When efforts to resolve a federal investigation into how the University of Virginia handled reports of sexual violence began in earnest last spring, campus officials were corresponding with a lawyer in a U.S. Department of Education field office. By the time the case was resolved in September, tense legal wrangling had reached the highest levels of the university, the state, and the federal agency.
A trove of nearly 2,000 pages of communication obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows an increasingly torturous set of negotiations, with UVa steadily ratcheting up the pressure on the department’s Office for Civil Rights to soften findings that the university had a sexually hostile environment.
The talks between federal and campus officials stalled and resumed as the two sides swapped documents back and forth, fine-tuning the settlement in line with their respective interests: strict enforcement for the agency and, for the university, acknowledgment that it had taken positive steps. At times they would "look forward to resolving this review collaboratively" (UVa) or express gratitude for "moving us forward so productively" (OCR), and then they would snipe at each other.
A resolution almost didn’t come, but finally, after a flurry of emails and a telephone call late one Saturday night between UVa’s lawyers and Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights, the two sides reached a finely parsed, fragile agreement. A negotiated "joint positive press release" projected collaboration. But the détente would last all of one day before differing interpretations of the agreement descended into bickering.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/What-It-Took-to-Resolve-a/235586