This project on publishing innovative policies to prevent the "pass the harasser" problem operates under the Response Theme Area of the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. The Action Collaborative brings together academic and research institutions and key stakeholders to work toward targeted, collective action on addressing and preventing sexual harassment across all disciplines and among all people in higher education. To contribute to efforts on improving how higher education responds to cases of sexual harassment, this project has collected and published information on policies developed by universities/organizations to prevent the “pass the harasser” problem in order to share them as official innovative practices through the Action Collaborative.

A systemic problem across institutions of higher education known as “passing the harasser” enables faculty members found responsible for sexual harassment to transition to another institution without notifying their new employer or facing disciplinary action from their previous employer (Flaherty, 2016; Gluckman, 2017; Kingkade, 2017; Leatherman, 1996; Mervis, 2019). This problem is often facilitated by confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements that prevent institutions from sharing information on faculty perpetrators of sexual harassment (Brown and Mangan, 2019; Fields, 2019a).

This project has identified two universities with anti-"pass the harasser" policies and worked with them to produce descriptions of these policies as official innovative practices of the Action Collaborative (i.e., a novel approach/idea that is consistent with the findings and recommendations from the National Academies Sexual Harassment of Women report and has not yet been implemented, has only just been implemented (0-6 months), and/or does not yet have data on its effectiveness).