The Daily would like to thank Title IX Coordinator and Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) Director Jill Zellmer and Dean of Student Affairs for AS&E Mary Pat McMahon for their clarifications on last week's editorial about Judicial Affairs Officer Mickey Toogood. Many of the corrections pointed out were warranted, as the editorial was quite brief and lacked many important details that should be available to the Tufts community. Additionally, we see this exchange as a valuable opportunity for dialogue on Tufts' handling of issues involving sexual misconduct, both in the present and moving forward.
However, we would also like to make additional clarifications. According to yesterday's letter to the editor, we stated incorrectly that sexual misconduct is processed and adjudicated within the Student Judicial Process. In fact, we wrote that Toogood will be updating the Student Judicial Process, and in doing so, will have a potential opportunity to influence how sexual harassment cases are processed. While cases of sexual misconduct are processed through the OEO, we still believe that the updates to the Student Judicial Process have the ability to reflect a commitment to reducing cases of sexual misconduct, even if the Judicial Process is not involved now.
Also, the letter to the editor states that we wrote that the Judicial Affairs Officer handles sexual misconduct cases rather than the OEO when in reality, we stated that both offices play a part. The letter later confirmed this when the authors stated that the Judicial Affairs Officer is involved in administering requests for OEO reports.
We are glad that factual details are being discussed here and that we are being held to a high standard of accuracy. However, we stand by the original message of our editorial and hope that it will not be obscured by semantic distinctions. The message that our editorial hoped to get across is that we as Tufts students also hold all the administrators involved in dealing with sexual misconduct to a high standard of accountability. We expect and hope that our new Judicial Affairs Officer will take issues of sexual misconduct seriously, including supporting victims and appropriately dealing with perpetrators, throughout his evaluation of the Student Judicial Process and in his interactions with the OEO.
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