HWS used to be at the top of my list but after finding the NYT article on how they handled a rape case I’m not so sure… Can anyone give me any insight on if football players/fraternity members or given preferential treatment? Is sexual assault common on campus? Is a similar story likely to occur again or has HWS changed its ways?
I have the same issues. My son is interested, but it sounds like a frat-boy jock school. Why nothing on this forum?
The school did a good job handling the aftermath of the article. There is now a Title IX office that runs required programming on sexual assault education. I’ve only heard of one incident where a student was accused of rape while I was here. The school has been coming down hard on the frats while I have been here.
Like any college, your experience is really based on what you make of it, and depends on who you surround yourself with. If your into partying/drinking there defiantly a scene for that. But there is also a very active social justice scene on campus that many students partake in, as well as clubs and other student activities. (I believe we have a nationally ranked debate team)
"The school did a good job handling the aftermath of the article. "
Really? The President and the Chair of the Board of Trustees both went on record after the New York Times article(s) to assert that HWS followed all of their processes and reached the appropriate outcome after the rape was reported. They even bragged that their own consultant investigated the case and determined that they had not done anything wrong.
“I’ve only heard of one incident where a student was accused of rape while I was here.”
After what happened to the student who’s rape was described in the New York Times, would you accuse a fellow student of rape if it happened to you?
My child graduated in 2017 from HWS and the incident you speak of happened at the beginning of freshman year. From that point on the school increased their vigilance and student education around this issue. There were marches, speeches, and fundraisers to increase awareness of this problem across all college campuses. This was the year that a similar story at seemingly every school in the country was uncovered and put college campus rape issues at forefront of the news, at it rightly should be. My child went on the next four years with no further issues of the like (to my knowledge) and reporting of any type of sexual assault/harassment was strongly encouraged by the administration. HWS is a small liberal arts school in a beautiful setting in the Finger Lakes region. My child had a good experience - traveling abroad, participating in field research, working closely with caring professors, presenting research at conferences, and graduating with honors. Close friends were made without participating in frat culture. As we all know, college experience is what you choose to make of it. Every school has issues and it would be naive to think they will be handled exactly the way you want them to/should be handled. Hindsight is 20/20 and schools often don’t have the proper policies in place until they need to respond and react to a crisis. If you judge a college administration or school population by specific incidents, you will be left with very few choices. I haven’t come across a single university in this country where someone won’t have something bad to say about it…
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Here is HWS’s annual Clery report. This report shows crime statistics across several categories over the last 3 years, starting on p. 48. https://www.hws.edu/studentlife/pdf/living_safely.pdf
In order to compare data across schools, one would need to convert the number of crimes to a crime rate, e.g., rate per student or per 1,000 students
Lastly, there can be variability across colleges as to how these numbers are reported, e.g., colleges with a significant portion of off-campus students may not reflect all off-campus crime, campus disincentives for rape victims to come forward, etc.
HWS is not a “frat boy party school”. Yes there are fraternities ( a few that do not dominate the social scene). The college scene the above posters are worried about is much more common at larger schools. Think SEC.
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Right, look for current info. A few years ago, there were problems among a wide swath of colleges, lots of chat here on CC, many mistakes made by colleges. The issue for you isn’t the past.
And there is hardly any college that won’t have occasional issues. Some mighty prominent colleges, included. Go visit, spend night on campus, talk to students.
I know gals who graduated, loved their experiences. My own D1 applied, was admitted, but chose another. What matters is your fit, academically and socially, how you can thrive and grow empowered. Hope you looked at that, too.
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