Endeavoring to Do Better

1990s Carleton Spotlight

“We Will Not Be Silenced”

Four students sue Carleton for failing to protect them, assault policy regresses, and another serial rapist roams the campus.

Over winter break in December 1989, four current and former female students at Carleton College quietly informed the administration that they intended to sue. The document they sent over, Julie Bauman, [GJW], et al v. Carleton College and Cris T. Roosenraad, said that between1985 and 1989 each of the four plaintiffs had been raped by one of two male students, and that this was the direct result of negligence by the college and its dean of students, who had failed them in their “contractual obligation to provide an environment reasonably free from physical danger, sexual harassment, and criminal sexual assault.”
The plaintiffs said that the dean, Cris Roosenraad, “the employee and/or agent primarily responsible for the administration of the College's sexual harassment policy,” had discouraged them from reporting their rapes to the police, diminished the severity of their assaults, subjected them to extreme emotional distress, and caused the disruption of their studies. One plaintiff said that members of the Judicial Hearing Board (JHB), which handled assault claims in trial-like proceedings on campus, had harassed her with grotesque questions about the attack as well as about her own sexual history. They all said that Carleton’s failure to respond with appropriate alacrity and efficacy had endangered the entire community by allowing students accused of multiple rapes to remain on campus, and created an atmosphere of tolerance for assault. They had even allowed one of the assailants, who had finally been kicked out, to return to campus.
In 1983 Carleton had been one of the first colleges in the U.S.to establish a sexual harassment policy, which also applied to cases of sexual assault. In the years that followed, students had successfully lobbied for changes that improved transparency and accountability and provided substantive protections for survivors. But problems persisted into the end of the decade, and when the lawsuit arrived on the president’s desk, students and staff on a subcommittee of the Social Policy Committee (SPC) had been working for two years on refining a proposal for additional changes. Once they agreed on a draft, it would go on to the full SPC for a vote, then to the College Council, and finally to the board of trustees for adoption. In January 1990, however, when the committee returned from winter break—unaware of the suit—they were informed that their proposal was being replaced with a draft written by a legal consultant.
That same month another Carleton student was sexually assaulted by one of her classmates, generating a case for the JHB in which they would have to wrestle with an issue that soon took hold in a growing national conversation about sexual assault: the relevance of consent in determining whether or not a rape has occurred. And Bauman v. Carleton would find a sympathetic ear in Congress, ultimately leading to the passage of what was and remains the most significant legislation in the U.S. dealing with campus sexual assault.

From Kissing to Rape in Minutes

On the evening of the 1990 Mid-Winter Ball, a freshman, Carrie—a pseudonym she was later given by the Minneapolis weekly City Pages in an article on campus assault at Carleton—had plans with a few friends. They saw a performance at Little Nourse, then drank some wine. Next they went to Burton before heading to the dance. They shared a bottle of champagne and cocktails and goofed around in a friend’s room, talking in silly accents. Carrie says that’s all she could remember when she began to regain consciousness in a Burton bathroom, shaking and covered in vomit.
Later Carrie learned that another guy, call him John Doe, had joined the party and they’d started kissing. The others left her with him and less than an hour later she stumbled out of the room partially undressed. John’s closest friend, who had been standing just outside the door, pushed her back in and zipped up her dress. Then she made her way out again, bumping into walls as she tried to enter the bathroom next door.
Another Burton resident, call her Ariana, came to her aid. Carrie sat slumped against the wall, vomiting if she tried to move. Eventually, Ariana helped her into a bathtub, and then stayed with her, worried she’d drown if she were left alone. Two of the men who had been partying with Carrie earlier brought towels and blankets to the door, and there was a discussion about calling an ambulance in case she had alcohol poisoning. After about three or four hours of intermittently vomiting and passing out, Carrie was helped to a bed in Ariana’s room. There was no sign of John Doe.
Carrie didn't know John except as a name and a face in one of her classes. She had no memory of having seen him the night before. Nevertheless, she says, as she recovered the next day she was having inexplicably queasy feelings about him. She told two friends about her misgivings and then connected with Ariana, who confirmed that she’d been alone in the room with John and said there was reason to believe they’d had sex. Carrie didn’t understand what she was hearing. She’d never even spoken to the guy.
Carrie looked John up in the directory and called his room, then tracked him down in the library to confront him about what had happened. “Is it the worst thing I could imagine?” she asked. When he said yes, she concluded he had penetrated her. She asked if he’d used a condom. He confessed that he hadn’t. He didn’t have much to say when she asked, “How do I know I don’t have AIDS? How do I know I’m not pregnant?” Carrie’s mother flew in the next day, and they went to see Dean Roosenraad to report the rape. This time, unlike with other survivors, including the four named in the lawsuit, he made a point of informing Carrie that she had the right to go to the police and carefully documented that he had done so. Then he outlined her other options: he could investigate and then adjudicate her claim or she could file a formal complaint, which would go to the Judicial Hearing Board. She says she wanted to use her energy to focus on her own recovery, not prepare for a trial, and decided not to file a complaint.

Sexual Assault: A Policy That Dares Not Speak Its Name

By January 1990, the committee working on the sexual harassment policy had been butting heads for months with Judith Langevin, a lawyer consulting with Carleton on the policy. Students had been advocating for and winning policy changes to increase victim protections since its inception in 1983. This time around the committee’s proposals focused on three main issues: eliminating the conflict of interest posed by the dean’s role as both investigator and sometime adjudicator; clarifying that assaults could be reported on campus and to the police at the same time, which the dean had frequently discouraged, claiming that if the police were involved he would be unable to do anything on campus to protect survivors while their cases proceeded; and mandating that members of the Judicial Hearing Board to receive sexual assault training.
In October ’89 the committee was offered a policy rewrite that Judith Langevin had drafted, which seemed to have a different set of objectives. As they later told the Carletonian, the committee’s three key mandates were gone, as were nine victim protection revisions that students had added in 1987. These included prohibiting the JHB from asking accusers about their sexual history, allowing accusers to request new rooms to avoid their assailants, informing accusers of the outcomes of their cases, and gathering and reporting campus crime statistics. Langevin’s draft kiboshed the student sexual harassment advisors. It omitted the range of penalties tied to each level of offense and any process for an appeal. It also replaced the definition of the term “sexual harassment,” with seven scenarios representing examples of the charge. And last but not least, the new draft made it technically impossible to accuse a person at Carleton of rape.
Dean Roosenraad had been telling survivors throughout the 80s that the college adjudication system only permitted a charge of sexual harassment even if the offense was non-consenual penetration. He could find suppoort for his claim in the language of the policy which defined sexual assault as “physical violence or sexual intimacy that falls under the definition of sexual harassment.” Langevin’s draft made it official, eliminating the term “sexual assault” from the policy altogether.
The committee members had left for winter break in 1989 believing they’d return to draft a compromise proposal in January. But instead they were summoned back to campus over break for a special session. After a 16-hour meeting, President Lewis met with SPC chair Jim McCorkell and assistant dean of students Sarah Westfall and told them in no uncertain terms that the committee could vote only on Langevin’s draft. Members of the committee later told the Carletonian they felt they had no choice. "It became very clear that it was a nonnegotiable point that the lawyer was going to write it,” McCorkell said. “No one was sure why Lewis had chosen that point to come down so hard, but in retrospect the filing of this lawsuit must have had something to do with it."
The SPC did score a few victories: Their definition of sexual harassment was allowed to remain, based not on sample scenarios but on Minnesota law. They also retained the peer counselors, although the number was cut from six to three. And the new policy mandated that the college provide rape-prevention training and educational materials to the whole campus.
Langevin explained her approach in a letter to the Social Policy Committee that surfaced later: “It is important for you, and indeed for anyone reading or listening to my views about the draft policy, to understand my very specific perspective,” she wrote. “I have a client. That client is the legal entity that is Carleton College. The goal of all my recommendations is the protection of my client from legal liability. . . . In a number of instances, recommendations that I think are necessary for the protection of my client will be insensitive to, or even in direct conflict with, Carleton community values, standards or procedures.”

The Law Calls It a Crime, but Not Carleton

After her assault, Carrie heard rumors that John Doe had raped at least two other Carleton students who hadn’t reported him. One of them confirmed her rape to Carrie, which prompted a dreadful realization: unless someone initiated a formal charge against him, John would continue to pose a threat. At the end of April, she wrote to Roosenraad to say she wanted to file charges after all. She began, “I was raped.” Then she continued, “I must make sure that [John Doe] does not hurt anyone else the way he has hurt me. [He] and the rest of the Carleton community have to understand that what he did is completely and utterly unacceptable.”
Carrie continued to monitor her health for signs of STDs, including AIDS, which was still untreatable in 1990. Meanwhile, Carrie, her friends and her mother, dove into gathering information on Minnesota law and sexual assault prevention and response in preparation for her hearing. They also hoped to use what they found—in, for example, a Yale study and a publication from a Santa Monica rape center—to educate the entire student body, equip the college with suitable printed materials, and appeal to key administrators about implementing best practices.
On May 24, Carrie made her case before the JHB. She opened with a statement explaining that as she had been unconscious when John had sex with her, “rape” was the only way to describe what had happened, even if the sexual harassment policy wouldn’t allow for it. She read a letter from a Minneapolis attorney who said that because she was “physically helpless” during the assault, John’s conduct was a crime, quoting a Minnesota statute defining “physically helpless” as any one of the following: "(a) asleep or not conscious, (b) unable to withhold consent or to withdraw because of a physical condition, or (c) unable to communicate nonconsent and the condition is known or reasonably should have been known to the actor.” Carrie noted that the attorney had advised her that her condition during her assault met all three. She was explaining a legal concept not yet widely discussed outside of courtrooms: that sex in the absence of consent was illegal.
For his part, John pleaded innocence, admitting that he’d had sex with Carrie but saying she had initiated the kissing and hadn’t “resisted” having intercourse. Despite the testimony of witnesses who said Carrie was unable to come to for several hours after leaving the room, the JHB viewed the incident as a case of he said/she said. They ruled that John wasn’t at fault, and he received no penalty.
The woman who told Carrie she’d been raped by John sat in on the hearing. She had been considering filing formal charges, too, but she decided on the spot to forgo a trial and file an informal charge, which would be adjudicated privately by Roosenraad. He ruled against John and gave him a “punishment” of six counseling sessions.

Students Rally for Change, and John Doe Strikes Again

The Langevin policy passed in the College Council in the spring of 1990 and took effect in the fall. Meanwhile, students’ independent efforts to combat campus assault intensified. A letter to the Carletonian signed by 25 residents of the all-women’s floor in Myers demanded a public apology from the members of the male rugby team who had rampaged through their floor, forcing them to “hide in fear behind a locked door.” The Myers residents said they were exploring a novel use of the sexual harassment policy—which prohibited an “intimidating, hostile or offensive educational environment”—to file a class action. Carrie became a co-leader of SMASH, and when the college failed to come through with prevention programs and materials, SMASH drew on the research Carrie, her friends and her mother had already done to create written materials and then enlisted the help of peer health counselors and recruited floor captains to hold educational meetings on every hall. Students continued their long-running campaign to make the volunteer escort service a work study job, despite opposition from Lewis and Roosenraad, who claimed it was “sexist” and a “taxi service.” And when a freshman discovered she’d been named the year’s “Chosen One”—a tradition where a female student unwittingly became the focus of a competition among football players—she complained to the football coach and then to Dean Roosenraad. When they failed to provide a meaningful response, she took her complaint to the New York Times.
But bold student action couldn’t provide the same protection that institutional resolve might have. Early in 1991 John Doe’s neighbor, a student we’ll call Sarah, witnessed something that terrified her. She and John lived in an unusual setting: they had neighboring singles on a floor with no other residents. One night Sarah came home to find him in the hallway physically struggling with a woman who was clearly trying to get away. Sarah tried to help, but he dragged the woman into his room and shut the door. Sarah called security and they extracted the woman, who it turned out was not a Carleton student, but the college took no action against her assailant. This was at least the third time John had come to the attention of campus authorities for predatory behavior.
Sarah asked Roosenraad for a new room—or at least that they move John—but he refused. After ignoring Sarah’s father’s calls and then increasingly insistent letters, Roosenraad finally supplied Sarah with a list of dorm rooms that had a spare bed and told her to make her own inquiries. Sarah’s father continued to press Roosenraad for months about the danger posed by John on such an isolated floor, and eventually he was moved to an all-men’s floor in Davis.
Carrie made no secret of what had happened between her and John Doe and was often quoted in the Carletonian as a leader of SMASH, so in February 1991, when someone painted “We Will Not Be Silenced” and named him as a rapist on a campus sidewalk, some were suspicious that she was responsible. She insisted she had nothing to do with it, but a few people made a point of finding her and telling her to drop it. She says they told her she was making things awkward for everyone. As had happened after a spate of assaults in the 80s, a bathroom stall in the library women’s room became the site of graffiti on the subject. Earlier taggers had been unified by a desire to warn each other about dangerous men, but this time some of the posts took the side of the rapist. “She was drunk,” some commented, as if the status made her morals or credibility suspect. Why was he more at fault, they asked, if both of them were drunk?
For months, letters went back and forth in the Carletonian over which was worse: continuing to accuse a student of a crime after he’d officially been cleared or allowing perpetrators to remain on campus where they did harm to the whole community. Carrie left Carleton midyear for an off-campus study program.

Policy Failures Come Home to Roost

On March 28, 1991, 15 months after informing the college of their intention to sue, the four plaintiffs in Bauman filed against Carleton with the Rice County District Court. President Lewis went on the offensive, holding a press conference that same day, in which he refuted the claims of the suit, in particular insisting that Roosenraad regularly encouraged students with complaints of sexual assault to call police. The next day he released a letter to Carleton students, staff, and faculty. Opening with “I am saddened by two things,” he said that the plaintiffs “refused to accept the judgements and disciplinary penalties” of the college’s adjudication system. He said the charges were “totally without merit” and that the two men named in the suit had never been found guilty of rape. Putting quotation marks around the word “rape,” he insisted that the college would have expelled anyone who raped another student. And he said it had been diligent about providing students and staff with training and education. He speculated that the case would generate widespread support for Carleton among other colleges and universities.
The response on campus was fierce. Someone turned it into a poster and taped it up in Sayles, where passersby scribbled scathing commentary in the margins. An op-ed in the Carletonian, which opened mockingly with “We are saddened by two things,” accused Lewis of refusing “to critically examine . . . a system that has yielded disturbing results” and disputed his claims, noting among other things that it was SMASH that had been responsible for distributing information about sexual assault to the campus community. Around 200 students gathered at Sayles for a rally in support of the plaintiffs, and afterward a smaller group marched to both Roosenraad’s and Lewis’s offices to demand Roosenraad’s resignation. In interviews with the paper, members of the thwarted policy committee noted that Lewis had intervened in their deliberations only three weeks after the college was informed about the lawsuit. One said the president’s public statements were “an attempt to refute what happened in ’86-’89 by citing policy put into place in ’90-’91.”
Alums and even parents, a constituency not much heard from in the Carletonian, wrote angry letters to the paper complaining about the college’s apparent disregard for its women students. One parent said the graffiti was “an implied accusation against the administration for not taking effective action” against rapists. In an open letter to President Lewis, another noted that Lewis’s letter to parents was “full of inaccuracies” and raised the “grave concern” that the college had failed to enforce the penalties the JHB had imposed, allowing one suspended and then expelled offender to return to campus to complete his work so he could graduate.
The plaintiffs themselves provided some of the most compelling responses. In interviews with the Carletonian they criticized Lewis, Roosenraad, and Carleton’s counseling services for protecting the college’s reputation at their expense. One said, “Before I set foot on the Carleton campus at age 17, Dean Roosenraad knew of at least three assaults by [one of the assailants in the lawsuit].” They noted the crucial importance of including the terms “rape” and/or “sexual assault” in the policy, and pointed out the absurdity of everyone at Carleton referring to criminal sexual assault as “sexual harassment.”
President Lewis himself wrote many letters to the Carletonian, in one asserting that it would be better for everyone “if all of us exercised more of a sense of responsibility.”
City Pages reported at length on the suit, but that wasn’t the only news outlet taking notice. The rally got sympathetic coverage on all four major Twin Cities news broadcasts, and stories about Carleton soon appeared in the Star Tribune and the New York Times. Time magazine ran an article on campus sexual assault accompanied by a large photo of three of the Carleton plaintiffs.
Pressure on the administration from students continued into the fall term. They called on the College Council to strip Roosenraad of his authority over sexual harassment and assault cases until the lawsuit was resolved, and they called out Lewis for his misleading statements and repeated claim that the plaintiffs were simply unhappy with their verdicts rather victims of systemic failures.
Carleton was spared the drama of a trial when the parties settled out of court, on October 30, 1991. In their part of a joint statement the plaintiffs said, “We undertook this litigation to help ensure that other women need not endure what we experienced. Though nothing can erase the trauma we suffered as a result of being sexually assaulted and subsequent events, we are pleased to bring this litigation to a close in the context of Carleton's very real and constructive efforts to address the issues raised by our experiences. We look forward to those efforts continuing in the future and commend Carleton's progress on these issues to the higher education community at large.”
Lewis’s statement began, “As I have said from the beginning, I am very sympathetic to the feelings of these young women who have been our students and who were harmed while they were at Carleton,” and then hailed the coming “time of healing and . . . continued progress in developing effective programs of education that will eliminate sexual assault and harassment at Carleton.” He praised Carleton for having been among the first colleges to establish a sexual harassment policy, but he never acknowledged the role of students in the creation or fortification of the policy or described his administration’s attempts to gut it.
As part of the settlement, the plaintiffs signed Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA), which remain in force.

The Lawsuit’s Long Tail

While the settlement and the NDAs gave Carleton some cover, a Minnesota congressman wasn’t satisfied. In May 1991, with a Bauman plaintiff at his side, U.S. senator Jim Ramstad proposed the Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights, making explicit the responsibility of colleges and universities to protect students reporting sexual assault. In February 1992, Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey directed all institutions of higher education in the state to include clear definitions of sexual assault—as distinct from sexual harassment—in their policies. And later that spring, Minnesota passed a law requiring all postsecondary institutions to have policies specifying the right of victims to report to local authorities and to be shielded from unwanted contact with perpetrators.
At Carleton, the term “sexual assault” was restored to the sexual harassment policy. But in June 1991 the the College Council voted to make the dean the sole adjudicator for all sexual assault and harassment cases, with the JHB relegated to hearing only appeals, a decision that would come back to bite them in the late 2000s. And by May 1992, Lewis was petitioning the College Council to make RAs mandatory reporters of sexual assault rather than confidential resources. He succeeded, but after a backlash the mandate was reversed in January 1994. Cris Roosenraad resigned his post as dean of students in November 1992 but continued teaching in the math department. He retired with emeritus status in 2007.
In 1997, when a survivor of date rape at another college came to campus to discuss sexual assault and noted that the perpetrators named in the Carleton lawsuit had been repeat offenders, Lewis parried by describing the plaintiffs, not for the first time, as people who believed they had been raped. Lewis was granted emeritus status in 2011 and honored in 2016—during the 25th reunion of one of the plaintiffs.
Carrie’s argument to the JHB about consent had been prescient: the year after she lost her attempt to bring her rapist to justice on campus, students at Antioch College rewrote their policy (see National Spotlight) to make the lack of consent the defining characteristic of sexual assault. Their movement triggered a national uproar and lots of late-night standup jokes, but ultimately it established what continues to be a commonly accepted standard for adjudicating rape. It wasn’t until 2001 that Carleton caught up and changed its term for prohibited sexual behavior from “sexual harassment” to “sexual misconduct.”
John Doe graduated in 1993 with the rest of his class. Carrie returned to campus but graduated a year late. The Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights, inspired by the women who sued in Bauman v. Carleton, was subsumed into the Clery Act, which requires all colleges and universities receiving federal funds to support victims, publish policies, and collect and report crime statistics—the latter something students had once introduced into Carleton’s policy only to have it be removed by presidential fiat. Carrie’s mother continued her activism on campus rape and served for decades as a board member for the Clery Center, which provides guidance, training, and resources for colleges. In March 2024, Liberty University was punished for Clery Act violations, including allowing repeat sexual-violence offenders to remain on campus without punishment or limitation. They were fined $14 million.