Professor Michele Dauber comments on the possibility for improvements to policy regarding sexual assault on college campuses for The New York Times.

The bipartisan sponsors of the campus sexual assault bill introduced this week say they are proud of the “stiff fines and real teeth” they would impose on colleges that underreport assaults. But there is a weakness in the legislation that makes the prospect of fines somewhat illusory: a lack of funding to hire more investigators.

Instead, the real power of the bill would most likely come from a provision that calls for a public database of campus assaults — with information provided by students, not administrators, through a survey. Revealing those results would amount to a public shaming that would capitalize on outrage over recent studies showing that about 1 in 5 undergraduate women are sexually assaulted while on campus.

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“Title IX can’t have teeth when the O.C.R. is not making reports fast enough, is dramatically underfunded, and is not getting things done,” said Michele Dauber, a law professor at Stanford, where she helped develop the university’s Alternative Review Process, a disciplinary procedure established at Stanford in 2013 to address sexual assault, relationship violence and stalking.

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Ms. Dauber says transparency is the single most important change that Congress could bring about. “Absent transparency, we don’t know what problem we are trying to solve and we have no idea how to solve it,” she said. “We are just fumbling around in the dark. When you want to change, you take an honest inventory of your situation.”