There are many potential starting points in Kamala Harris’s origin story, but perhaps the most relatable begins in India with two parents huddled together deciding whether to send their daughter far off for college. Like any good Indian parents, Harris’s grandparents certainly would have asked, “Will our girl be safe in the United States?”

A federal lawsuit filed by an Indian student against the elite Carleton College in Minnesota suggests the answer is “no.” India is the largest single source of international students in the United States, sending 269,000 to American universities in the 2022/2023 academic year. Yet they are so frequently attacked, harassed or returned in body bags that the American ambassador needed to issue a rare public assurance that the US is a safe destination for higher studies.

A close examination of the lawsuit produces a surprising conclusion: If Harris’s mother were choosing colleges today, she might find greater protection for women in India than she would in Minnesota, where Harris’s running mate Tim Walz serves as governor.

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Indian society has significantly expanded legal protections for women during the past decade, replacing colonial-era laws. In contrast, until 2018, Minnesota did not classify grabbing a woman’s buttocks as sexual assault. The state has a deplorable track record of botched prosecutions and non-investigation of thousands of reported sexual assaults. There is little to suggest that this situation has improved during Walz’s term as governor, and he has not made student safety a priority in his current campaign.

What does the lawsuit say about Carleton?

The lawsuit against Carleton College shows how little Minnesota protects students against sexual assault by teachers. It alleges that Don Smith, a class of 2009 alumnus who served as Carleton’s assistant director for institutional research and assessment, used his position to comb through confidential student data to identify multiple students to prey on, including Doe.

While the college possesses a distinguished faculty ranked number one for undergraduate teaching nationally, Carleton promoted Smith as an award-winning competitive dancer and teacher even though he had no dance credentials. Smith was, however, a self-proclaimed sex worker and BDSM practitioner in an open marriage, allegedly with multiple partners amongst other Carleton employees.

Smith used dance classes as a pretext to beat, drug and choke Doe and pressure her for sex over many months. Although the dance department head witnessed one of the assaults and reported her concerns to the college, the college fired Smith only after Doe supplied multiple text messages where Smith admitted to the assaults. Rather than open a Title IX investigation as required by federal law, Carleton quietly let Smith go.

In a court filing, Carleton admits that Doe told a dean that she had been assaulted by a faculty member at his house. Carleton argues in court filings that it has no legal responsibility to investigate or support students in such circumstances.

Doe alleges that Carleton even attempted to force her out by failing to provide reasonable accommodations. Instead, the college stripped her of her academic major, placed her on multiple probations and then continued to harass her even after she met the college’s performance standards. Against these odds, Doe graduated.

Carleton has no record of the assault against Doe in any of the federally mandated records that are the primary source for students and parents to assess the safety of a college campus.

US higher education institutions are in trouble

Such safety concerns are critical to international students and their parents. Maintaining the flow of Indian students is increasingly vital to the survival of many US educational institutions, which are staring at a demographic dip in the domestic pool of college-bound students.

Carleton’s coverup and harassment of Doe follow a shockingly routine pattern that has played out at other elite institutions like Harvard and Stanford. Although as many as one out of four female college students in the US reports facing sexual assault, colleges have significant financial, reputational and legal incentives to underreport attacks that might impact enrolment or jeopardize alumni donations. In March, Liberty University paid an unprecedented $14-million fine for doctoring its campus crime log in a manner like Carleton. Despite its progressive posturing, Carleton College has decades of legal troubles and alumni complaints about mishandling sexual assaults.

In Doe’s case, Carleton does not dispute that Smith stalked and assaulted her. The college says that Minnesota law and public policy shield colleges and schools from liability for sexual assaults committed by a teacher. According to Carleton, Doe’s assault is not Carleton’s problem.

Carleton’s legal stance and its abusive treatment of Doe offer a sobering perspective on the realities of a US collegiate landscape that, despite Title IX and the #MeToo movement, remains unsafe for students. 

Doe is represented by Tamara Holder, a nationally renowned attorney specializing in sexual assault cases, and Paul Dworak, who represented the family of George Floyd, whose 2020 murder by police in Minnesota sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

Holder, who is also a survivor of a famous #MeToo case, has expressed shock that a leading college such as Carleton would have hired and promoted a sexual predator, hushed up an assault and silenced the victim. “I think that in this day and age, post-Larry Nassar, Boy Scouts, that this school should have done something and they didn’t,” Holder told a local reporter.

Carleton’s cover-up and failure to report the assaults alleged by Doe mean that prospective students would not have the means to discover the college’s safety problems.

India’s streets are regularly filled with cries for justice for sexual assault victims. But in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, there is only the silence of the snow-covered prairie.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.