Colleges and Universities Join With the National Academies to Combat Sexual Harassment in Higher Education

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have joined with over 40 colleges, universities, and research institutions to launch an Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. The initiative is designed to be an active space where colleges, universities, and research and training organizations can research and develop efforts that move beyond basic legal compliance to evidence-based policies and practices for addressing and preventing all forms of sexual harassment.

The four main goals of the action collaborative are to:

* Raise awareness about sexual harassment and how it occurs, the consequences of sexual harassment, and the organizational characteristics and recommended approaches that can prevent it;
* Share and elevate evidence-based institutional policies and strategies to reduce and prevent sexual harassment;
* Contribute to setting the research agenda, and gather and apply research results across institutions; and
* Develop a standard for measuring progress toward reducing and preventing sexual harassment in higher education.

“It’s exciting to see academic institutions come together to address sexual harassment in a collective, structural approach to ending long-standing patterns of discrimination,” said Elizabeth Hillman, president of Mills College, a member of the action collaborative’s leadership group.

The educational institutions that are members of the collaborative are listed below.

American University in Cairo
Argonne National Laboratory
Boston University
California Institute of Technology
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Colorado College
Columbia University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
Los Angeles Community College District
Michigan State University
Mills College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Northwestern University
Olin College of Engineering
Rutgers University
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Merced
University of California, Riverside
University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Francisco
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
University of Kansas
University of Maryland Medical School
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin System
University of Southern California
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Wellesley College
Yale University