UPDATED: Oct. 28, 2019 at 8:15 p.m.

At least 40 students were expelled or suspended from Syracuse University for alleged sexual misconduct over a recent four-year span, according to a once-confidential list of formal Code of Student Conduct complaints.

The list of complaints was made public in federal court last week as part of an ongoing Title IX lawsuit against the university. The document provides an unprecedented look into how SU adjudicates cases of alleged sexual misconduct and sanctions accused students. It also details Code of Student Conduct data that is typically not released to the public.

According to the list, there were 76 formal student conduct complaints alleging sexual misconduct filed from the start of the 2013-14 academic year to the end of the 2016-17 academic year at SU. (The Daily Orange only factored 71 of the complaints into its analysis for this article. See the above-referenced methodology.)

Aside from the number of expulsions and suspensions, The D.O.’s analysis of the document also concluded that:

• About 87.5% of the students that faced complaints at that time were found fully or partially responsible for the conduct violations that they had been accused of.

• Roughly half of the complaints were specifically filed over allegations of sexual assault.

• Twenty-one students received sanctions of disciplinary probation or disciplinary reprimand after facing a sexual misconduct-related complaint. They were not suspended or expelled in these cases.

Talia Trackim | Presentation Director

Responding to questions about the list, a university spokesperson said in an email on Monday that SU does not comment on pending litigation or “discuss documents filed as part of legal cases.”

To better contextualize the data, The D.O. asked two independent experts to review it. W. Scott Lewis, a co-founder and advisory board member of the Association for Title IX Administrators, said it’s hard to establish any trends in the data.

“There’s too much left to reading between the lines,” said Lewis, who is also a partner at the NCHERM Group, a risk management consulting firm that specializes in education policy.

There’s a myriad of unknown facts in each individual case on the list, he said. (The document only contains aggregate statistics. It does not include personally identifiable information.)

An Ohio-based attorney submitted the list as evidence to a federal judge on Oct. 7 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York.

The attorney is representing a former SU student who is suing the university. The student is only referred to as “John Doe” in court documents. Doe alleges that he was unfairly expelled from SU in early 2017 after a woman accused him of sexual assault. She is referred to as “Jane Roe” in the lawsuit.

SU created the list of formal sexual misconduct-related complaints in response to a discovery request from Doe’s attorney, Joshua Engel. In court, Engel said he was seeking more data on the complaints to help build his case.

Talia Trackim | Presentation Director

The list includes 15 fields of information. The D.O.’s analysis of those fields shows that:

• From 2013-14 to 2016-17, a total of 65 formal sexual misconduct-related complaints were filed at SU over alleged sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual violence, dating violence and domestic violence.

• Forty-five students were found fully or partially responsible for conduct violations after a sexual assault- or sexual harassment-specific complaint was filed against them.

• Nine students were found fully not responsible of alleged conduct violations.

• Almost all of the complaints were filed by women against men. There were only two cases in which a man filed a complaint against a woman. In two other cases, a man filed a complaint against another man. Five women filed complaints against other women.

Elizabeth Jeglic, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who reviewed the data, wasn’t surprised by most of the information included on the list. The majority of sexual abuse is perpetrated by men on women, she said in an email, so the number of complaints filed by women at SU is not irregular.

Jeglic, an expert on sexual violence, did say the percent of students who were found fully or partially “responsible” for conduct violations stood out to her.

“This is probably a result of the fact that under Title IX it is the preponderance of evidence (standard),” she said.

Talia Trackim | Presentation Director

But both she and Lewis stressed that it is important to note that sexual assault and forms of sexual misconduct are some of the most underreported crimes on college campuses in the United States.

Jeglic said the list likely represents just a snapshot of the true number of sexual assaults that occur at SU. Lewis agreed and pointed to the university’s Survey on Sexual and Relationship Violence, which was published this past spring. The survey was only open to input in April 2018.

In the poll, about 23% of respondents said they had experienced sexual contact without their consent since coming to SU. But about 95% of respondents who said they had been sexually assaulted did not file a report with the university, according to the poll. Almost all other respondents who said they had experienced sexual harassment, dating violence or stalking did not file a report.

That 95% figure is “really high” for a school of SU’s size, Lewis said.

“‘Wow, what can I be doing to decrease that number?’” he said. “That’s the real question for SU.”

— News Editor Casey Darnell contributed reporting to this article.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the number of cases in which a formal sexual misconduct complaint was filed by a man against a woman, according to the Code of Student Conduct complaints list, was misstated. There were two cases, not one. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on October 16, 2019 at 10:06 pm

Contact Sam: sfogozal@syr.edu | @SamOgozalek