
In four years at Temple, Ray Epstein has traveled much of Pennsylvania — its metropolises, its historic suburbs, the hollowed-out industrial towns and ranches forming the commonwealth’s rural “T.”
On these journeys, the founding president of Student Activists Against Sexual Assault has told and retold her life story: The abuse she suffered as a teenager. The support group that rejected her. The dormant advocacy org she revived on campus.
After all those trips, she’s noticed something: Pennsylvania has a lot of colleges.
“Like, an insane amount,” said Epstein — who also serves as TSG president and chairs a committee for the Every Voice Coalition.
That memory of institutional failure and a campus-packed commonwealth came together when the EVC’s Pennsylvania chapter began rallying support for a measure offering abuse victims an alternative to the Title IX process. A petition backing the bill drew more than 1,500 signatures in two weeks, according to Epstein.
The late United States Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana and the late United States Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii established and strengthened Title IX of Congress’s 1972 Educational Amendments. Its provisions were designed to ensure equal access to college opportunities for women. As part of that guarantee, Title IX’s architects created a process to investigate campus sexual misconduct.
Epstein described the original Title IX regime as hastily assembled; it’s become more broken over time, she argued. EVC aims to restore gender equality in college to full strength by distancing the handling of campus misconduct from the institutions themselves, she said.
But many of its provisions could prove controversial in collegiate boardrooms. One section empowers an advisor not tied to a university to walk students through abuse cases. It would commission anonymous “climate surveys” to review schools’ handling of allegations. Parts of the bill even bar officials from using student conduct codes against students who pursue the Title IX process.
Epstein has long believed that many schools pressure students not to report sex abuse — keeping reported accusations low and their reputations high. Independent analysis of campus rape culture might eliminate incentives to maintain the gap between reportage and reality, she said.
“I do think [this bill] will increase the level of accountability to universities across the state,” she said.
Temple Title IX coordinator Megan Patrick acknowledged that reports of sexual abuse likely lag behind reality. Any measure to ease victims’ path to justice could count on her full support, she said.
But university policies alone, Patrick added, can’t bear the brunt of the blame for the disparity. Abuse survivors often decide that intense, drawn-out legal or disciplinary confrontations just aren’t for them. But no college’s reputation influences her work, she added.
“I have a job to do,” Patrick said. “And my job is to take every report that comes in and to look into it if the individual wants to.”
Pennsylvania’s sharply-divided General Assembly presents another challenge for the EVC and its allies. As Every Voice state director and SAASA Vice President Bella Kwok began shopping EVC’s legislation to the commonwealth’s sharply divided government, members warned her: It’s not easy getting anything signed into law these days.
So, when the time comes to introduce what’s known as the EVC bill to lawmakers in Harrisburg, the task will not fall to anyone directly representing Pennsylvania’s many, many college campuses. The bill now runs through State Rep. Amen Brown — a centrist Democrat whose district sits just beyond University City, among the residences and storefronts separating Penn and Drexel from West Philadelphia.
“I knew that being able to gain bipartisan support from both parties was crucial,” Kwok said. “I knew that Representative Brown is a very bipartisan type of legislator.”
Members at EVC say Brown displayed a genuine interest in their cause. But he, too, has crisscrossed the keystone — to the sorts of places where ordering a drink with almond milk draws more sideways glances than raw milk.
“I’ve met with farmers,” Brown said. “I’ve met with the most rural family. I met with the Trumpers. I meet with them all.”
Versions of the EVC bill are now law in nearly a dozen states. But the incoming Trump administration sees Title IX a little differently than previous White Houses, deploying it less in sexual assault cases and more against transgender students and athletes. And both Trump terms stiffened requirements for disciplinary action in campus sexual misconduct cases in the name of fairness to the accused.
Still, Epstein remained confident that the EVC’s proposals wouldn’t be seen as drastic — and would prove popular and passable.
“It’s just giving them a better scope: ‘Here are your resources in the city — local and state,’” Epstein said. “‘And here are your options on campus.’”
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