Hilltop Views reporters Raveena Devjee and Nicole Williams-Quezada sat down with Lisa Kirkpatrick, St. Edward’s University Vice President for Student Affairs and Administration, Erika Zamora, director of the Office of Student Belonging and Inclusive Excellence and Gwen Schuler, senior director of content and communications, for a wide-ranging discussion about issues facing the university as President Donald Trump’s administration moves to enforce its interpretation of Title IX and implement new immigration policies. What follows is a Q&A from that discussion, edited for clarity.
Schuler kicked off the discussion with a focus on Title IX. Kirkpatrick repeatedly urged students to complete the St. Edward’s University Sexual Assault Campus Climate Survey that was emailed on Feb. 18. More information about Title IX resources can be found here.
Kirkpatrick: …we have a mission statement and it’s informed by the values of Holy Cross, and I feel very blessed about that because that’s where we come from first. So, then when you look at the Title IX regulations,… because we’re in Texas, there was already an injunction filed against the 2024 Title IX regs…. So, we’re still operating under the 2020 regulations….we continue to use that policy in order to respond to any Title IX complaints.
[The 2020 Title IX regulations were issued during Trump’s first term. Republican attorneys general successfully challenged former President Biden’s 2024 Title IX regulations, which were more expansive, in federal court. The U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter in January guiding campuses to follow the 2020 regs]
…. So, with Title IX, I feel like we have really solid infrastructure here. We have a campus-wide committee with faculty, staff and students on it. We have a student Title IX advisory board. We have It’s On Us, which is advised now by Erica [Zamora]. We have three deputies across campus, which is more than most schools our size. We have pretty solid infrastructure in place. There’s lots more that you could always say about issues of sexual harassment, sex and gender discrimination, sexual assault.
Devjee: We’re still on the 2020 regulations and we can’t move forward into the 2024 regulations. Obviously a lot can change in four years and things in society change a lot. So, is there anybody on the St. Ed’s campus that you feel is not going to be as protected, or I guess, will people still be as safe as you think they will? Or is that what that survey is, for you to know that?
Kirkpatrick: Are we still going to make sure that our broader policies speak to all of the experiences in between, right? Yes …. We are here to support and care for and educate around all of those issues. In all of the Title IX presentations and trainings that we do, there’s a slide where I say, “Even if it doesn’t fit the standard of Title IX, that doesn’t mean we can’t address the behavior of concern and that we are about education and support and helping hold people to account for inappropriate behavior.” So, what I don’t want to do is accidentally send a false message that this university is not prepared to address concerns that might not fall under Title IX. And that’s why when the 2020 [regulations] went into place, we said, even if Title IX does not address the behavior of concern, because it doesn’t fall within the definition, we have policies at our campus that are informed by our mission that help us hold people to account and educate and build a safe and respectful community.
[Devjee turns the discussion to the immigration “toolkit” prepared by university administration to give guidance to students, faculty and staff about questions regarding Trump’s immigration policies, including the detention of undocumented people. The toolkit is available on myHilltop.]
Zamora: Lots of people are reviewing it. We have a lot, I mean, we have a lot of institutional knowledge, campus knowledge, but also City of Austin knowledge, the amount of our faculty and staff members that have connections of knowing places where people can get resources. So, we sent it to a couple people. Now it’s getting sent to everyone, which is awesome.
Kirkpatrick: So, since 2017, we’ve had a work group on this campus that has worked behind the scenes to make sure that we have coordinated care and support for undocumented students, students with DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] and students coming from mixed status households. More recently, we’ve chosen to reframe that and say, this is really about more than our undocumented community, and it’s more than just students, that this is more about immigration because of what’s happening in the federal landscape, really the international landscape. And it’s also about our faculty and staff here as well. So, this workgroup [chaired by Kirkpatrick] has faculty, staff and students on it. Different years, different periods, different circumstances. We’ve met at a different cadence now. We meet monthly. We also have an immigration attorney from Catholic Charities. He’s been a part of the team really since its inception, and we use that as our core working group, as the federal and state landscape shifts. We have another member in our community who follows all of the government and nonprofit activity in Texas and nationally. And so, she advises the group and…
Zamora: Connects us.
Kirkpatrick: And really connects us to whatever resources and changes and good information that we need. And so, it’s about a coordination of care approach … It’s always about the standard of care and rooted in our mission, our value of respecting the dignity of each person and creating that loving, caring, safe, respectful environment where people can learn. Because if it’s not all those things, people can’t learn. And we’re, at the end of the day, a Catholic higher education learning environment.
Williams: Can you outline if there is a specific university protocol if faculty, staff or students would be approached by ICE on campus?
[Discussion of the toolkit for these issues].
Zamora: Our police chief came to student organization training just to let people know, too, and get this, just so people had a face also. And the way that some language that he said that was helpful was just [to] let them know our liaison for any external agencies is University Police Department, and that is all you got to do.
Williams: Is there any reasoning behind sending people to UPD as the frontline?
Kirkpatrick: Yes. Any law enforcement agency that comes to campus can have a lot of different types of documents. People are not trained to understand what those documents are requesting, what the process is for releasing data or information or even if it’s required. So, it’s important. We’ve had this protocol in place for years. This is nothing new. The difference I think, is because now people are paying attention and they’re concerned, and because the government has been talking a lot about it. It’s important that our law enforcement agency apply its knowledge of what kinds of documents are being presented by other law enforcement agencies. And we also have a concern for our community that we keep this a safe and respectful place.
Williams: Has UPD had any specialized training on handling immigration enforcement situations? To your knowledge.
Kirkpatrick: You need to talk to [University Police] Chief [Homer] Huerta about that. I mean, the training that we do as a campus community is with our crisis management team, and that includes the police department as well as different leaders on campus to talk about how we work together. So, we have a coordinated approach…
Williams: This toolkit is obviously a really helpful resource for everyone across campus. And I know there’s been different [Know] Your Rights events by student [orgs] and led by faculty and staff. But has there been, I don’t know, a clear communication email correspondence across campus to staff and faculty about instruction?
Kirkpatrick: We want to support and care for our community. We also have to follow the law. There’s so much changing so rapidly right now, we’re being really careful to not mislead or confuse people, which is why under honest guidance, we’ve created this webpage that is starting right on the news page to say, when these things come out at the government level, here’s what the university has to say about it. But if you want more detail, we’re telling you all on campus how to get to that. In myHilltop, we’re trying to train everybody to go in there.
Zamora: For example, with Catholic Charities of Central Texas, we have a fund that St. Edward’s students can access to help with some of the legal fees. And there are some stipulations and they have that, but that is not open to everyone. That is a student thing. And so that’s something that we would want to keep there because they don’t disclose to us who is doing it, of course, because [of] privacy. But we wouldn’t want that information. That information is for our community.
[The conversation turned to the question of whether or not the university tracks the immigration status of students.]
Zamora: There’s not a university marker that exists that says, “This person is DACA or undocumented.”
Kirkpatrick: [Kirkpatrick went on to reference FERPA, the Federal Education Reporting and Privacy Act] …. You all have heard of FERPA that protects all student records, and there is a process for the release of any student records, whether that’s the student asking us to release it or a third party. And, so, we would stick to our process. It’s no different than any other student record.”
Kirkpatrick: Can I just say, with issues of immigration right now, we’ll continue to monitor very closely and figure out what else. This is not static. There may be new needs that come forward. We were just talking about the Hoof Fund, which is our emergency aid fund for students. If we have students on our campus who are starting to need more emergency aid, are we prepared? Is our food pantry prepared? If families are disrupted in some capacity and students’ ability to take care of themselves changes, are we ready? And so, this work group around immigration, not just undocumented, but around serving our community around issues of immigration right now, that’s an ever-changing dynamic situation. And we’ll continue to monitor and make changes as we need to. I just think that’s important to know.
[The conversation turned to the impact of the so-called Dear Colleague letter sent to educational institutions from the Department of Education on Feb. 14.]
Williams: I was going to ask if you could even discuss any potential impact on, for example, certain graduations like Black graduation or Latino graduation or Lavender graduation.
Zamora: So, when people say identity graduations, they’re not (official) graduations. That’s colloquially what they’re called. They’re not an academic ceremony. They are just, they’re like senior celebrations and they’re put on by the student organizations that it corresponds with. So those are student organization events celebrating senior students who identify in that way, but they would be open to anyone.
