loop. The film, starring Matthew McConoughey, tells the story of a university suffering a deep loss: the deadliest sports-related tragedy to affect any sports team in U.S. history.
The focal point of the film however isn’t the events of that tragic day. Rather, it tells the story of a community racked with sorrow and left wondering how it could ever possibly rebuild itself and make the survivors whole again.
On a Friday morning in October some 50 years later, a group of students gathered at this memorial (or, “the fountain”) to demand the same reverence the school’s administration showed in the face of that tragedy as one that’s just been uncovered recently: Marshall University ranking as one of the most dangerous schools in the nation for sexual assault.
The day before the protest, USA Today published a story titled “How a top university failed survivors during their Title IX cases,” detailing a systemic failure of the school to take rape victims’ allegations seriously. The report showed between 2018 and 2020 only 18% of reports of sexual assault were substantiated by Marshall’s Title IX office.
After 20 minutes of chanting outside, the University’s President Brad Smith, approached the students. Junior Bex Law said it caught her off guard. “He just came up and said, ‘Hey, do you want to talk?’”
“I said to (Smith) before we went inside, ‘We're willing to come talk to you. But, that's not going to stop us today. We are going to leave your office at 11:30 because we have a protest to do at noon,’” Law said.
Front of mind for Law was Smith’s initial response to the USA Today story. His first public-facing step to address the article was to send an email to students and faculty that focused largely on how the school had already made significant progress in addressing sexual assault on campus since 2018 – a point already disproven in the article.
The students wanted an apology and a plan of action, not an explanation of their own lived experiences with sexual violence over the past four years. Smith took the students up to a third story office and, to Law’s astonishment, she got part of what she asked for.
“One of the things that I said was that I would like to see an apology from him on behalf of the university, to which he immediately turned around and said, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry. I want you to know that I'm sorry.’ And I said, ‘Can I get that in writing?’”
Later that day, Smith issued a second email that opened with an apology.
The administration had become so known for complacency regarding allegations of harassment and assault that students like Senior Sam Green didn’t bother reporting them to the Title IX office.
“I know countless students who are in that position who just say, ‘Nothing's going to happen. Why would I put myself through that?’” Green said.
Also featured in Smith’s second email of the day: an announcement that he’d be assembling a student-led committee to help overhaul the way sexual assaults are reported and resolved on campus.
In a follow-up email, Law said “Overall, I am pleased by the energy that today inspired. I left feeling we made a positive impact, which seems to be culminating already.”
The next day, Smith fired the head of the Title IX Office.
Regardless of whether the university continues to make good on its plan to address concerns about sexual assault, Senior E.T. Bowen said students will continue to do what they’ve had to – rely on each other.
“It's kind of like the conversations that we've been having about policing over the past, you know, five years, it's like, we keep us safe as a community,” Bowen said.
In a roundtable discussion about their experiences with the administration and their meeting with President Smith, students said the environment of sexual predation has led to each student developing their own network of friends. Green said students talk in code to share negative experiences or to warn each other that they might run into an abuser at a certain location.
“You find your own safe people,” Green said.
Having come together to protest and successfully confront an administration, multiple students said they felt the size of that network of safe people growing.