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| Winter 1999-2000 issue | . | Sexual harassment: Different schools of blame | |
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When a student sexually harasses another student, should the
school be punished for not knowing about it and taking action? Maybe if it’s an elementary or secondary school, but not if it’s a college or university, according to William P. Hoye, Notre Dame’s associate vice president and counsel and a concurrent professor of law, and William A. Hahn ’99J.D. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a set of guidelines on sexual harassment suggesting that colleges and universities be held to the same standard as primary and secondary schools when it comes to liability in cases of peer sexual harassment. Hoye and Hahn disagree. Writing in the South Carolina Law Review, they point out that students are under the noses of teachers almost the entire time they spend in elementary and secondary schools. College students, on the other hand, spend only a small percentage of their time in classrooms or anywhere else where they are directly supervised by college employees. "For the most part, college students are emancipated adults living on their own," the legal scholars argue. That should limit a college’s liability, they write. Hoye and Hahn’s article, "Beyond the Camel’s Nose: Institutional Liability for Peer Sexual Harassment on Campus," appeared in the law review’s fall 1998 issue. After its publication, the U.S. Supreme Court — adopting part of the rationale contained in the article — ruled that schools of all kinds are liable in peer sexual harassment cases only when a problem is brought to their attention and they do nothing about it. |
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