Leadership Forum
Rear Admiral Michael Alfultis, PhD, President, The State University New York Maritime College
Lieutenant General Darryl A. Williams, Superintendent, U.S. Military Academy
Rear Admiral William G. Kelly, Superintendent, U.S. Coast Guard Academy
Lieutenant General Jay B. Silveria, Superintendent, U.S. Air Force Academy
Vice Admiral Sean Buck, Superintendent, U.S Naval Academy
This distinguished panel will share their experiences as engaged leaders in preventing sexual assault and sexual harassment, their views on data-driven decision making, and the importance of measuring the effectiveness of prevention systems.
Transcript
Can we have another round of applause for the chancellor and the secretary? (audience applauds) I was personally so pleased to hear both the chancellor and the secretary talk about SPARC, which was an innovation that we created at SUNY with the intention of driving down costs while driving up quality in prevention education, and there are four people who really were the driving force in the development of that program and its growth and support, and I’m pleased that all four are here today. They we’re expecting this, but since the chancellor and the Secretary highlighted their work, I’d ask Rebecca Harrington, Chantelle Cleary, Lisa Campo and Elizabeth Brady to please stand and be recognized for their incredible work. (audience applauds) On SPARC and now TREK, Lisa in the back. And now to continue our tone from the top theme, we are proud to be joined by the superintendents of each of the service academies and the president of our Maritime Academy. Secretary Spencer said it well, this was not such an easy thing to do, you all don’t get together every two days or so, and what I think is shown by the fact that they’re all here and happily here, as the secretary said last night, this was not a push but a pull, they wanted to be here and they wanted to participate, it’s just an incredible showing of how they stand on this issue. To introduce them in the order of the founding of their institution, and to lead this important discussion, please welcome back to the stage Dr. Kristina M. Johnson. (audience applauds)
Okay, so in the interest of full disclosure, if it was up to me I would first introduce the superintendent of the Naval Academy. However, he is not the superintendent of the oldest academy, so instead I will, and the why is my brother is a proud graduate of 1966 the Naval Academy, so we’re very pleased to have, yes, so back to focus, I just had to get that dig in, I mean, that plug in. (audience laughs) (audience member speaks softly) For my brother, yes, okay. So let us call to this stage, I’m gonna ask the superintendents to come up in order, so we’re so pleased to have Lieutenant General Darryl Williams, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, so pleased that you’re here, would you please come to the stage, we’ll get into, (audience claps) we’re gonna get right into the Q and A here, then I’d also like to next ask Lieutenant General, I mean Vice Admiral Sean Buck, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, thank you. (audience applauds) Rear Admiral Michael A. Alfultis from SUNY Maritime, and again, as he comes to the stage, I just want to give a shout out to the Rear Admiral, who’s also president of SUNY Maritime, I started, and I was sharing this last night at dinner, I started as chancellor two years ago today, today’s the fifth? Yeah, September fifth. And what was happening, as we know, is we had hurricane Harvey and then Irma and then Maria, and the first call I got from the president was from Rear Admiral Alfultis, who said, “you know, I’ve got a ship, I can carry “600 men and women, we can do rescue operations, “we gotta get this going,” and I said, “so what do we do?” And then we worked together, we got the governor, FEMA, we were able to deploy the ship and bring relief to some of the most hardest-hit places, particularly in Puerto Rico, so thank you for your service. We’d now like to ask Rear Admiral, Admiral Kelly, superintendent of the United States Coast Guard to come to the stage. (audience applauds) And last but not least, Lieutenant General Jay Silveria, superintendent of the Air Force Academy. (audience applauds) So the structure of the next session, the leadership forum, is I’ve prepared a few questions and I’ll ask our superintendents here, and then after a bit of give and take on that, we’ll have, open it up to Q and A if we have time. So let me, I’m gonna join you here, and I think my, is my mic off? I think so, great. Well thank you again for (mic feeds back loudly) for being here, little bit of feedback, that’s good. We heard earlier from Melissa Cohen about the importance of data, and also from the secretary of the Navy, so first question is to Rear Admiral Kelly: can you talk a little bit about how you use data, you know, how do you employ data and what do you feel maybe is lacking and how do you get at that with regard to sexual assault and sexual harassment prevention?
Yes ma’am, thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today. As a proud New Yorker, it’s great to be back in our state and in the finest city in the world. (Kristina laughs) Talk a little bit about what the United States Coast Guard is doing with regard to eradicating sexual assault from our service and in my current job of, from the Coast Guard Cabinet. I came to this job from the chief of Coast Guard personnel and Coast Guard headquarters for the last three years overseeing our efforts and having the opportunity to work with some of the good people in the room, so I understand the larger issue and how it impacts our service. And if I can, I just wanted to pause and kind of, we’re going through (mic cuts off) our service academy that we could possibly become, and on that journey (mic cuts off) about 40% women, 60% men, representative of every state in the nation, several international students as well, but we’ve found in our journey is that we are, I’m the eighth class to graduate with women at the Coast Guard Academy, and I know my colleagues up here fall into, I think I’m the youngest one up here as well, so (audience laughs) so I’ll move along, I’ll move along.
[Kristina] Yeah. (laughs)
What I see as I come back to the Coast Guard Academy is that many of the rules, the regulations, the policies, the procedures, the traditions are still in place from when I was there in 1987. And when we graduated with 20 women in my class. So basically what you have is some of those traditions that were put in place by white men, we’re white men, at an institution of men. And so, how do you get after addressing those? And some of those things, you know, data allows you to have an educated and transparent discussion about the challenges, so initially we’ve entered into that foray with regards to how to become a more inclusive institution that represents the diversity of the population of our student body, and so we’ve entered into that discussion, and now we’re able to take the lessons learned from what were our struggles and challenges folks have in the classroom, on the athletic field with physical education, whatever it may be, we’re able to take the lessons learned there and transfer those over to our efforts with regards to sexual assault. And I’m just gonna provide some of the, you know, some of the wave tops if you will, from what we’re identifying in the data arena. We do a gender relations survey, and all the service academies do that every two years, and what we’re able to find out is we know when students are gonna come forward with reports of sexual assault. It’s gonna happen in October and it’s gonna happen usually in late January, early February. And we can, we could say, well, is the sexual assaults happening in September or October? No, it’s probably, we’re identifying that that’s probably happening over the summertime period, but as they come back to campus, they’re feeling more secure, they’re feeling more protected if you will in the environment there on campus, and they’re coming forward in the early weeks of October. And then similar events happen probably over the Christmas holiday break, and students come back and we’re hearing their reports. So what can we do, how can we intrusive leaders to get to our students before they go out, all of our students go out on, all of our students, go out on summer training, they go out and engage with our service members out in the field. So what can we do to make sure that we’re providing the right interventions prior to them heading out, so that as they are out in the field, usually in much smaller groups, they’re protected and they understand what may lurk out in the field? Some of the other things that we’re identifying is we know that our sophomores, we call them third class cadets, are at the highest risk of being sexually assaulted. So what can we do as our sophomores come back to campus to intervene and make sure that they’re protected? We know that 50% of our sexual assaults happen in our barracks, in our dormitories. What can we do in our dormitories to address that? And then so I thought as I go back to policies and procedures, tactics, traditions, heritage, our students don’t lock their doors at night. Even though they’re allowed to, they don’t, because then it gives the sign that, well I don’t trust my shipmate, I don’t trust my classmate. Well, if you’re a young woman who might be on the volleyball team and you’re gone for the weekend, your classmate may be in their room by themselves throughout the weekend. We know that that (mic cuts off) higher rate to potentially be threatened. Now I don’t wanna give you the thought that sexual assault is rampant across the Coast Guard Academy. We had 17 sexual assaults in the last year. So it’s not (mic cuts off) from folks outside the academy committing sexual assaults against our students, but these are things that we can do to incrementally make our campus safer, make it the most inclusive campus we can make it, so that our students can be successful. We all invest so much to bring young women and men to our service academy, we need them to be successful, we need them to graduate, and we need them to go off. And I think the last piece of data is we’ve (mic cuts off) working with Dr. Van Winkle and others, we know that 25%, 26% of our current student body was sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, or had unwanted sexual contact prior to even showing up at the Coast Guard Academy. So from utilizing data to ensure that we have the right interventions, how can we intervene earlier and often and have the support services in place to make sure that we’re doing all we can to protect America’s future leaders so that they can achieve their goal to serve their nation as part of the United States Coast Guard?
Well, that’s great, and I don’t know if you’re the youngest, however, you may be the youngest appointed, because you were just appointed in, what, May 30th of this last year?
May 30th this year, that’s right.
So you’re getting after it very quickly.
I’m 90 days in the job.
Very good, yeah. (audience chuckles) Another ten days. (man chuckles in mic) Let’s turn it over (mic cuts off) Buck, maybe you’d comment a little bit about the Naval Academy, your philosophy, and then drill down a little bit into data, and it sounds a little bit like the superintendent from the Coast Guard is using predictive analytics, trying to get at, from what has happened when one might predict and therefore prevent sexual assault and sexual harassment, so the floor is yours, sir.
So we collect most of our data through surveying, as we all know in this room, and to get folks to open up on those surveys, they need to have some type of sense of anonymity. They’re not necessarily confident in sharing some of maybe the worst things that ever happened to them in their life, as Bill Kelly said, many of the members of our respective student bodies have been sexually assaulted or harassed before they have come to college. And as we show them that we have a very inclusive, safe environment where they’re treated with dignity and respect, which they may not have been treated that way before, they finally begin to feel like they can open up, they can trust their leadership, and what vehicle do we do that with? We offer them surveys. So at the Naval Academy, we have a phenomenal evolution, a continuum of education, training and example over their whole journey of four years, it’s called SHAPE. We have five opportunities to provide training from their first pleb summer, their kind of, their boot camp, all the way through all four years of their stay in Annapolis. Right away when they come in for their indoctrination summer, their pleb summer, we survey them, that’s where we start. We have an exit survey when they graduate to try to get some type of value statement about our program of education, and then in between, with this every other year gender relations survey, we’ll have two other opportunities to hear from our brigade of midshipmen. So four anonymous survey opportunities as well as always seeking their feedback from when they finish a training session throughout their journey at the academy. That’s what we use to inform our curriculum. That’s what we use to inform our response rate if we have victims, but also to inform our efforts at teaching prevention. So we think that that’s a real solid baseline of how to collect the data and try to get some predictive analytics. We’re always revising this curriculum to make it better, to keep it relevant and to try to get a sense of what works best to a young cohort of people. As Bill unfortunately mentioned, many of us up here are the old guys and the old ladies, sorry ma’am.
[Kristina] No, that’s, (audience laughs)
But we are all—
I was just feeling the love earlier on. (audience laughs)
We are all older than our student bodies. Especially when I go out and PT with ’em and I realize I’m triple their age, and I don’t necessarily do all of this social media, I’m trying to figure that out still. We need to be sure that we’re listening to them to figure out what, how do they relate to the training, and we can we do to keep them listening? So the best attribute of leadership, and we’re developing leaders at our service academies, the best aspect of leadership is the ability to listen. And we need them to listen to us, and we need to listen to them, and that’s how we’re getting after it.
That’s great, Admiral, and also noted, and I should have noted, you’re actually fairly new in your role too, was it July?
[Sean] Yes ma’am.
Of 2019, and one of your first speeches you actually talked about, this is one of your most important priorities is to end sexual assault and sexual harassment, so thank you, thank you for that leadership and for your shout out (coughs) about age, so um. (audience laughs) General Williams, you did a phenomenal thing in February, maybe you could talk about that. Your philosophy towards addressing this issue, this scourge as the secretary mentioned, talk about the stand down, talk about how you used data in your experiences, please.
Thanks chancellor, and Mr. Secretary, I’ve got a couple other teammates here I wanna recognize, my Command Sergeant Major Jack Love, secretary mentioned him, and then I have Cadet Sam Sullivan, who’s the best, recognized as the best women’s Army rugby player in the nation last year.
[Kristina] Wow, woo-hoo! (audience cheers)
Now, rugby is one, and the other part of it, she’s our trust captain and very much involved in this space, so to answer your question, we mobilized February 25th, if you ask Sam, I encourage you to talk to her later, we mobilized as a community beyond just the 4400 cadet men and women, but the entire community, our coaches, our staff and faculty all stood down. And I was, I had a finger in their chest, and I said, look, we have a problem, and I wanna make sure you understand we have a problem. Whether it was a cadet roommate or cadet company mate, or the guy who works at the gym, or the guy that works in defense public works, or woman, they didn’t realize we really had a problem, so I said, here is the data that we take every other year, as you mentioned earlier, so to build on that, and we need to get to work. So, you know, we’re a military organization, and military organizations, we write plans and orders, so we wrote a campaign plan, a comprehensive interdisciplinary, evidence-based, built on evidence based on the data we got from the survey, and we’re moving out and we haven’t stopped since then. This Monday, in about four days, we’re gonna do this again. This is round two, the finger won’t be in the chest so much ’cause I think I’ve, (Kristina laughs) I’ve awakened everybody. Senator Ernst will be there with us and join us.
[Kristina] Oh, that’s great.
Sam will speak, I’ll speak, and the brigade first captain, our number one cadet will speak, we’ll set the tone in the beginning of the day and then we will break down into small groups for the rest of the day and have real discussions and listen, as my comrade just said, really listen to what they have to say. A part of being a college president, a superintendent, is being in the moment, and what I tell our staff and faculty, I’ve been telling ’em all summer, I personally have been and met and looked in the eyeballs of every single new staff and faculty and said look, if Cadet Williams comes to you and needs help in this space, your day is stopped. You may have had a training plan, you may have had things to do that day, but it’s over. You need to get your other buddy to come and teach the class while you attend, so that’s after the fact, but more importantly, what we’ve done is use the data to get to the left, and you mentioned that earlier. How do we get to the left of this? So I wrote a letter to every single 1205 cadets who came in, they’re now 1197 that made it, we had a little trouble this summer, some of them working through. (audience chuckles) I’m sure my other colleagues as well. But I wrote a letter, I said here, I’m here for you in this space, take this survey, I wanted to build the analytics baseline before they got here, and then we took it all this summer, and we’re getting at boundaries, as you mentioned, let’s talk about boundaries, let’s talk about dignity and respect. So the short answer to your question is we’ve mobilized as a community, as the academy, and we’re not looking back. I’m in this space, and I told ’em as a former Army football player, I stand in that space like a middle linebacker, ready. And a number other things, which I won’t unpack unless you ask later, but the bottom line is mobilize, community awareness, and we’re going forward and I’m not leaving that space as long as I’m the superintendent at West Point, so.
Wow, that’s great. (audience applauds) Anything surprise you about calling for a stand down? ‘Cause I, that’s leadership.
Thank you, you know actually you mentioned Jay, and I was in Turkey a year before, and I thought that was one of the most brave things that Jay did, to stand up, and you mentioned that earlier, it was a different issue, it wasn’t in this space, but I use that as an example. What surprised me the most was um, many of the cadets didn’t know their roommates and people in the same company, I didn’t know, I didn’t know that Darryl Williams was assaulted or was struggling in this space, and so there was really that awakening of the corps, and I had so many cadets come to me. Our reporting went up, we saw a spike in reporting, many of them still on the fence, though, and so they would go to their chaplain, I had to ask the Army for more chaplain support after that day, we had a huge surge in people that needed attending to. And they weren’t really comfortable yet with going to their chain of command or another way, but our great chaplains, if any chaplains in the room, my hat’s off to you all. I had to bring in four more chaplains to deal with this.
[Kristina] Wow.
As a reaction to this, so the biggest surprise was not knowing, I didn’t know my roommate who I am with had this problem, had this issue, challenge, yeah.
Well, thank you.
Yes.
Rear Admiral Alfultis, so you are a president of one of the SUNY schools, also of course leading the Maritime Academy. Maybe talk a little bit about what we, you know, what we do in SUNY, what do you do at Maritime, what kind of data do you collect, your reflection on sexual assault, sexual harassment prevention in the context of SUNY and a public institution.
Sure, so at Maritime College, we like everyone else here, we survey our students, we have different surveys for students, first of all SUNY does its, every other year SUNY does a private survey of all faculty, staff and students. We also do survey all of our students annually when they’re returning to campus from summer, their summer seafaring experience, internships on commercial vessels and internships in office settings to find out what was their experiences away from campus. And one of the advantages of being associated with the SUNY system and SUNY doing a biannual kind of survey, we can compare our results to other SUNY campuses to say, okay, are the things that we’re seeing with our particular cohort of students any similar or different on either campuses? But I think we have a lot of work to do in this area, because when we tend to get our survey results, we tend to focus on the moment, the here and the now and this year, and we don’t tend to say, okay, well what is the context of these results compared to other years? And I don’t think we’ve thought well enough about, how can we design survey instruments that allow us to compare different cohorts? ‘Cause the problem is, we’re trying to find culture and climate of our campuses, but the reality is every cohort of students you bring on your campus changes the climate culture of the campus. You know, I learned when I was a teacher in a classroom for 21 years at the Coast Guard Academy (speaks off mic), (Kristina laughs) I would try to adjust the rules in my classroom, and it would work brilliantly, and I’m like, I’m there, I’m the best teacher in the whole wide world, I got it made, I’ll do the same thing next year, I do the same thing next year and it’s a complete failure. And I didn’t do any different, but the cohort of students changed, and so I think the challenge we face in these surveys is we need to think about, how can you come up with an instrument that allows you to not only just give a cohort, give here, but with multiple years, and for example, I think the national student steps faction, the National Survey of Student Engagement, NSSE, they do a survey of every senior and freshman. And so you can imagine, if we surveyed, did a similar survey, similar climate survey, every freshman and every senior in SUNY every year, it would allow to look at, okay, what is the change in attitudes and climate from freshman year to senior year in a given cohort, but it also, so that’s, okay, are we affecting climate within a given cohort, but that allows you to look longitudinally and say, okay, are we in fact changing climate? Are we seeing a change in the seniors over time consistently? And so I think what I’m looking for in the discussion today is really sitting down and thinking about, you know, when we should survey and why, who we should survey and why, and what analyses and comparisons do we wanna make and why. And I think we can learn a lot from what DOD is already doing in this area, so I’m looking forward to the academic realm and DOD really sharing about those three areas: who and why, how often and way, and what are we doing with the data and why.
Yeah, so you’ve been president for five years, you have a little bit more perspective than 60 and 90 days, perhaps, any changes you’ve seen over that time? Anything the data might have revealed, or?
Well, and yes, I’ve been head of campus for five years, but if you’re doing a survey every two, I only have two cycles.
Oh, that’s true. (laughs)
So that’s where I, I really think that, what I look for working with SUNY system, Joe, (Kristina laughs) is we’re rethinking about, you know, our student-wide campus, our student-wide climate survey, and maybe thinking about doing it more often, but do it on a subset of students so we’re not wearing our students out with survey fatigue, that if we do it every year, every student, we’re gonna wear ’em out, but so I, we really have two years of data. I can’t say off the top of my head that I’ve definitely seen any changes yet, then again the problem is, if I had seen changes, is it because anything we’re doing, or was it a different student body coming in?
Yeah, or more reporting, so just for everyone that may not be familiar with SUNY, of the 64 campuses, we have 30 community colleges, we have what, eight technical colleges, which is what Maritime Academy is part of, about 13 comprehensive, which are mainly bachelor’s and master’s, and then we have about seven doctoral intuitions, and I hope that all adds up to, there’s some statutory and other things, so it may not all add up to 64 but it does, I’ve counted ’em, I’ve been to 63 out of 64, I’m looking forward to my last visit. So in thinking about data, and we’ll now turn to the Air Force Academy, data informs program, and we heard from Melissa earlier that we’re here today to talk about programs, things that work, things you’re evaluating, things that might not work, things you wanna do, maybe General, would you comment a little bit just about the Air Force Academy, your program, anything you wanna say about your famous statement, which resonated with all of us, and then talk about program?
Well first, thanks, thanks Secretary for your leadership here in gathering us all together, I mean, I about the only time we’ll get us together is for a football game, but so (audience chuckles) I guess this shows how important this truly is, so thanks. And it’s also impressive to be part of a crowd of leaders that are directly engaged on this issue, so I think that’s impressive. I’d offer a few things I think on the area of data. From the survey that Dr. Van Winkle works with us every other year, one of the main elements out of that was that the main contributor to cadets, in our case, our students, that were either seeking help or preventing them to getting help was related to their peers. So that was very clear in the data. It wasn’t from senior leadership, that it was from peers. It was the retaliation, the shaming amongst each other. So we’ve really added a lot of energy and resources to robust our program that we have, where we’re training cadets to be peers, to be available for other cadets. And then this year, we’ve added another layer on that program where we’re giving special training to cadets to recognize and help in the area of sexual harassment and sexual assault so that the cadets are comfortable going to someone that is within their squadron that they know as opposed to necessarily going to a senior leader. The other thing about data that I’d offer is that, you know, data is an effort by all of us to try to get feedback so that our efforts are going in the right way, so another part of that is that we want to also be available to get feedback not necessarily related to surveys, or a continuing survey, or the every other year surveys, that we’re always looking for feedback, so we’ve added this year a number of ways for cadets to come to us anonymously as Darryl mentioned. We now have an app that cadets can go to directly to provide us some feedback in all sorts of different areas, they also have an ability to come to me anonymously directly; believe me, they do, about everything. (Kristina laughs) So I think that’s, our efforts to try to get at their ability, or their real need to provide us that feedback. Thank you for mentioning the comment, that seems like a while ago, but I think it’s so important for leaders in this area, and certainly, and that was a case about race relations, but you know, in areas of relations between each other, relations between people of what we expect, I think it’s so important that leaders, there’s no equivocation, there’s no backing off, there’s no relativism there, I mean there is an expectation of how we treat each other, and whether that’s race relations or general relations or sexuality or religious tolerance, it doesn’t matter. The element of human condition doesn’t matter. And so I think it’s so important for leaders to draw that unequivocal line of what’s not acceptable.
Yeah, absolutely, it was to do with racial slurs, and I think it, way I interpreted it was the same way, is that it really comes down to how do we treat each other? Basic dignity and respect, and you need that for across the board, so thank you again.
[Sean] Chancellor, if I may?
Yes, please.
I’d like to try to give the audience a best practice that ties in what Darryl and Jay have brought up. In that gender relations survey, we all, at all of our schools we found out that the trust problem is with their peer leadership predominately, not the senior uniformed leadership that’s running the institutions, and as simple as this may be, but what we chose to do is to release that data to the cadets and the midshipmen.
Oh, wow.
A lot of times, that survey data will go to senior leaders, senior leaders, and we’re all struggling with creating policy, and what are we gonna do about this? And the midshipmen and the cadets never know, really, why we keep talking about this, and why is there a problem? And we handed them the data and said, here it is. And we found that they were shocked. It’s exactly what Darryl said, they found out that their roommate was suffering, their classmate, their company mate was suffering, and all of a sudden, we allow them to be more part of the solution, especially when they found out that the finger was pointed at them, and it was a big deal, so that’s a best practice whether you use that at your respective institutions or not, please consider doing that.
So how granular did you go down in terms of publishing the data, I mean, was it down by unit and—
It’s to the individual cadet or midshipman, here it is.
We gathered all of the classes, all of the faculty, all of the staff, coaches, you know, every element of the academy and explained all of the data in detail, so that everybody at the institution, as Darryl points out, that you know, every part of the institution has to recognize that the problem is there. It can’t just be the folks who work in this space on a day-to-day basis, it has to be every member of the staff and faculty, coaches and then cadets, so we briefed all of the data to absolutely everyone.
They’ve gotta own it; it’s their problem.
Interesting.
And a lot of times, they’re assaulting each other, so they’ve gotta own it, and they saw it. It also prevents survey fatigue. If you give them the results of the survey, they’ll be more willing to do it again, ’cause they’re interested at least in the follow-up, that the next survey they’ll be interested to see if maybe what they did made a difference, and you can actually get some positive energy instead of burning ’em out with survey after survey, that all those old people, you know, they get and they try to do something with it, but they have no idea what the message was.
Yeah, a little bit about the feedback, I know you have my wingman here, this generation, I’ve raised three kids, they’re a little, they love feedback, and these are very competitive environments that we exists in, so if you share with them this data and they get the transparency, they’re now empowered to do something about it, like my trust captain back there and the first captain, so I tell the team all the time, look, some three-star general’s not going to solve this problem. I’ll help you you, I’ll be in this space, I’ll lead, but it’s gotta come, it’s gotta be horizontal, it’s gotta come from the bottom, so to the points that my teammates mentioned, very important that our cadets know and see the results of this survey.
And I’d like to add, back to something Melissa brought up a little bit earlier in this space, in the area of data, that sometime in this space, we want to just do something, you know, it’s so horrible, we wanna see action, and that there’s a tendency just to want to do something. And that can be dangerous and it can create in sometimes this fatigue or cynicism about the programs on the part of the student, so it’s so important that we measure baseline and foundational data when we start as well as along the way on a program. We’re introducing E triple A that’s going on at a number of universities, some of you, I see some head nods that have the program, it shows some promise at some other universities, it’s Enhanced Assessed, Acknowledge Asses Act, we’re introducing it at the academy, but we’re gonna do it in a way, by doing survey in the beginning and then survey data along the way, and determine whether it actually works for our population in our setting, and then to see, like Melissa points out, if we just continue to throw programs at things without that data, then I think we create a cynicism and we create a fatigue on the topic, so.
Right, absolutely. Admiral Kelly, can you talk about, we’ve heard some really interesting concrete actions that can be taken, taken place such as shining a light on the data, getting it back to the individual and the units, you know, maybe if you’ve got a minute, and obviously you do ’cause you’re sitting up here, you could a little bit about specific areas that you (laughs) that you’d recommend.
From a programmatic standpoint or from a leadership perspective?
I think both, I think we’re all looking for those best practices, and I learned one just now, so I think it’s fabulous.
Sure, so I think, folks, if you can absorb one or two things from these leaders up here, myself excluded, I’ll take myself out of that, because you can learn so much from listening to your peers and we know that in the realms that we work in, but trying to talk about leadership amongst these esteemed leaders is a little bit daunting for me 90 days in the job, ’cause I’ve learned so much watching your video, hearing what you’re doing and having the opportunity to spend time with these two gentlemen, there’s a lot to be learned out there. But I think what you’re hearing up here is it’s incumbent on us to be the face of this issue, to be the face of the effort at the institution, and to be out there proactively engaged day in and day out, but as General already mentioned, our young men and women know how to address and how to get after the issues, or at least what the issues are. We need to help them figure out how to get after those. I stood up meeting with each class as they came in, and I told ’em that, you know, I had a hard time as a 54-year-old man understanding how somebody could go through the military training that we go through, especially our freshmen, they go through an intense period of eight, nine, ten weeks of training, how then, two, three, four weeks later, two, three, four months later, two, three, four years later, they could sexually assault, sexually harass or unwanted sexual contact on one of their shipmates that they’ve gone through so much with. And I asked them to help me understand how that can happen, because cognitively, I can’t get there. I can’t understand how it happens. And there was a little bit of a silence in the room, and one brave young woman said, “sir, I have some thoughts.” And she got up, sophomore, got up and shared her thoughts with her classmates, and unsolicited, the round of applause. So it just reinforced to me that we can learn so much from our students, we can learn so much from our faculty, we can’t solve the problems, but the problems that we find interesting, our staff, our faculty, our students will find fascinating. And we know General Schneider up in Norwich University, right, an esteemed college president, has been up there for over 20 years, he’s getting ready to retire, he’s a Coast Guard Academy Graduate, what he shares with us on our board of trustees, he’s a trustee member, is, you know, “resources are the root of all excellence.” So what we put our resources towards, what we put our time and effort towards, what we put our energy towards, we will achieve excellence in that area. So we can give lip service, we can show up here, but if we go back and don’t, if we gather to commit and disperse and forget, we will never get after eradicating this from the deck plates of our institution. So I would offer to you, if your president, if your chancellor is not here, Dr. Van Winkle talked about this last night, and so, ma’am I’ll take a little bit of your lead on this; if they’re not here I would ask why. And I would go back and challenge them to see if this is truly an issue on your campus, then ask them to show up, ask them to be present, ask them to engage, and not only engage with their presence or their words, but ask them to engage with their resources and their commitment of time, effort and energy, because that will be a very clear signal to your college community that you are willing to get after this, and I think you’re hearing up here that these leaders are willing to not only engage with their time and with their presence, but they’re putting their resources after it, you know (mic distorts) to take a full day off from classes to focus on sexual assault, so those are some of the things that we’re trying to do as leaders at our institution.
[Kristina] Thank you, yes?
Chancellor, I’d suggest that another best practice based on my opinion, but I haven’t asked my cohorts here, but I had shared with you that at the Naval Academy, we probably have an opportunity four times to survey a midshipman, and I think the most important survey that we have is the initial one within the first week of arriving for the new cohort. You talked about how each years’ cohort is different. These kids at our service academies come from every state in the union. We have a very diverse student body at each school, and they come from rural America, they come from big city America, they come from the rich, the poor, they come every one of ’em comes with a different value set. And to better understand your student body to form your curriculum and be able to reach out to them and get them to listen, we need to kinda know, what’s the entering value system? This is our first opportunity to shape and mold these young men and women, and what they’ll practice at the service academy is what they’ll take out into the fleet, and we could get it wrong if we don’t survey them until their sophomore year with the DOD gender relations survey, we have missed the opportunity for that first impression in the pleb year, the first year where we start with the training. So I would suggest to you, if you’re not surveying your student body as soon as they come to your school, you may be missing a really critical first impression opportunity to get to them and get them to begin to listen to how you do business and what your expectations are. So we not only preach to them and tell them what our expectations are of service in the military, but we’re also trying to teach ’em.
No, that’s excellent, Admiral, in fact I was thinking as we all walked up here, thinking about, this is a safety issue, I was remiss not to point out, there are no rails on those steps, so when you walk down, please try to be safe, (cameraman laughs) but the point is that by doing what you’re doing, you’re creating the lens of which all your students and cadets are gonna be look, and midshipmen and you know, are gonna be looking at their service through, and that’s so critical, so that certainly is a big take away for me—
Can I add something to Sean?
Please.
To add on to that, because I think that’s so crucial about, we get the geographic diversity which is wonderful and it comes with that, the diversity of all of the values and other pieces, we’ve arrived at a program where we’re teaching healthy relationships and interpersonal skills in the very beginning just for that very reason, that in some cases if you think about the fact that as someone comes from a family, and all of these different families in all of this different geography, that in many cases our programs are largely centered on telling people what not to do. And in many cases, we have to teach them what a healthy relationship should be like between two people, because no one has taught them that. And so a lot of the programs that focus on what not to do, there is plenty of material and we’re working on it and we have curriculum that we’re using to teach people what to do, what a healthy relationship should be between two people, because coming from those different backgrounds in many cases, their different value sets, they have not been taught that.
Oh, that’s exactly right, you know, Admiral Alfultis, again, you’re at one of the SUNY campuses, I wanna ask you a question, I have to give you little preamble to it. So I am the co-chair of the working group for the National Institutes of Health on sexual assault and sexual harassment prevention, and we had a listening session at the National Institutes, I think it was about June, it’s live. One of the things that was an eye opener for all, I would say many of the members on the committee, I won’t speak for all of ’em, and this is on the heels of the report by the national academies about sexual assault and sexual harassment, was that it’s almost like the, and in this case it was all women that were speaking about their very personal experiences, that they’re almost victimized twice: first, when the assault or harassment happened, and then second, when retaliation. So I wonder if you would comment just a little bit about, you know, do you feel that, how do you feel about the retaliation, and is that something that you think we can get after pretty quickly, if there is an issue? And opened up for anybody who wants to comment on that, but.
So first of all, last year we hooked up with a fantastic speaker on this very topic. Her name’s Brenda Tracy, she was assaulted by, she was not in the college that, she was with friends that partied with some college athletes, and she was gang raped by three college athletes, and she went through with our own students the deeply personal story of what you just said of realizing that she was drugged, then she woke up, she realized she was sexually assaulted, she came forward, and obviously was really put through the ringer by the college community, the community of the college itself, the chief of police, you know, and she told a deeply personal story of this very issue. And frankly there was not a dry eye in the crowd. It was really moving of our students. I do think that there isn’t, and this issue of retaliation extends beyond just, you know, victims of sexual harassment (speaks quickly) because when you’re asking students to do survey, to your point about anonymity of survey, when you’re asking students to do a survey, or you’re asking students to come forward, we do have a fear, certainly at my institution, of retaliation by fellow students, you know, why did you do this to my friend? Why are you putting him through this? And so I do think it’s an issue, I think it’s an issue that needs to be addressed, I’m real proud of the fact that we made the decision in 2017 to hire a full time Title IX coordinator. So think about a college of only 1,700 students, we made the investments, gets back to the leadership from the front, we made the decision, invest those resources in a full-time Title IX coordinator; I don’t think you’ll find many colleges our size with a full-time Title IX coordinator. When we brought that person on board, we saw an increase in reporting, both formally and informally. We provided, again, vehicles for students to report either anonymously or informally or formally, and people felt more empowered to come forward. So I think that’s the key is, you have to still empower them and make them feel like they can come forward in confidence and give them option, do you want to keep this confidential, do you wanna keep this between us, or do you wanna take it to the next step? So I think it’s a combination of things: I think it’s creating that culture of climate and respect where people will feel like if someone does come forward, they’re not gonna feel the retaliation, and two, I think you need to provide the vehicles to empower people to feel that they can come forward.
Chancellor, if I could—
Yes, please.
Add on to that and what Admiral Alfultis talked about. So in the military, we have the sexual assault prevention and response, and what we’ve identified is that recovery is a new R, we’ve added a new R to that, because when you sit down with victims, you realize that this is not something that, you know, we have assault, we have the prevention, we have the response, we hold people accountable, we take ’em to mass, we send ’em to jail, we discharge ’em from the service, and then we go back to doing what we do. And we realized we were missing an opportunity, we were missing something that we absolutely have to do to help our members recover from this, and that doesn’t just mean recovery in the short term, it means recovery in the long term, so what we’ve taken upon ourselves is to add that formally, add that second R to our SAPRR acronym, and invest in the education and the support services there for our members, and that doesn’t just mean over a six-month period, it means over a six-year period, it means over the lifetime of their, well, of their lifetime, because they will deal with the trauma of this crime for the rest of their lives, so recovery is such a key part of what we’re evolving into, and we’re trying to use data to find out what our members need, so where we can meet them where they need the support, and that support is gonna change throughout the recovery period.
Your academic background, in I think, professional service was in human resources.
Yes ma’am.
You were the assistant commandant for human resources previously.
[William] Yes ma’am.
What about that role prepared you for your new role, you know, 90 days in?
Six years at Coast Guard headquarters prepared me to realize that– (audience laughs) walking to work every day is really cool, and I’m in a really good situation, and I’m blessed to be there, but again, the insights into our work force, and all too often, I haven’t had an opportunity to talk to the other superintendents about this, but what I find at our academy is that it’s 103 acres, and that becomes kind of the center of the universe. And folks kind of focus on things and the challenges on those 103 acres, and we lose focus on the fact that our sole responsibility is graduate leaders of character to go out into our service, to deal with the challenges in our service. So we get caught up in the tyranny of the present or the tyranny of the 103 ares, and because I’m only 90 days in the job I can still go, we have challenges in Bahrain, we have challenges in northwest, you know, Washington state, we have challenges along the coast of Maine, where our members work in small communities. What are we doing to prepare our leaders to be able to go out and deal with those challenges? So I hope I don’t forget that. I’ll probably go back and sit in traffic in D.C. just to remind myself of how lucky I am. (audience laughs) But we have, it’s provided me a unique opportunity to work with some of the folks in the room here on these challenges that impact the large Coast Guard so that I can come back to the Coast Guard Academy, where we develop, we are the home of the office corps. Every single officer in the United States Coast Guard: academy, officer candidate school, or other programs, all come through the gates of our Coast Guard Academy. So we have a unique opportunity, unlike my peers here, to be able to actually influence all of our Coast Guard leadership from an officer perspective at the Coast Guard Academy.
Oh, that’s great. Yes, Admiral?
Chancellor, I’d like to try to share another best practice that resulted out of analyzing the data through our surveys and then our feedback that we request after some of our training sessions, so stereotypically, perpetrator male, victim female. There’s a lot of myths out there about male on male sexual assault. We have, at the request of our brigade, we broke out female only small group sessions, male only small group sessions, we have to work really hard to dispel a lot of myths associated with male on male rape and sexual assault. Well, what we found out, the by-product of that is, is one, to better educate the males, and once they understand that and they see those myths dispelled, they have become more empathetic about male perpetrator against female sexual assault, and it’s less a woman issue, a woman problem. They understand the entire holistic problem and are more interested in being part of the solution, more interested in holding their male counterparts and friends accountable for it and getting to the preventative side. I think every one of us up here, and as a DOD and a DON, and a department of the Army, we’re all very proud of what we’ve done in the response world, but we’re not proud of what we have gotten to, or the results in a downward trend on preventing it from the first place. And getting males to have better buy-in through understanding is getting to the preventative side of the house, and we did that through analyzing the data on the males not necessarily understanding the whole issue as well as they could be.
[Kristina] Wow, that’s great.
So maybe male-only breakout small group sessions to have those discussions.
[Kristina] Yeah, that’s excellent, another great recommendation. Yes, Admiral?
Just, I wanted to talk with you about bystander intervention, ’cause we heard both from the senator and from the secretary about the need to be active bystanders. So, 2017 we did our 2017 climate survey and in that, we were shocked by some of the results, frankly caught off guard, because in that survey, only 76% of our students indicated they would likely call or very likely call 911 if they heard their neighbor calling for help.
They would or would not?
They would, they would, only 76% would say, I would be likely to call 911 or very likely to call 911 if I heard my neighbor calling for help, and only 68% of our students said if a friend came to you who had been assaulted, you would help that friend get the resources they need. And so we were concerned about, you know, we need to take action on this bystander piece, and so that’s one reason why, and again, what I like to the best practice we’re doing, our Title IX coordinator is not in human resources, she’s not in public safety, she’s in student affairs. And so we’re leveraging a unique synergy between the compliance side of Title IX and student affairs program to affect climate. So that’s, again, we brought Brenda Tracy on campus for bystander intervention, and again, she challenged all the students to, look, do the right thing and look out for your friends. She really did.
Yeah, that’s great.
And then we brought, and I really wanna mention this, ’cause I wanna highlight again Kyle Richard, everyone’s gonna get tired about hearing Kyle Richard, I’m sorry, but we brought Kyle Richard on campus, you already Kyle Richard’s story. But what I tell you is what Kyle Richard told to our student, so he told the students this is that listen, listen to that small voice in your head when it’s telling you to do something, and be the leader who acts on that small voice in your head, because other people in the room are probably hearing the same small voice, and if you be the leader, others will follow. And it had a tremendous impact on our students. And by the way, after both of those sessions we had an increase of students coming forward, again formally and informally to report incidents. And you don’t, we didn’t, from my perspective, you don’t get that kind of response when you’re sitting down with students to talk about, you know, what is Title IX, what is affirmative consent, they don’t, they respond more to the human moment of this issue than the compliance part of this issue. So I just want to encourage people to think about, where are you putting your Title IX coordinator? How are you connecting the two together between the Title IX coordinator as well as your student life programming, to really, again, have a big impact on your students and really drive change?
Chancellor, if I could.
Yes please, General.
Part of this, and I’ve got some of my doctors in the room here, we’ve taken a look at reframing this subject a little bit in terms of developing a culture of character growth. So to get at the bystander intervention, one of the things I talk to my staff and faculty, we gotta create here a culture of intervention. And how do you, so you’re talking about a generation that’s used to doing this and not looking up and not being comfortable with social skills and picking up on social cues. Oh, did she really mean that, did he really mean that? And so they miss those, they talk past each other, we’ve found, and so, and not to mix your uniform or making your bed, but discipline as a whole. If you raise the level of discipline up, in confrontation, they shine. I really don’t like the way you just talked to X cadet or X midshipman and practice that, role model that and let them practice intervening, then perhaps they’ll have more confidence and more traction in these tougher issues. So what I’ve found, I’ve only been a year, but I’ve taught at West Point a couple times, and I’ve seen it in my kids, they’re not comfortable with intervention like maybe some of us are. Hey, I don’t like the way, what did you just say? And so there can (Kristina laughs) be no sanctuary, whether its on the athletic field, we call it the field of friendly strife at West Point, sometimes not so friendly at West Point. (Sean mumbles) No no, I didn’t. (audience laughs) It’s a motivator. Whether it’s on the athletic field, whether it’s in the classroom or it’s on the military field, there cannot be, so all the coaches know, our TAC and TAC NCOs all know that you need to get folks comfortable with stepping in, intervening, a culture of intervention, and how do you do that? And so we’re working at, we have a long way to go, but my commandant, dean and others, my sergeant major are working, hey look, you need to make those corrections. Practice here, so when you have the real tough pit, when you’re at the bar, when you’re at the first class club on a Friday night and you see this situation that’s developing, you need to step in, so.
That’s just what you do, you know, we’re so fortunate to have these five distinguished leaders here, six, many of you in the audience, so I’m gonna ask the final question if I may, and I’ll be asking General Silveria just to give you (mumbles). So what would you say to your younger self as an incoming cadet, and incoming midshipman, someone walking in the door, what you know now, what would you say to that person that’s you? Because you all talked about addressing them and getting them early and getting them often. So tell us a little bit from your perspective, what would you say to your younger self?
Well, I think there’s two things. I think, first off, Darryl just hit one of the most important things, when you’re 18 years old and you arrive at a military institution, you are very unsteady and you’re very unsure of how things work, and you don’t wanna stand out. And so, I think if I could go back to that 18-year-old and talk to him, first I’d tell him to study harder. (audience laughs) Then, after I told him to study harder, then I would tell him that when something’s not right, then you have a responsibility to speak up. You have a responsibility to say, that’s not right, you shouldn’t say that or you shouldn’t do that. So I think that’s important, but I also think that the other thing that I’d try to get to that 18-year-old is that the idea of providing support for others, the idea that you can lean on me, you can count on me.
That’s interesting.
That’s such an important part of our military culture, that everyone is valued, you only go into a combat situation with others, counting on others and counting on you. And so I would wanna tell that 18-year-old about that much, much earlier. About that idea that you have to lean on me and lean on each other for support.
Do you see that changing over the years since you were first that 18-year-old? I don’t know how many years it is, clearly it’s more than, a number of– (Darryl laughs)
I think the need for that is even greater now than it’s ever been. I think that the challenges that the young men and women at the military academies, but students of all age, I have two boys in their early 20’s, the challenges that they face I think are much more complex. I think that they need that more than ever, the ability to go for support, the ability to know where they can get support, where they can get help, that what they have to deal with I think is a lot more complicated, I think it’s a lot more difficult than what we dealt with in the 80’s, and I think that having those programs that we all have, but having that programs available I think are so much more important now than they were then.
Sure, and just to put it in perspective, the 80’s, some of you lived through it or didn’t, this is before the invention of the personal, the IBM PC, nevermind the iPhone, the iPad, and I could go on, but I won’t, thank you very—
Well, can I add something to that?
Yeah, please.
I think there’s an important point, because there’s sometimes when we talk to our students, there’s an important point a lot of people, and perhaps looking around, some of the ages in this room, about the presence and the availability of the internet. Frankly, there’s a time that happened that’s not about the internet, it’s about the availability of high speed data, and the availability of high speed data, and the availability of high speed data changed everything, because now, this is the availability of video to move. This is the availability of us to interact with video on our phones, and that has fundamentally changed things, and I think that has made the availability of a lot of content that all of us don’t like, it’s the pervasiveness of pornography, it’s the pervasiveness of a much more open and permissive society, that largely from the presence of high speed data. Now we need that, we need to be connected, combatants, we want to be connected, but with that has come another layer that we’re just beginning to understand, not just the presence of the internet, but the presence of high-speed data.
No absolutely, and we’ve had 40 years of Moore’s Law. No we’re at the point where censors are pervasive, there are more devices connected to the internet than there are people on the planet, and all that data that you are collecting, now the ability for our algorithms to really do deep learning and to get better at prediction, I think is an exciting aspect of this as well.
It is exciting.
Admiral Kelly, would you mind?
Yeah.
What would you tell your younger self, given you’re the youngest here?
You know, it’s interesting you ask that question, my aid is in the back, and tonight when I get back, I’ll have the opportunity to sit down with our seniors who led the battalion throughout the summer training. So we got 20, 25 young women and men coming over the house, and I was asking Lieutenant Perez, I said, the question I think my wife and I wanna ask them is, pick a year, Five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, where do you see yourself in the future? So it’s just interesting as I reflect on that question, we were kind of talking about that this morning, you know, looking back, I’m with you, study harder, ’cause I didn’t do that. The girl that I met on the dance floor at Leamy Hall, which is our ballroom, you should ask her to marry you sooner, but you did the right thing asking her to marry you, ’cause that turned out wonderfully. I grew up in a house with five boys, I had no sisters, very limited interaction, I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, went to the Coast Guard Academy, and I didn’t know how to engage in constructive and positive conversations with young women, my peer group, and then I was the first commanding officer of a mixed gender patrol boat in the Coast Guard, and I learned at about 30 that you know, women in the United States Coast Guard kick butt and take names just as well as men do, and I just wish that I had—
Hear, hear. (claps) (audience claps)
And I’ll deviate for just a second, as a superintendent now engaging with the young women at our academy, if the young men were in the room right now, I’d tell ’em to pick up their game, ’cause the young women are taking ’em to task, they are just phenomenal. We are very blessed, we are very blessed. But I would’ve said, Bill, engage with your classmates, engage with the young women, your classmates, those senior T and junior T, those female staff members, and just engage, learn how to do that, right? ‘Cause I just didn’t have that, that was missing from my repertoire if you will, my skillset. It’s evolved, but it kinda hit me right between the eyes when the assignment officer said, Bill, you’re going to this cutter, and within a week your crew’s gonna go from 16 men to nine men and seven women and you’re gonna be responsible for taking them from Grenada to Halifax and doing Coast Guard missions, I just had to, I developed that skillset and a tremendous appreciation, but I wish that I could go back to that cadet back in 1984 and go hey, just engage with the women in your class ’cause you’d be a better officer and a better person.
So I’m hearing a big theme here, which is listen to the students, the cadets, hear from them, speak to them directly, get them the data because it’s all our problem. I do have a request to take questions from the audience, so I’m gonna, if you’d like, General and Admiral, the Admirals that didn’t get the chance to answer that question may weave it into the questions from the audience, but we only have about five minutes left, it’s been such an engaging discussion, but we are here to take some questions from the audience, so if anybody would like to step up, please, and there’s a microphone there in the middle. Thank you again.
Thank you, ma’am.
Good morning, and I’d like to thank you all again for coming here, being in the same place at the same time, sharing all of your feedback. My name is Dr. Kesson, I work at Cornell University, and it sounds like you’re all doing fantastic things at your respective institutions, but I’m curious to see what if any plans do you have for long-term data tracking, particularly integrating qualitative feedback? So you talk about feedback, and you talk about the awareness that you learn from the students once you put the data in their faces. Do you have any plans to get qualitative, so anecdotal, perhaps facilitating some focus groups, and specifically with the Coast Guard, what you’re doing since you have the opportunity to impact all the officers. Is there any long-term plans to see what they learn after, once they go into the workforce, how your current curriculum will impact what they take with them beyond?
Great question.
Yes ma’am.
Yes, (mutters), yes, after the stand down day, we captured data that day from the, in fact I just had this discussion last week with my team as we prepare for Monday. How are we, the term we use in the military is after action review, how are we gathering the data, the qualitative data from the folks, the anecdotal data? How did the experience, how was the day for them? The day starts off sort of on this grand scale, makes its way through the cadet and the senator and myself as I mentioned, but then we break down into small groups, we have character lunches, so each semester we’ll have the stand down day followed up by a character lunch where staff and faculty will be, and they will collect that data. It’s very important that we collect and watch this data longitudinally over time. I used the term earlier, campaign plan, so we have mobilized longitudinally over time, this isn’t a one-off event for us. February 25th was just sort of just the call, if you will, to focus everybody but then we, I want this to exist when my grandson and daughter are here, they’re benefiting from the benefits of this campaign plan that’s been changed, of course, over time, that’s the way I’m looking. I’m looking, our jobs I think as college presidents, is to be out a little bit, right? We have people that our running our organizations right now, I hope, while I’m here. (Kristina laughs) But so the current fight, if you will, to use military parlance is important, but what’s more important is that this sustains and that there’s carry-through and follow-through. So a long answer but yes, we do qualitatively collect.
That’s great, thank you very much, next?
Hi, I’m Katie Hood from the One Love Foundation. And I just wanna first say I’m so inspired by your leadership, and I’m teary because yes, I work for One Love. I’m also a campus sexual assault survivor.
God bless you.
And what really moved me this morning was when you talked about focus on recovery. I think that that has been a huge missing piece for campus sexual assault survivors is that the rush to are you gonna press charges, it’s overwhelming and you are not prepared, so what I would say is I’m a person who didn’t mention that I was a survivor for 15 years, not a soul, and it wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t trust my peers, I didn’t trust myself because I was traumatized, so my point is, I think you guys have an awesome opportunity to start doing more work on prevention, I’m all for it, and I’m so proud to have partnered with so many of you up there on the stage including SUNY, which, SUNY is such a leader in the space, as is the Navy. But what I wanted to say is this piece is very special, what you just talked about with recovery and the opportunity to build real programs and then measure those programs as well I think is critically important, so I know you have a lot on your plates, but you guys got me while I was sitting here, and I just wanted to say thank you. (audience applauds)
Thank you, do you have a comment? You have a comment, thanks, yeah, please, General.
I’d like to add, so thank you, thank you for your courage. I have to tell you as a college president and as a commander, the years that I’ve been there, the most powerful thing that has happened to me and where I’ve learned the most in this space is after I arrived, I asked and began to meet with a number of survivors. I mean, one-on-one, in my office, I had ’em up for lunch, when these amazing conversations about what they learned, about the recovery, about actionable steps we could take from an individual point of view, and that back to the resources point of view, I put my money where my mouth is, and I meet with them, as many of them as many who want to meet with me one and one, and it’s been the most powerful thing that’s happened since I’ve been there, so thank you.
Thank you.
That was a difficult act to follow, so thank you for that. I wanted to thank you for your time, and hearing all your impressive initiatives. My question is really about a different aspect of data. The survey data, climate data, et cetera is very important, and I appreciated the transparency, sounds like you all make that results available to your communities. My question is about, when people come forward with situations that they’ve experienced, if and how you make, how you handle those allegations transparent to your community and how people who’ve been found responsible for violating a policy or a standard in your community are held accountable as another prevention method.
Admiral Buck, first, and then—
I’ll take a stab at it. It’s a lot of process, I think, you’ve asked, that we have a very organized sexual assault prevention and response program across DOD, and it depends on how the victim comes forward and asks for help and to report, and they can choose, it’s their choice whether they do what we would call an unrestricted report or a restricted report: are they, if they keep it restricted we provide them all the response effort and recovery care that we can, but it’s kept very confidential and it’s not investigated. If they come forward and they want it investigated, they want accountability, they want the perpetrator held accountable it becomes more prevalent, the information at least statistically it’s reported with a little bit more fidelity but with anonymity. And so it depends on the victim as they come forward. We receive their permission to talk about it, they may wanna do what this young lady just did and have the courage to talk and share testimonials, but that will be up to each individual. (audience member mumbles question to panel)
Hi, um, oh are you done with that question?
[Sean] No, not yet. (audience member mumbles to panel)
Yeah, the different, good question, McPonn. We differentiate between an unrestricted report that can be investigated and a restricted, we want every single victim to feel confident that they can come forward and begin to receive help, attention, talk about it, expose it, and then once they see our services’ response to them, over time they may begin to grow the confidence and the courage to convert it from a restricted report to an unrestricted and investigate it down the road.
That’s interesting.
Ultimately to get to that accountability that we need to remove the perpetrator and have some type of deterrent toward overall prevention in the service.
If I could add just one thing to that, one of the challenges that we do face is we have our students for four years. When an unrestricted report comes forward and it’s investigated, it takes time, and during that time there’s not a lot of information being shared publicly. Humans crave information, they want it in a timely manner, and all too often, especially if this happens to a junior or a senior, that class may move on. That class may graduate before this case is fully brought to adjudication and punishment given, so the ability to be fully transparent is something that I think, I know we struggle with, and as I read the reports ’cause we follow the same process that our DOD partners do, that’s something that we struggle with.
Right, thank you.
Did that answer your question?
Yeah, I mean I think I’m wondering if you publish reports for your community to see how many restricted, unrestricted, and of those that are restricted, is that the word for when they wanna formally have it investigated?
Unrestricted.
Clearly not from the military.
[Sean] Yes ma’am, we—
And then so what happens to those, what are the outcome, yeah, do you publish numbers?
The department of defense through this sexual assault gender relations survey every other year publishes that report to the entire world, to the entire country, it’s very transparent. We also have parts of that report that are about our respective service academies, and once again, that’s public for every single one of you to consume and call us to task on what those numbers say about how things are going in your service academy.
Thank you very much, last question, and then we’ll thank the panelists.
I just wanna thank you all, I’m from Columbia University and this has been an amazing experience, and your work is really something to be modeled. My question is this: you said that on a very granular level you share the data that you generate from your surveys, and I’m wondering how you do that without sacrificing the anonymity of somebody in a very small unit who might disclose; I see the value of that, I think it’s fantastic, but I’m wondering how you can share it, you know, down to particular group without sacrificing that, and also I’m wondering, how do you get people to take the surveys? Do you just order them to because you’re a military establishment? (Kristina laughs) (audience laughs) I assume you have a very high response rate. How do you get that?
Two parts to your question: one, the granularity of that data is still very anonymous; it has nothing to do with a specific individual or any type of identifying information that they could tunnel down and find out what that person was, ’cause in some of our groups you have a very small cohort and you could begin to whittle that out. We will not do that, that’s not what I meant. The second this is we do not order people to take surveys. You’ll completely lose the crowd if it’s a, we call it, volun-told or volunteer. It’s important that everyone is a volunteer. Very, very important.
I will tell you, by creating this culture of awareness and trust, and so off the top of my head, the last survey I wasn’t here for, but our great teammates came in and administered 69% of the men took the test, 92% of the women took the test last time, and so it’s about creating energy and staying in this space so there’s awareness, so next April, when we take this text, my expectation will be even higher in terms of our results.
And I’ll say one more thing also on incentivizing students so I again, I have a combination of students in the regiment, civilian students, and we try initially to get our response right up, is we incentivize the regiment by saying, if we get a certain response rate, you all get a Friday morning formation off, you can sleep in. Well we found out that even those sorts of incentives skew the data because they’ll do it for the incentive but then we get inaccurate data, so I agree, what we’ve found is, live with a lower response rate but your data’s more accurate.
Oh, interesting. Thank you very much for your leadership, thank you Secretary Spencer, appreciate it. (audience applauds)
Thank you.
That was great. You were wonderful. (applause drowns out panelists)
Thank you sir, appreciate it, thank you, you were great.
Thank you so much, may we have one more round of applause for the chancellor? (audience applauds) We are going to move shortly into our morning break, but before we do so we just wanted to thank again the secretary and the chancellor for supporting this, and we thank the secretary for his idea in our conversation about coming back again two years from now, and we hope that the leaders of all of our service academies could join us, that was an incredible discussion, and the opportunity to be able to look back, look where we are and look forward is an incredible opportunity, so we invite you to take a break, meet somebody new, talk with each other, and we will join back up again in 22 minutes, thank you. (audience murmurs)