President Obama and top administration officials will reportedly no longer visit universities whose leaders they consider “insufficiently serious” about sexual assault on campus.
The president, the vice president, their wives and other members of the Cabinet will not visit institutions that fail to pursue sexual-assault allegations or punish perpetrators, officials told The Washington Post in a report published Sunday.
Vice President Joe Biden said he would like the federal government to “take away their money” if a college fails to change its ways, the Post reported.
His comment comes almost one month after he wrote an open letter to a survivor of sexual assault at Stanford University.
“I am in awe of your courage for speaking out — for so clearly naming the wrongs that were done to you and so passionately asserting your equal claim to human dignity,” the vice president wrote. “And I am filled with furious anger — both that this happened to you and that our culture is still so broken that you were ever put in the position of defending your own worth.”
Mr. Biden told the Post that the issue of campus sexual assault has always been important to him. He said he spoke to Mr. Obama before they won the White House in 2008 and requested a staff to work on violence against women, the Post reported.
“He said, ’Okay.’ He knew how strongly I felt about it,” Mr. Biden said, adding that over time Mr. Obama focused more attention on the issue, the Post reported.
“He always thought it was an awful abuse of power. But as his daughters grew, he became more explicitly focused on it,” Mr. Biden said.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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