About

I never anticipated becoming a Title IX Coordinator; it’s not a job that shows up at career fairs when you are in high school. Or college. Or in law school, at least not in 2004, the year I told my career counselors that I didn’t want to work in a firm or as a prosecutor but I’d like to do good and maybe work with young people yet be able to pay my bills as a single woman without a partner to help subsidize non-profit work. Their answer wasn’t, “Let me introduce you to education civil rights compliance.” It was more, “Lol good luck.” Actually, that was a pretty accurate foreshadowing of my job...

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I've been working in higher education for nearly twenty years, over half spent in sexual misconduct response and Title IX. I love Title IX work: it's my calling. And I'm good at it: in 2019, I was the first Title IX Coordinator to win the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s “Visionary Voice Award,” an honor recognizing the creativity and accomplishments of individuals around the country who have demonstrated outstanding work to end sexual violence. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really proud of that. But I’m even prouder that the Tulane student body named me Administrator of the Year in 2017, just eighteen months after I started at the school. (The award came with Mardi Gras beads; we are so on brand.) 

 

I have a unique expertise in using campus climate surveys, and it has set me apart from the usual Coordinator. After two full-time years at Dartmouth College, I reared back, shocked over how badly we had conceptualized campus sexual assault and wrote a graduate thesis that proposed a prevention- and remediation-focused approach to the issue, one that made me feel like I was the black sheep at every conference I attended. I was bucking the traditional Title IX Coordinator mold of a lawyer focused primarily on investigation and adjudication: for me, the emphasis is on preventing sexual assault and getting my university invested in this work. It’s how I’ve developed a national profile, participating in roundtables and working groups convened by the Department of Justice and the American Bar Association and conducting webinars teaching other Title IX professionals how to throw off the ridiculous punishment-focused standards and embrace a public health approach driven by data and research—while still being totally clumsy at math and science. But if this girl with dyscalculia can figure it out, there is no excuse for all of the smartypants Ivy League attorneys and governmental lawyers staffing the nation’s elite Title IX offices.

 

Even though I love being a Title IX Coordinator, after so long in the field, I burned out. And I'm ready to help more than just one school at a time. So I've left working for individual institutions to be a Senior Vice President at Rankin Climate, using data to construct effective, practical solutions for colleges to address the sexual misconduct in their community.

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There's no excuse to not do everything we can to end this epidemic of collegiate sexual misconduct. Let me partner with you--let's end sexual assault together.