How Harvard Killed Its Best Title IX Resource

“You are not alone” reads a sticker stuck on the door of the Lamont Library bathroom stall. At first glance, the purple rectangle offers a helpful list of resources for people who have experienced sexual assault, with phone numbers for Harvard University Health Services, peer counseling, and Harvard University Police.

There’s only one problem: The first organization, the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, no longer exists.

Three years ago, then-Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 announced the merger of Title IX and OSAPR into the Office for Gender Equity, which comprises Title IX and a new, confidential resource called Sexual Harassment/Assault Resource Education, or SHARE.

However, prior to this system most undergrads now know, there was OSAPR, an office independent from the legal proceedings of Title IX that provided confidential advocacy, support, and counseling for survivors of sexual assault.

In the alphabet soup of Harvard offices, the change from OSAPR to OGE may seem inconsequential, but the gutting of OSAPR was not just another administrative consolidation — it meant the loss of perhaps the best-known, most-trusted resource for survivors on Harvard’s campus.

The end of OSAPR marked a key shift in Harvard’s sexual assault response strategy with profound — though little-known — consequences for a campus that has struggled to reckon with its rape culture.

OGE declined a request for comment on criticisms raised in this article.

‘They Put the Students First’

Harvard College created the Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response in 2003 to provide education and support services to students across the College. In 2010, its services were expanded to the entire University.

In addition to providing direct support to survivors, OSAPR embraced a “community engagement” model under the tenure of former Director Pierre R. Berastaín ’10, who headed the office from 2018 to 2020.

From the annual Denim Day, which garnered as many as 1,000 attendees, to a candlelight vigil dubbed “Take Back the Night,” to self-care events in the upperclassman Houses, the office worked directly with students to shift campus culture and raise awareness about sexual violence and consent.

Getting out of the office and into student spaces created a “low-risk, more accessible context” for students to access services, according to Berastaín.

OSAPR also provided advice and support to student groups like the Harvard Feminist Coalition, formerly known as Our Harvard Can Do Better, an anti-sexual assault advocacy organization for which I am an organizer.

Harvard Feminist Coalition organizer Sanika S. Mahajan ’21 put it simply: “OSAPR was probably one of the only spaces on campus that we felt we could go for open conversation about campus culture around sexual violence.”

The numbers speak for themselves. Under this community engagement model, OSAPR saw a 390 percent increase in walk-ins and a 415 percent increase in hotline calls, according to Berastaín.

Osiris Rankin served for three years as a Consent Advocacy and Relationship Education tutor, a position supervised by OSAPR. Rankin wrote in an email that what made OSAPR unique was “the people and the trust they earned.”

“In my time as a tutor, I often tried to evaluate whether the people I interacted with seemed to be putting the students first or Harvard first,” Rankin said.

“To me, it felt like they put the students first.”

OSAPR's annual 'Denim Day' event aimed to show solidarity for victims of sexual assault and saw thousands of students participate. By Sharleen Y. Loh

Starting from Scratch

Despite OSAPR’s successful model, in March 2021, the University decided to shut it down.

To explain the decision, Garber and University Title IX Coordinator Nicole M. Merhill pointed to a 2019 campus survey and the results of an external review earlier that year as evidence of the need to “streamline our resources,” and expand prevention resources. A University spokesperson at the time added that the change sought to “improve upon community knowledge of the resources and services available.”

If these were the problems, dissolving OSAPR — almost universally known by students and expressly dedicated to prevention — was not a solution.

The external review does not even mention OSAPR, and the campus climate survey Garber and Merhill cited shows widespread familiarity with the office. Additionally, the decentralization problem highlighted by Garber and Merhill concerned personnel filing issues hardly related to OSAPR.

In fact, instead of improving available resources and student awareness, the merger seems to have had the opposite effect.

According to William M. Sutton ’23, an organizer with the Harvard Feminist Coalition at the time of the merger, the transition “cleared house.”

“There was really no passage of institutional knowledge between SHARE and OSAPR,” said Sutton.

Only one staff member moved from OSAPR to its successor office, SHARE, a new hire still unfamiliar with OSAPR’s practices, according to two people familiar with the transition and public directory pages. Practically no documents were left behind, according to another source.

OGE seems to have expected as much. In interviews of candidates for the new office, former Harvard Graduate Student Union Vice President Marisa J. Borreggine recalls interviewees being told to “expect a start-up culture at SHARE.”

Associate Director of SHARE Greta Spoering explained that “building up the trust within the community is something that takes time” and something that they are “still doing.”

She’s right. It does. And yet, in one fell swoop, the University erased OSAPR’s 18 years of progress, leaving SHARE to start from nothing.

‘Things Just Got Worse from There’

Much of the community trust and relationships OSAPR had built were lost with the office.

Bailey A. Plaman, President of the HGSU, recalled SHARE’s lack of bandwidth to get started on prevention efforts in its early days “because the two people that had been hired were so overburdened” with hiring new staff.

SHARE “just didn’t have the people to be able to get things off the ground,” they continued.

In the first year after its closure, Sutton, the Harvard Feminist Coalition organizer, explained that student activists’ had trouble building a relationship with SHARE.

“They’re creating a new office,” he said, “and they’re creating it under the watchful eye of an administrator who also has allegiance to the Title IX side of things.”

“When that office was moved, we lost a lot of our ability to trust that openly, and we lost people who were on our side,” Sutton added.

With SHARE focused on starting from square one, OSAPR’s community initiatives appear to have fallen by the wayside. Since the merger, there have not been Denim Day, Take Back the Night, or other community initiatives.

Also unlike SHARE, OSAPR actively supported student activism against sexual assault.

OSAPR set up booths with snacks and pamphlets at protests opposing rape culture. When Winthrop House Faculty Dean Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. decided to represent Harvey Weinstein, OSAPR issued a statement supporting dismayed students.

SHARE, on the other hand, has been uninvolved in protests against professor John L. Comaroff, who is accused of sexual harassment by multiple graduate students.

When I worked with other students to organize a walkout, rally, and occupation last year, SHARE was nowhere to be found. The closest thing to a statement from SHARE was OGE’s director criticizing a lawsuit from three of Comaroff’s accusers for discouraging people from using the system.

OSAPR’s undergraduate peer educators, who planned much of the office’s community programming, were also lost during the merger, consolidated into Wellness Educators, an HUHS program that promotes healthy lifestyle practices. (Their Instagram features, among other things, facts on nutrition and applying sunscreen — hardly anything to be seen on sexual assault.)

Without community events and initiatives, sexual assault resource offices struggle to change culture or make students aware of their resources.

“Public presence is really important for survivors to feel comfortable coming in and sharing this incredibly personal thing with their school,” said Dr. Nicole Berdera, a sexual violence researcher.

It is telling that OSAPR’s name remains on stickers in bathroom stalls and the resource pages of several house sites, including Leverett, Eliot, Pfoho, Quincy, and Currier: SHARE has not yet filled the vacuum.

‘Title IX Advocacy is a Very Small Part of What They Do’

Among students who are aware of SHARE, some remain hesitant to access its services.

The new structure, which houses SHARE under the same organizational umbrella as Title IX, can leave students unsure about how separate the two offices are.

Students are not always sure of “what’s a confidential resource versus not,” said Anushka Patel, a CARE tutor.

This lack of clarity can lead students to avoid SHARE out of fear that going to it will automatically trigger a Title IX complaint, as is the case for many other University employees.

The OGE website does little to resolve this confusion. SHARE and Title IX staff are listed on the same page, and the site does not make clear the divisions between or confidentiality of OGE’s three entities.

Concerns about OGE’s merged structure go deeper than appearances.

SHARE — and all of OGE — is under the purview of the University Title IX Coordinator, raising concerns about its ability to function as an independent student advocate, like OSAPR did.

According to Berdera, if survivor advocates aren’t independent, “they can’t do their jobs.”

“The closer they are to campus organizations like Title IX, with competing interests,” she explained, “the less they can work well.”

In other words, even with strict safeguards in place, staff in one office might tread carefully to maintain collegiality with another or out of fear of consequences from higher-ups.

In the transition to SHARE, Borreggine, former Vice President of the Union, felt that the responsibility to advocate for survivors was “shifted onto students.” In fact, in President Garber’s 2021 statement about the merger, advocacy was not even listed among the functions of the newly-created OGE.

Before its dissolution, OSAPR hosted well attended annual events, like a 'Take Back the Night' vigil, which encouraged students to reflect upon sexual assault and rape culture on campus. By Jiho Kang

Several survivors described feeling that SHARE focused more on counseling than advocacy.

One student who sought out SHARE’s services after being referred by a union representative told me “it didn’t really seem like they were really anything more than a therapy team.”

In her first meeting, she said she was told by her SHARE counselor that there was not much SHARE could do for her.

“Frankly, I’m not sure how much bite this office really has,” she added.

Another student told me she felt her counselor provided helpful support as she navigated seeking a no-contact order. Still, she added that it felt like most of what SHARE does is counseling.

“Title IX advocacy is a very small part of what they do,” she said.

How We Can Do Better

With the closure of OSAPR, we lost a trusted, well-known resource actively involved in the Harvard community.

While Garber and Merhill purported that the purpose of the merger was to expand resources and increase awareness, the move has instead crippled the progress of sexual assault response and prevention on campus, leaving SHARE to start from nothing.

Harvard must re-establish an office fully independent from Title IX to regain the trust of survivors and the campus community alike. At the very least, OGE should provide further clarity and transparency about the separation of its offices and their respective confidentiality levels.

SHARE must also designate specific “survivor advocate” positions, in addition to its team of counselors, to guarantee that advocacy for the survivors’ best interest stands at the heart of its work.

Finally, the office must restore OSAPR’s community engagement ethos, fostering relationships with student organizations, coordinating advocacy and awareness events, and reestablishing the CAARE peer educator group.

Bringing back the annual Take Back the Night and Denim Day events, for instance, will return the crisis of sexual assault to the forefront of the Harvard community’s mind, promoting awareness of sexual assault resources and de-stigmatizing conversations about sexual violence.

Killing OSAPR was a mistake. But it does not have to be the last word.

By returning to OSAPR’s strengths, Harvard can set itself on a path to fighting the epidemic of sexual assault with the care and urgency it requires.

Rachael A. Dziaba ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House and an organizer for the Harvard Feminist Coalition. Her column, "A Broken System," runs tri-weekly on Fridays.