A Matter of Degrees story by Brian Wallstin
Excerpt:
Susy Struble was a 16-year-old high school student when, during a weekend visit to Dartmouth College, she was raped at an off-campus party.
Like many rape victims, Struble chose not to tell anyone about the assault, and two years later, she was back at Dartmouth as a student.
One night during her freshman year, she opened her door to a tall, sandy-haired man. Obviously drunk, he forced his way in, pushed Struble against the wall and tried to kiss her. Struble was able to fend off her attacker, who she realized was the same man who had raped her two years earlier.
After graduating in 1993, Struble fled west and later settled in the Bay Area with her husband, also a Dartmouth graduate, and their two young children. For years, she kept a quiet distance from her alma mater, whose reputation as an inhospitable place for young women is a centerpiece of the national debate over sexual assault on college campuses.
Dartmouth is one of dozens of U.S. colleges and universities currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, which enforces guidelines that protect students from gender discrimination. The federal intervention, which was announced last summer, came shortly after more than three dozen Dartmouth students filed a complaint under the Clery Act, accusing the school of failing to report allegations of rape, sexual harassment and other crimes.
Struble says she decided to “re-engage” with campus affairs in 2012, after a lengthy article in Rolling Stone magazine shined a light on Dartmouth's alcohol-soaked fraternity scene, which several female students described as predatory and dangerous.
“When that story was published, I couldn’t pretend that nothing was happening, that the problems weren’t still there,” she says.
Infographic by Sara Plourde:
