After a 16-month investigation into a civil complaint made by two former Boston University students, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said the university did not discriminate against the students on the basis of sex while investigating their separate sexual assault complaints and did not retaliate against them by initiating disciplinary action. The decision was announced in a letter to President John Silber Friday.
The complaint, originally filed by Kristin Roslonski in November 2001, was joined in April 2002 by Meghann Horner. Both students alleged the university failed to attend to their complaints of sexual assault in a ‘prompt and equitable manner,’ according to the letter, and both accused the university of responding to their complaints by sanctioning them for violating the university’s drug and alcohol abuse policy.
However, the OCR found that the investigations and BU’s responses to Roslonski and Horner were ‘prompt.’ The department also found that BU’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policy regarding drugs and alcohol is applied fairly to all students, negating charges that the university’s response of sanctions violated Title IX, as the complaint alleged, and that the application of the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy does not have a ‘chilling effect,’ discouraging students to report incidents of sexual assault.
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