Educational Institutions
Know what to do and when.
Because of the many stakeholders at your institution — students, faculty, staff, parents — concerns about inappropriate conduct can be brought to your attention by various sources implicating varying scenarios. Some of the more common are:
Boundary issues in K-12 schools when employees fail to understand the difference between creating a caring environment and becoming enmeshed in the emotional lives of students.
Student-on-student cyber-bullying; harassment based on race; sexual misconduct often driven by adolescents’ interpretations of the #MeToo movement.
With colleges and universities, Title IX complaints and Code of Conduct violations between students and climate reviews of departments, when faculty members stop collaborating and supporting each another.
As domestic and world events are absorbed by campuses serving all age groups, shared ancestry, free speech, and politics are the bases of additional complaints, often spurred on by the passion of both young minds and seasoned academics. Such interpersonal conflicts can have significant financial and reputational consequences on all of an educational institution’s constituents. And they need to be thoroughly investigated.
Why investigate?
For an organization, it can be helpful to hire an external investigator to make certain a complaint is addressed impartially so that the institution can have confidence that the findings are reliable and, indeed, defensible. For those involved in an investigation, it can be empowering to share their story with someone who knows how to listen and will treat them with respect. Whether a complainant, respondent, or witness, talking to someone about negative intimate or emotional experiences can leave someone feeling vulnerable and in need of support. As an experienced investigator, I bring a stabilizing approach to the process, leaving participants feeling that they have been heard, which in turn leaves them feeling more confident about the investigation and the educational institution that commissioned it.
When to hire an investigator.
Ideally, it’s best to address concerns as quickly as possible. Yet many institutions simply don’t have the in-house expertise or bandwidth to conduct thorough, unbiased reviews of a complaint. If Title IX is implicated, regulations impose deadlines and formalities on the sexual harassment complaint process that often mean an institution is best served by outsourcing the investigation to an impartial third party who understands the policies, knows how to make credibility determinations, and who can evaluate the relevance of information provided during the process.