Update (6/27/2016): American University has notified the student body that the school received a notice from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights of a Title IX complaint. “AU will respond in a timely manner to OCR’s request for data necessary to investigate this complaint,” wrote Title IX program officer Heather Pratt. “We anticipate that OCR’s assessment of our work will provide an opportunity to further enhance our Title IX related policies and related activities.”

Original:

Last month, American University alum Bianca Palmisano and several fellow graduates called the school’s alumni giving office to say they would not be donating any money until the school improved its record of handling student sexual assault cases.

Several days earlier, AU junior Faith Ferber had stepped forward and said she filed a federal Title IX complaint against the school. Ferber said university administrators had asked her to sign a confidentiality agreement, a practice prohibited by the Clery Act, after she reported that another student had sexually assaulted her in February of 2015.

Calling the school felt like a first step, says Palmisano, but she thought they could do more.

So Palmisano and several others reached out to Ferber. Together, they composed a petition asking the school to bolster its policy for handling student sex assault cases with additional disciplinary and training requirements.

“It’s really hard to call myself a graduate of AU while things like that are going on,” says Palmisano. “We’re just embarrassed for the university and how they’re treating their students.”

Ferber said she filed her complaint with the Department of Education on March 7. However, as of April 6, the university has still not received notification of her complaint from the DOE’s’s Office of Civil Rights, according to AU’s assistant vice president of university communications, Camille Lepre.

Officials say they learned that Ferber and students at three other colleges filed Title IX complaints from a March press release distributed by the survivor advocacy group End Rape on Campus and subsequent press reports (full disclosure: I graduated from American University).

Since then, Palmisano posted their petition. Among other stipulations, it demands that AU:

• Adhere strictly to its 60-day time-limit to resolve disputes outlined in its Discrimination and Sexual Harassment policy, with no extensions due to finals, term breaks or other events on the campus schedule;
• Create new automatic restrictions for assailants found responsible for sexual assault or other charges, including bans on participation in extracurricular activities such as student government, fraternity life and athletics;
• Cease requiring any party in a sexual assault case to sign a confidentiality agreement;
• Require members of sexual assault hearing boards to receive at least 2 hours of sexual-assault response training;

Several days later after it went live on March 12, Ferber says she checked the website and found that the number of signatures had jumped from roughly 300 to 20,000.

“I refreshed my computer because I thought there must have been some kind of glitch or mistake or it was showing me a number for a different petition,” she says.

The signatures continued to pour in from all 50 states and countries ranging from the United Kingdom to New Zealand. Three weeks later, more than 75,000 people have signed the petition.

“I really have been so overwhelmed with all of the support,” says Ferber. “It’s amazing to see so many people behind not just me, but survivors in general.”

The current student and the 2012 graduate share similar backgrounds in sexual assault education and survivor advocacy. Ferber is currently director of Students Against Sexual Violence at AU. She also helped to develop programming for Empower AU, a mandatory sexual-assault education program for incoming students.

Palmisano owns Intimate Health Consulting, a consulting practice that teaches sexual-minority and sexual-health competency to hospitals, clinics, businesses, and other organizations. She has volunteered with the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, where she educates middle-school students about consent, body issues, gender, and sexuality.

Despite her plentiful expertise in sexual assault advocacy, “taking on the university’s culture was a very new challenge,” Palmisano says.

With a much higher number of signatures on the petition than ever expected, Ferber guesses that the group could have asked for a bit more, “so that if [administrators] try to negotiate down, we’re still getting what we want,” she says. “But I think that all of the demands are really, really reasonable,” she adds.

Palmisano says the alumni who helped to draft the petition have reached out to the school about discussing their demands. They have not pinned down a specific date for when to present the petition.

“We really want it to be an amenable conversation. This is something that can be good for everyone involved.”

The university did not comment directly to DCist about the demands of the petition.

However, administrators responded to Palmisano in an email earlier this week with an invitation to the group of alumni behind the petition to attend a campus-wide event on April 21 featuring a discussion with AU professor and sexual violence and bystander intervention expert Jane Palmer. Administrators said they would be willing to meet with Palmisano and other alumni to discuss the petition before or after the event.

“We would welcome the opportunity to share more about the measures we have taken to address these important issues—a number of which speak directly to the concerns addressed in the petition. We also want to hear your ideas for fulfilling our commitment to continuous improvement in our work,” read the email from vice president of campus life Gail Hanson and vice president of development and alumni relations Courtney Surles.

The petition, much like Palmisano’s original phone call, is just one step among many in producing change on campus. “In reality, what we’re looking for is a culture change on campus within the administration and in the entire AU community, that we believe survivors as our first instinct and that we take them seriously when they say something has gone wrong,” she says.