Addressing sexual and gender-based harm on campus and walking the path toward healing with students.
Marti McCaleb is Associate Vice Chancellor for Equal Opportunity and Title IX Coordinator at the University of Denver, where she is responsible for the university's response to reports of discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence. In her role, she develops and administers policies and procedures and supervises investigations into incidents of alleged misconduct. She is actively working to build sustainable, restorative-informed practices for community building, campus engagement, and response and reconciliation in the aftermath of gender-based harm.
Q: What brought you to the IIRP as a student?
A: I had been facilitating restorative justice conferences for several years and was really interested in building a stronger understanding of the theory and philosophies that underline this work. As I began exploring programs that would help me go beyond the basic skills of facilitation, I fell in love with the IIRP's holistic approach and decided to pursue a master’s degree.
Q: Please tell us about your professional work now. What makes you passionate about it?
A: I'm a recovering attorney working in higher education, overseeing my university's response to reports of discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence. For much of my career, federal law restricted our ability to incorporate restorative practices into our response to reports of misconduct. For years, my hands were tied when survivors of sexual assault asked me for some path to accountability that didn't require a six-month investigation and hearing process. Over the past four years, federal regulations have loosened, giving us much more discretion to work with those impacted by misconduct to design a process that meets their needs. The results of my restorative-informed resolutions, as compared to the more standard investigative response, are overwhelmingly positive. It's a daily motivator for me to keep doing this work, to keep offering opportunities for a different path to accountability and healing.
Q: What do you see as the future of this work?
A: The growth of restorative practices in university disciplinary processes over the past five years is staggering. In 2019, there were only a handful of colleges and universities offering restorative-informed processes for responding to incidents of sexual misconduct. Now, the U.S. government’s Office of Violence Against Women offers annual grant funding for schools to develop restorative justice programs, and it seems like every couple of months another school reaches out through one professional network or another, trying to figure out where to begin. I don't think we'll ever eliminate the use of punitive disciplinary models completely, but the progress we've made in a relatively short period is remarkable and I think the growth is likely to continue rapidly as our students become more vocally critical of the quasi-criminal approach to student conduct issues.
