Emerson president: No more la-di-da approach to rape allegations

Emerson President Lee Pelton said today the college can and will do more to combat sexual assault on campus, after Huffington Post reported on a complaint alleging the college responded slowly, if at all, to students reporting sexual assaults.

In a long letter to the Emerson community, Pelton said the college will hire an advocate for sexual-assault victims and will have an independent study conducted of its response to sexual assault. He added:

I want to be in conversation with you as soon as possible about how we might renew with purpose our commitment to live up to the important values that undergird our community. The sexual assault issues that I wrote about to you last spring as well as incidents of racist, anti-Semitic and discriminatory speech written on the walls of various places on campus are corrosive. They do great violence to our educational community.