Professor Michele Landis Dauber is featured in this Palo Alto Online article for a “one-of-a-kind” class she is teaching at Stanford on sexual assault. 

In 1979, a group of Stanford University students founded the Rape Education Project, working to promote awareness around and discussion of campus sexual assault. Over years of activism, they created an hour-long film called “Working Against Rape,” led discussions on sexual violence in dorms, held educational workshops, printed booklets, invited speakers, put together a two-week Rape Awareness Series that focused on acquaintance rape, and in 1988 conducted a 2,400-student study that found that one in three Stanford women and one in eight Stanford men reported having been pressured into having sex against their wills. The study led to the creation of the university’s first task force on sexual assault.

Again, in 2014, a group of students, led by a student survivor, rose up to advocate for better handling of sexual assault on campus. They called for reform through rallies, in meetings with administrators, on social media and in messages of protest scrawled in chalk on campus quads. Their clamor for change, too, helped spark the creation of another task force devoted to reviewing and reforming Stanford’s processes and procedures around sexual assault. This task force recently released a series of recommendations, most notable and radical among them a charge that the university make expulsion the “expected” consequence for any student found responsible for sexual assault.

Stanford Law School professor Michele Dauber — who has been Stanford’s most staunch and vocal advocate for sexual-assault reform for many years, helping to create the university’s dedicated process for adjudicating sexual-assault cases, supporting student survivors and serving as an oft-quoted expert on the topic in local and national media — is hoping that a one-of-a-kind class she’s teaching this month will help to continue this history of student activism by educating the next generation of student advocates on sexual-assault issues.

“One in Five: The Law, Policy, and Politics of Campus Sexual Assault” is a three-week, immersive class offered for the first time this year to rising sophomores as part of Stanford’s Sophomore College, a residential summer program during which groups of 12 to 15 students “engage in intense academic exploration,” the program’s website reads.

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“I thought it would be a great opportunity to do a lot of education with students who are at the beginning, basically, of their undergraduate careers at Stanford … so that they might form the core of students working on this issue over the next several years,” Dauber said in an interview with the Weekly.

The class is an all-encompassing, in-depth crash course on campus sexual assault for the 12 students enrolled, only two of whom are male. Dauber said that more than 50 students ranked “One in Five” as their top Sophomore College choice.

“That shows the need for education on this subject at Stanford,” she said. “To me, if there are that many students who would rank this as a high choice … we need to do more education with our freshmen.”