Endeavoring to Do Better


First Person Accounts

A growing collection of personal remembrances from people who experienced or witnessed the problems we cover in the Timeline Project, including, for instance, how in multiple decades serial predators were reported to the administration yet were allowed to remain on campus and reoffend. These testimonies reveal that it wasn’t just the victims of sexual assault who suffered from lax or misapplied campus policies.

2020s

My daughter was sexually assaulted by a fellow student while she attended Carleton. Apparently this student had already assaulted at least one other student—the Title IX office told her so when she reported it—yet the college did nothing except restrict him to certain hours in the dining hall.It goes without saying: the assault wasn’t my daughter’s fault and she did not ask to be harmed. In my eyes, it appears that in some cases Carleton does not hold students that violate other students accountable. That so few survivors speak out publicly and so few parents know what really happens on campus plays to Carleton’s advantage: silence means the school doesn’t have to contend with the truth. And the truth is that almost 25 percent of all college women, even at Carleton, experience a sexual assault while they are in college. In the four years my daughter attended Carleton, only one student was expelled for sexual assault.As a person of honor and conscience, I can’t reconcile my lived values with Carleton’s institutional betrayal. By not expelling my daughter’s assailant, a known serial predator, from campus, the college put the entire community at risk and my daughter suffered the consequences. I, too, am an alumna, and Carleton was the formative place that launched me into a life of service dedicated to families and children. Because of my own experience on campus, I entrusted Carleton to educate my daughter and keep her safe. My daughter was educated but not protected.After attending Carleton’s commencement ceremony in which the assaulter received his degree, I returned my own diploma—the only thing that has brought me a scintilla of relief from my unending rage. Carleton is ruined for me because it did not stand by my daughter—nor so many others, as I’ve subsequently learned.However. Yet. But. Since that graduation on the Bald Spot, every day that my daughter lives her life is a testament to her spirit as a survivor. If you knew her, you would be in awe of her courage, fearlessness, independence, and confidence. She is the bravest person I’ve ever met. In spite of everything, she rises.Who knows? Maybe this is your daughter, too. According to the 2021 Sexual Assault Campus Climate Survey done by the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, less than 10 percent of women survivors tell their parents about their assault. (Read Carleton’s results here.)I remain forever in solidarity with all affected by sexual assault and all who seek to reckon, reform, and repair Carleton.Tikkun olam—repair the world.Anonymous alum, mother of class of 2021 alum
Submitted with permission from my daughter 

2010s

For two years I was heavily involved in activism on getting the college to appoint a full-time Title IX coordinator. It started during my sophomore year (2014-’15) in the aftermath of a case involving one of my friends, which we believed was egregiously mishandled. She sued the college over it, and the case was dismissed.
Julie Thornton, the associate dean for the sophomore and junior class, was also performing the role of Title IX coordinator, covered in her job description under “other duties as assigned.” After some intense student critique of her handling of the case, Thornton left Carleton and students demanded a dedicated full-time Title IX coordinator. 
I was student chair of the Title IX Student Visioning Team in 2016, put together after the 2015 Campus Climate survey, which in my opinion existed mainly as a show that the college was soliciting student input. We met for pizza with the new interim Title IX coordinator, Amy Sillanpa, who had previously worked in residential life. These sessions, while informative, seemed pretty pointless. We did develop a list of recommendations and sent a three-page report to dean of students Carlolyn Livingston, who never responded to the email. 
Julie Thornton had admitted to me that she hadn’t been adequately trained for that position and received insufficient support so cases weren’t getting enough time and attention. When she left, Carleton denied that it was related to her job performance.
During my junior year, I and other students, including several official peer leaders, met with Carolyn in person to explain our views on this issue. She did not seem especially receptive and I didn’t get the feeling that sexual violence was a priority for administrators at Carleton. Student interest would typically increase when someone publicly shared a story about a poorly handled case and then go away after a few weeks. Institutional memory is very short.
In fall of 2016, a few months after Julie left, the student body got an email from Carolyn telling us that a search committee had been assembled to look for a full-time Title IX coordinator because the dean’s office was being “restructured.” I posted about it on Facebook and got some students and alumni to email Carolyn reiterating their support for a dedicated, full-time Title IX coordinator. Several students independently met with Carolyn to discuss the issue, myself included. 
The Title IX Student Visioning Team, which had essentially disbanded, got an email asking if we could help interview candidates. Four or five of us had long closed-door interviews with all the candidates, where we asked very candid questions and discussed our experiences and the campus climate. We all believed that a relevant master’s degree and previous experience as a TItle IX coordinator (or equivalent position) should be minimum requirements for the job.
I had my own experience with the Title IX complaint process at Carleton. Without going into detail about the incident, I found the process lopsided and overwhelming because the other student had significantly more financial resources than I did. As a result, she was able to retain an attorney as her support adviser, which was not feasible for me. That by itself isn't Carleton's fault, but I've spoken to other people who ended up in similarly uneven hearings where the accused student had an attorney and they didn't have access to one. Given that there were and are huge wealth disparities in the student body, I think this is something that Carleton should be more intentional about supporting students through, potentially by helping connect them with legal counsel.
Laura Riehle-Merrill was an internal hire when she was appointed as the new full-time Title IX coordinator in the summer of 2017. She had been a sexual misconduct support adviser for a few years and the head of the Civic Engagement Center before that. She did not have the training the students on the Visioning Team were hoping to see in the new coordinator, and she got the job over several candidates who did.
After I graduated I put together some documents for the new CSA senators, including the recommendations of the student Title IX Visioning Team, in hopes that they might help guide future discussions about these matters.
We frequently wanted to get alumni involved with Title IX related activism but never knew how to start.
Anonymous male, class of 2017

2000s

1990s

For many years, two alum friends of mine made a practice of going to Carleton just after graduation and going through house and floor kitchens. They took food that would otherwise have been thrown out, used and distributed what was open or about to spoil, and donated the rest to food shelves.They probably should have worked with the college around this, but they went with "better to ask forgiveness than permission." When the college found out, it banished them from campus for I think two years and threatened them with prosecution.I probably don't need to finish this little comparison of crime and punishment.Anonymous, class of 1990
To my knowledge, I never knew anyone personally who was sexually assaulted at Carleton. But I certainly heard about some. A roommate once told me that one of the people known on campus as a serial rapist had threatened to kill him when he came to a woman’s defense because the guy was groping her at a party. And I remember vividly when all the stuff hit the Minnesota and national news in early 1991–it was a bombshell. Dean of students Cris Roosenraad was completely ineffectual–in my own limited experience–when I filed a complaint against some students who verbally harassed me while I was experiencing a mental health crisis during my senior year and then again six months after graduation, while they were still students. It’s truly appalling that the administration allowed the sexual assaults to keep happening. Their focus on preventing the accused from becoming “pariahs” and “ruining” their futures is grotesque. Do they really think a bunch of young women would make this shit up when it required voluntarily talking about their sex lives with middle-aged, almost all male administrators? And this focus on handling everything internally without involving the police (true at many schools, not just Carleton) is just shameful. I agree there shouldn’t be mob justice and that the accused have rights too. But the way things were and are handled is so focused on the accused that it dissuades victims from coming forward to avoid being retraumatized.Anonymous male, class of 1990
As I listened to Xandria's excellent presentation at Carleton's 2023 reunion, it gelled for me that this is about sexual assault and institutional betrayal, yes, but it's also about the question of who belongs at Carleton. If it's so easy for a woman to drop away from Carleton in the wake of a sexual assault but so incredibly difficult for the college to banish an attacker, then we're saying something very fundamental about who and what Carleton is about.In that respect, the college owes every one of us a profound apology.Ingrid Meyer Case, class of 1990
I was an RA in the late 1980s, during the height of the AIDS crisis and a period of feminist activism on campus around sexual assault. Carleton provided RAs with some training on talking with students about their sexual relationships and gave us 50 percent off the price of condoms, which we bought with floor money and our own money. Nevertheless, I was woefully unequipped to deal with several disturbing incidents that happened on my floor.One that haunts me happened in 1988 when I was a junior and an RA on 1st Hue. Back then the exterior doors of dorms were left unlocked and Goodhue had a cafeteria, so we constantly had nonresidents passing through the floor. It took me and the other RAs a while to realize that some of the girls the first-year men were bringing to parties and to their rooms were high school students from Northfield. At least one guy was having sex with one of these girls. He boasted to others on the floor that it was easier than trying to have sex with Carleton women, who he said were all "angry feminist lesbians." The toxic culture on the floor that some of the first-year men were creating was a regular topic of concern at our weekly RA meetings with the head resident.  The head resident was a new professor on campus, and while I think he wanted to do the right thing, I don’t think he was fully trained or prepared for these sorts of situations. As far as I know, nobody higher up was informed. My co-RA tried to talk with the guy who was having sex with the high school girl, but he laughed it off. He seemed confident that we had little authority and that no one with more authority would challenge him. All we could do was encourage him to use our five-cent condoms from the Health Service. I don’t recall making any effort to get to know these girls or pull them aside to check on them, and I feel some culpability. But as an adult looking back it seems unreasonable to leave two RAs in a position to handle all this on our own. We used the tools Carleton provided us - talking and condoms–but they were completely inadequate as a means to handle sexual improprieties and possibly statuatory rape. Where were the adults–the dean of students, the high school administrators, the police? The lack of meaningful intervention from higher authorities, communicated to me as an RA, to the students entrusted to our care, and even to kids from the surrounding community, that we were on our own.Nancy Withbroe, class of 1990
I know of four women who said they were raped by the same guy who was in the class behind mine. One of them, a first year I knew, dropped out and didn't return until the following year. Another was in my class. She continued through school and graduated on time despite being verbally abused by his friends, who accused her of making it up when she reported it. The abuse was so bad she even cautioned me against remaining friends with her during that time. I ended up at a party with the guy once and heard him bragging about his "four sexual harassment claims” and how they were all “rejected by the school." Rather than start a fight with him and his friends, I left. I was also on campus when we made it into Time magazine in 1991. I knew one of those victims as well (the one who was assaulted by the guy who was allowed back on campus). Never quite understood why the police were never involved, or why him finishing his degree was somehow more important than the crimes he was accused of. The campus was split between those who believed we had a problem and those who thought we didn't. Never really got resolved. At that time, on the third floor of the women's bathroom in the libe there was a list of the "top 10 rapists on campus,” which had the names of both of the men I mentioned above. Not an official record, but definitely a cautionary tale known to many of my female classmates. My senior year, I joined the group Men Stopping Rape and made T-shirts with a stop sign logo on the front and on the back the words "No means no. Which word don't you understand?" We sold quite a few before I graduated. Jason Herres, class of 1992
My sophomore year I lived in a single in an old house–Faculty Club maybe it was called. It was pretty isolated away from other rooms due to the layout of the building. The hall had only two rooms: just me and next to me was a male sophomore, also in a single. One night I came home and saw a woman cowering on the floor of the hall, half naked and crying with this mess of cottage cheese or yogurt or something on the wall and the floor around her. Apparently she was shielding her head because he had just thrown that and a bunch of other stuff at her. I didn’t see him at first, but when I went to help her, the guy barreled over in his tighty whities and grabbed her. I tried to help her get away, but he was able to drag her back into his room. I called campus security, but by the time they arrived and knocked on the door, both of them were dressed, and the woman, who wasn’t a Carleton student, declined to go with them. But the mess was still there and she was obviously not OK.I asked to be moved to a new hall but  Dean Roosenraad wouldn’t help me. It took my dad calling and writing letters to advocate for me to finally get me out of there. But even then all the administration did was give me a list of rooms with open beds. I had to make my own inquiries to find a place to move into. One of them took me in. (Thank you to that person; you know who you are.)Only because my dad kept on it, saying that the guy was unsafe, was anything ever done with him. They made him move to the all-men’s floor on campus. Later I found out this guy had already been accused of rapes before this. His creepy teammates came up behind me once in Goodhue dining hall when I was all alone off in the corner getting cereal from the dispenser, maybe a year later, and threatened me for getting him in trouble. Super scary. I did my best to avoid them and him.The thing I find disturbing is that the administration already knew about this guy from multiple previous accusations but had framed them as a he said-she said thing. But then my report was a different type: I was an observer, not a victim. I had not been drinking. I called security in the moment, who came and was a second witness, so they had the sort of proof that everybody said was needed, and still they did nothing. Literally nothing until my father kept calling and screaming over the phone and then they just moved him. I remember my father telling me to call 911 next time because "security works to protect Carleton, not protect you." And he was right.Allison (Al) Stolz, class of 1993

1980s

“The only crime is an academic crime.”I distinctly remember rhetoric from top administrators being something along the lines of “the only crime the college can do anything about is one of academic dishonesty.”Amy Gossow, class of 1988
There was one professor who really created a toxic environment in the classroom for women.For example, when we discussed the work of a famous theorist who had held a faculty appointment at Carleton in the early 20th century, the professor made several remarks about this person's sexual prowess and the women he slept with at Carleton. After class, several of the women met to talk about these comments. We agreed to raise the issue with him directly. The next time we had class, I raised my hand and asked why this theorist's sexual exploits were relevant to our learning of theory, and the professor responded: “Jesus Christ, Angela, do you have to wear your goddamn feminism out on your sleeve?” I felt not only embarrassed but humiliated in front of my classmates. And, moreso, he used his power to silence me. I'm sure I never spoke again in that class. Several us decided to file a formal complaint that this professor had created a “hostile environment” in the class and violated the sexual harassment policy we had worked so hard to develop. Rather than speaking to him about his actions the department blamed us. We were called in to meet with the chair and admonished for raising the issue and accused of causing disruption to the department. They made it clear to us that the professor had the right to teach the class in any way he chose (what I now understand as "academic freedom") and that we were way out of line.Once that happened, I was convinced the college would never believe a student or take their concerns seriously, especially, if those concerns were raised about a faculty member.Worse was that all of this transpired in my junior year, after I was raped by a stranger on an off-campus program and I still had classes and my comps to complete. It was a very small major and I struggled to feel accepted and respected by both my classmates and the other faculty. As I moved through the comps revision process, I wondered if he was retaliating against me by making the process more arduous and difficult. In the end, most of my classmates had my back, and I'm still in touch regularly with a few of them. Several professors, including Paul Wellstone, Paul Reisman, Hertha Wong, and Nader Saiedi supported me through the process, even encouraging me to go to graduate school, which I did, ultimately earning my PhD at the alma mater of one of my advisors.I continue to research and write about sexual and intimate partner violence, and I teach courses that include discussions of sexual violence on college campuses. I have never been back to Carleton for a visit or a reunion.I'm saddened to think of what I’ve missed and lost because I was made to feel like the “problem” when I chose to ask a question and advocate for my right to learn in an environment free from sexual harassment, just like everyone else.Angie Hattery, class of 1988
As someone who was on the Judicial Hearing Board briefly during our senior year (I think for two cases only, one of which was a sexual assault case), I can confirm that the JHB got NO special training. We were told that we had to use the policy manual, and the terminology was confusing at best. It was completely inadequate and opaque. It was disturbing.Fiona Grant Pradhan, class of 1988
Spring term my senior year I was at an event when I had a sudden realization: all of the women I knew who were on academic probation had been raped, assaulted, sexually harassed, or stalked on campus. Not one, not some, but ALL. A few days later, I went to speak with Dean Jean Phillips, when I was intercepted by Dean Cris Roosenraad, who repeatedly insisted I speak with him instead. So I explained the situation to him and asked if they could at least make some kind of counseling or anger management a requirement before allowing repeat offenders back on campus. At this point women had resorted to writing lists on the back of library bathroom stalls to try to warn each other to actively avoid a core group of known repeat offenders. Even in the 80s it seemed absurd to require the person who had been raped/assaulted/harassed/stalked to be responsible for avoiding their attacker/stalker. The more I insisted the college should do something, the weaker their excuses seemed. Fed up with my demands, Dean Roosenraad turned to me and said, “It is this administration’s opinion that these men are better off with diplomas than without.” Not knowing what to do with an administration who openly protected the rapists and not their targets, I packed up my belongings and left. I was just a few weeks away from graduating.  Many of the women who left due to the mental exhaustion of seeing their rapists/stalkers/harassers did come back to complete their degrees. Some came back one or two years later. Some came back 16 to 18 years later. I considered finishing my degree elsewhere but a Carleton diploma has value that I wasn’t willing to walk away from. When I came back to complete my degree there were three incidents that stood out to me. Within the first few days back on campus there were allegations that one student had drugged and raped another student. Student protests about how the administration was handling complaints of sexual assault. Revelations that repeat offenders were allowed to remain enrolled. Another online list of male students to beware of. It felt like nothing had changed in 20 years. The second event was that a class I needed required me to walk past Professor Roosenraad’s math class three times a week for ten weeks. I was unable to avoid the man who had told me the administration valued rapists over women. Lastly, as I neared the end of my studies, I went to the current dean’s office to thank him for his help in navigating my return. It turned out he didn’t even understand why I had come back. He asked me why I thought it would make any difference to have completed my Carleton degree.Patt Romero, class of 1988

1970s

Upon arriving at Carleton, I was eager for independence after years of abiding by my parents’ restrictions. I was astonished to learn that women had a curfew and men did not. Although I had been quite blind to sexism in high school with regard to sports and course requirements, the college’s in loco parentis approach for women was entirely unacceptable to me. After my arguments with the dean about my failures to comply with the curfew yielded no relief, I collected signatures on a petition to abolish women’s hours. The petition wended its way through the policy process and ultimately the curfew was abolished.Like many other students, I took up various causes and marched in Saint Paul and Northfield in response to large issues including the war, the draft, sexism, and the environment. On campus, I fought for a change in the college’s policy that did not allow its doctor to prescribe birth control medication. Although it was merely a local issue, in the pre-Roe era it was extremely significant for women. I was unsuccessful.Roz Lahner Pautzke, class of 1971

1960s

Part OneWe had a predator in our class, a seemingly charming fellow, engaging, outgoing, inclined to pounce down in front of you when studying in the library, interested in what you were working on. He’d say: “You know, there’s a great book on that.” And he’d lead you off. Into the stacks.  Down a few floors until you were in a place where nobody could hear you when he pressed you up against the bookshelves, heavily breathing, hands all over you, muttering who knows what. It took strength to get away—and the knee jab my father taught me. The first time it happened, I ran away and blamed myself for—who knows what? And I said nothing.The second time happened two years later. You’d have thought I’d be wiser. But, again, he was so personable. And the reason to cull me out from the crowd so plausible. Again, I found myself against a wall, hands everywhere, heavy breathing, the whole nine yards. Again, I scrabbled away. Angry this time because I’d been fooled twice. A fellow student found me in the Myers bathroom, muttering about my stupidity and ritually washing hands, face, anything he might have touched. She asked me if I was all right. My answer:  “Damn [him]!" A knowing smile crossed her face. “So he got you too,” she said. And then she proceeded to name the women on our floor who had also been assaulted by him. There was a moment when we realized the magnitude of this problem. “Should we tell the dean?” we asked. (At that time it would have been the dean of women.) Our common reply was “Nah!” Who’d believe us? What would they do? After all, none of us had actually been physically hurt. We were all pretty much “intact,” as they say—or as much so as we were before the incident occurred. So by group agreement, we said nothing.Only years later did I realize the danger of our silence. At one of our early reunions, a classmate told me that she too had been approached by our predator. In this case, he had isolated her in the Arb and forced her to perform oral sex. She was always a fragile personality and the incident clearly haunted her. When she committed suicide several years later, I wondered if that incident had anything to do with it.Even later, in fact quite recently, my younger sister informed me that she too had been assaulted by him when she was a Freshman. When she effectively rebuffed him, he replied, “You aren’t any more compliant than your sister.” Again, she said nothing to me or anyone else until all these many years later.  The #MeToo movement is a wake-up call to all of us who let unacceptable behavior go unchallenged and who now live with the haunting question of what else happened that by our silence we permitted.Sheila Cumberworth, class of 1969
Part twoAs an incoming student in 1965, I was issued the Women’s League Handbook. The Women’s League was part of a governance system for women that was separate and different from the one for the men. The handbook spelled out the rules, including a dress code: skirts were required for class, the dining halls, chapel, and the library. But most of the rules had to do with “hours.” We had to return to our dormitories by specified times each night to be locked in. We were issued signout cards on which to document our comings and goings and would get demerit points for being late. Five minutes late was a penalty of one demerit. Ten points or a single instance of being 30 minutes late would land you in “court,” where you’d be sentenced to the punishment of being confined to your dormitory after seven o’clock.Women students designated as floor counselors appointed by the dean of women, were responsible for checking our little cards each night when we returned to the dormitory. We elected others as representatives to the WL. Their duties included such ladylike activities as hosting a weekly student-faculty tea: every Friday afternoon around three, dressed-up, smiling young women presided over long tables laid with silver teapots and elegant cookies in Great Hall. They also had more serious and arduous responsibilities. Working with the floor counselors, they were expected to prevent rules infractions (yes, sex) when men came to visit during Friday night open houses. None of these students were paid for their work.The men students, on the other hand, had no restrictions on where they could go or when they were supposed to be in dormitories. Their dean-appointed student floor proctors were paid for the decidedly undemanding job.Premarital sex was prohibited for everyone, but only the women floor counselors and WL representatives had to play sex cop. Furthermore, a pregnancy was always regarded as the woman’s fault and would lead to expulsion—of just the woman.My classmates and I started to tally up these inequities. We were getting fed up. I remember returning from the Friday ski trip one night in 1967, just minutes before the library was to close. I needed to collect a book on hold for me, and I had to decide which was the greater risk: dashing back to the dorm to change into my skirt or running in wearing my—oh, gasp—ski pants to grab the book, and escaping before anyone stopped me. I did a little power dance outside the Libe before rushing up to the front desk. I told myself: I didn’t make this rule; why should I follow it? It was a truly liberating moment.Not long after that we were ready to take more serious collective action.Sheila Cumberworth, class of 1969
Part threeBy the late 60s we weren’t having it. The months’ long efforts of the Women’s League to relax the hours rules had come to stalemate. When Dean of Women Jean Phillips stalled, bargained, then ultimately declined to approve the moderate changes proposed, the Women’s League countered with an ultimatum: no hours rules at all. As expected, Dean Phillips shot this down. The Women’s League representatives took action and resigned en masse. This set off a series of floor meetings in every dormitory on the east side of campus, in which women joined the dissent by refusing to elect replacement representatives to the Women’s League.In what was later referred to as “The Evans Revolt,” the women of Evans (minus A column) did what the other dormitories considered, but stopped short of. We voted to secede, not just from the Women’s League, but from the college itself. It was a meeting I will never forget. As I raised my hand to vote, I half expected I’d be expelled, and thought, “What am I going to tell my father?” To make it official, we hung a bed sheet proclaiming our independence out a window and then went out on the patio to burn our hated signout cards. The house mother retired to her apartment on the main floor while the rest of us jumped around outside, monitoring the door so we wouldn't get locked out, just to make the point that we could.Life went on as usual for a bit, except that we posted women at the front door of Evans each night so we could come and go as we pleased. The house mother kept to her apartment in the evenings. She chastised us, said we had abandoned the good graces that characterized the women that preceded us. Women used to arrive on campus with trunks full of ball gowns, some with their own horses, she told us. They would never have behaved as we did. We went to class, ate in the Evans dining room, and waited.After about ten days, the dean came back with proposals for reforms. The hours rules for women would be gradually phased out over the next two years, and the college might even explore a move toward gender-integrated dormitories. Dean Phillips had opposed our goals and methods, but once changes were under way she came up with the term “resident assistants” to replace female counselors and male proctors and became a fierce advocate for equal pay. When the women of Evans were asked if we wanted to accept the dean’s proposal and rejoin the Women’s League, we gladly voted in a new slate of representatives. I was one of them.In the 1968-69 school year I served as an RA in Myers, and I was paid the same rate as the men. It was the best $600 I ever earned.Sheila Cumberworth, class of 1969

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