Why President Obama Won’t Be Visiting These College Campuses

Top government officials, including the president and the vice president, will no longer visit college campuses where they believe school leaders aren't doing enough to deal with sexual assault accusations, the White House told The Washington Post. Going further than withholding visits, Vice President Joe Biden added that he would like the government to “take away their money” if a college or university failed to fully investigate and pursue allegations of sexual assault. How exactly the institutions on this “no-go” list will be decided remains unclear. Right now, the Department of Education has 253 ongoing investigations across 198 colleges over their handling of sexual assault cases, The Post reports. The announcement comes after years of pressure from Biden, who has spoken about the issue since as early as 1994 when Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. But the approaching end of the Obama/Biden presidency has focused urgency on the issue, according to The Post. “It’s time to put the pedal to the metal,” Biden said. Just last month Biden wrote a powerful letter of support to a Stanford sexual assault survivor whose attacker's sentence of just six months in a county jail caused nationwide outrage.

In it he wrote, “You were failed by a culture on our college campuses where 1 in 5 women is sexually assaulted — year after year after year…And you were failed by anyone who dared to question this one clear and simple truth: Sex without consent is rape. Period. It is a crime.” High-profile cases of sexual assault — including the Stanford sentencing, and this year's conviction of former Vanderbilt football player Brandon Vandenburg for rape and sexual battery regarding a 2013 incident — have pushed campus sexual assault to the forefront of the national conversation.