When she started working as a college consultant full-time, Hanna L. Stotland ’99 called herself “Disaster Girl.” She wanted the clients other consultants wouldn’t touch: people with substance use problems, eating disorders, criminal records, or disciplinary records. “You don’t want to deal with that bear of a case, do you?” she would say to her competition. “You don’t want to deal with that headache.”
It was April 2013, and Stotland had just left her job as a legal career counselor at the Northwestern University School of Law. She had been consulting informally for 14 years prior, working in a range of college consulting settings, but it was her specialization in crisis management that “really caught fire” with clients, she says.
Stotland thought she had a sense of how her practice would develop. “Young women with eating disorders seemed like a growth industry,” she says. “There was going to be no end to the kids who need my help in that field.”
But in January 2014, while she was on a family vacation in Singapore, Stotland received a call that would alter the course of her career. “It was a colleague of mine saying, ‘I have a kid who just got expelled for sexual assault — can you help?’”
Stotland didn’t hesitate: “I was like, ‘Beats me. Let’s find out.’”
By 2016, Title IX clients — as Stotland calls them — had become half of her practice. For hundreds of dollars an hour, she has helped 314 students expelled from school for Title IX violations either transfer to another college or apply to graduate school. A “non-zero number” of those clients are students who have been expelled from Harvard, she says.
University spokesperson Sarah Kennedy O’Reilly and representatives from Harvard College Title IX declined requests to comment for this story.
Since its inception in 1972, Title IX, the federal law which prohibits sex discrimination on American college campuses, has been dogged by criticism. When Title IX is used to adjudicate sexual assault, critics argue that it elides due process and overly regulates cases of sexthat they see as unpleasant but technically consensual, such as sex while intoxicated but not incapacitated. According to these critics, this conflation dilutes the definition of sexual violence and trivializes it when it actually occurs. Stotland isn’t concerned with whether her clients have actually violated another person — it’s not her job, she says, to “take the temperature of their soul” — but she has little confidence in the conclusions of any given Title IX investigation.
Few would claim that Title IX is a perfect tool. But outside of the criminal justice system, it’s often the only tool survivors on a college campus have. Critiques of Title IX can be sympathetic to students accused of sexual misconduct while overlooking the concerns of survivors. It’s telling that survivors of sexual assault on college campuses are primarily women, while those accused of sexual assault in the same setting are primarily men.
While Stotland’s supporters believe that she gives hope to students wronged by a botched bureaucratic system, feminist organizers at Harvard argue that she helps privileged perpetrators evade the consequences of their actions while leaving survivors to grapple with the destabilizing effects of sexual trauma on their college experience.
Stotland’s practice draws attention to the uncertain aftermath of the Title IX process, raising questions about how misogyny and power can determine access to a college education.
Stotland connects the surge in Title IX clients that began in 2014 to the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter on campus sexual assault. The letter marked the first time that the federal government had issued guidelines for how universities should respond to reports of sexual violence and, crucially, argued that they had an obligation to do so under Title IX.
The “Dear Colleague” letter pushed many campus administrators to overhaul their existing procedures for adjudicating sexual violence on campus. The letter also lowered the standard of proof needed in a Title IX proceeding to a “preponderance of the evidence” standard. This standard is used in federal civil rights lawsuits and is met when the complainant can prove that there is a greater than 50 percent chance that their allegation is true. The change ignited debates over the efficacy of Title IX in adjudicating sexual violence, with critics seeing the change as an infringement upon the rights of the accused.
Stotland’s Title IX practice emerged in the midst of this nationwide reckoning. The basis of Title IX’s relationship to sexual violence may have to do with the educational access of survivors, but Stotland — who identifies as a feminist — concerns herself with the educational access of potential perpetrators. While she doesn’t believe people are accused at random, she doesn’t think that everybody accused is responsible.
Even when a student is found responsible, Stotland is hesitant to draw conclusions about their character, reflecting her broader doubts about the fairness and efficacy of the Title IX process. “The fact that someone has been found responsible in the Title IX process gives me almost no information about that person,” Stotland says.
In other words, she doesn’t believe that being found liable of a Title IX violation inherently means that a student committed an act of sexual violence. She believes she has worked with both perpetrators and the falsely accused as well as students who have done exactly what they were accused of, but that what they were accused of did not constitute a sexual violation. Under Title IX, all of these students are lumped into the same category — that of the liable respondent.
(It’s worth noting that, while false allegations do occur, they are exceedingly rare: Studies have estimated the rate to be between 2 and 8 percent in the American criminal justice system. However, some researchers believe that these statistics are inflated. Sexual assault is also underreported, both in the criminal justice system and on college campuses. One in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college, yet more than 90 percent of victims do not report the assault.)
Though the “Dear Colleague” letter brought heightened scrutiny to the scope of Title IX, the story of how Title IX came to regulate campus sexual violence began three decades earlier, with the landmark lawsuit Alexander v. Yale in 1980. Several Yale affiliates alleged that Yale’s failure to combat sexual harassment, as well as its lack of institutionalized procedures to investigate allegations of harassment, posed a barrier to female students in accessing an education.
The women were advised by Catharine A. MacKinnon, who had just graduated from Yale Law School. MacKinnon, who is now a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, was testing out a novel legal theory that would become the foundation for her groundbreaking book, “Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Sexual harassment, MacKinnon argued, constituted a form of discrimination on the basis of sex. By this logic, universities that failed to prevent sexual harassment could be found in violation of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in any school or educational program that receives federal funding.
Though the plaintiffs lost the case, their argument led Yale to institute a procedure for investigating complaints of sexual harassment. Additionally, the plaintiffs’ use of MacKinnon’s theory led to a seismic shift in how universities conceived of sexual misconduct, with the court holding that sexual harassment constituted sex discrimination in education.
In the following decades, the particularities of Title IX’s relationship to sexual misconduct continued to be debated in court. At the same time, a movement against campus sexual assault took hold of several universities: marches across college campuses, candelight vigils for survivors, the names of alleged rapists scrawled on the walls of women’s bathrooms. In the early 2010s, as a result of the “Dear Colleague” letter and several high-profile cases of campus rape, this movement garnered national attention. The college campus became the nexus of debates over consent, power, and justice — a reevaluation that, within the next few years, would spread to various professional industries through the #MeToo movement.
Although public attention shifted to these professional industries in the latter half of the 2010s, Stotland’s focus remained on the college campus. Her Title IX clients are primarily, though not exclusively, men. The severity of their Title IX violation can vary. Stotland has helped a client found liable for “an unwelcome hug or a drunken make-out session on the dancefloor” as well as a client found liable for raping and choking another student.
She describes her “median case” as a hookup where the complainant alleges violation via intoxication. “They often agree that there was apparent consent, but that the consent was vitiated by intoxication, usually alcohol,” she explains.
The bulk of her work revolves around helping her clients tell the story of their “crisis” in a way that makes them appealing to admissions committees. First, she tries to approximate a 360-degree-view of her clients’ Title IX case. She listens to her clients tell their version of what happened, and she reads through official documents from the case.
“I want to understand the story from your point of view, and I want to understand it from the worst external point of view,” she says. Stotland has never spoken to her clients’ victims, though she says she would be open to it if someone were to reach out.
Once she has an understanding of the case, she helps her client build a narrative. The exact contours of this narrative change on a case-by-case basis, but there are a few pieces of advice she applies across the board.
First, she encourages her client to acknowledge the accusations made against them. “You don’t plead guilty to what you did not do, but you must plead guilty to what you did do,” she says. “It’s usually not that difficult to look at the day of this incident and say, ‘What’d you do wrong that day?’ It doesn’t have to be assault. If it wasn’t assault, don’t say it was, but virtually all of my students have failures of kindness, failures of planning, failures of risk management, all kinds of ways that they screwed up.”
There is a strategic purpose to this soul-searching. If Stotland’s client were to fully absolve themselves of responsibility — if they were to say, “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had the bad luck to hook up with this crazy girl,” as Stotland puts it — then they have “cut the legs out from under any argument [they] could make that [they] can prevent this from happening again,” she says. Taking responsibility for one’s actions is the first step in changing those actions, but for Stotland’s clients, the act of taking responsibility must also be performed for the audience that is the admissions committee.
In that sense, Stotland’s work is less about encouraging repentance in her clients and more about refining its portrayal. “What have you changed in your life? How can you illustrate the change that you’ve made?” she asks. “Don’t just be like, ‘Yeah, take my word for it,’ but actually put evidence into the document.”
This isn’t so different from the work of more conventional college consultants: Stotland transforms the application process into a kind of narrative exercise. Even the narrative she chooses for her clients — of making a mistake and learning from it — is a common one. One of the most popular essay prompts on the Common Application asks applicants to write about something they’ve learned from facing “a challenge, setback, or failure.”
But not all failures are equal in their damage. It is one thing to change after botching the hand-off at the district track meet or making a cruel comment toward your younger sister. It is a different enterprise entirely — one that, while possible, requires immense amounts of time and commitment — to change after being found responsible for sexual assault. Stotland helps her clients craft a tale of personal transformation, but she has little stake in whether this transformation has actually taken place.
“I assume that some of my students are responsible,” she says. “I just don’t know which ones, and to some extent, I don’t care. I’m not their rabbi.”
“My job is not to heal their soul,” she adds. “My job is to help them be good citizens at their next school, persuade a school to give them a chance, and then be successful there.”
Stotland has shared her own narrative in several media outlets. It forms a neat parallel to the work she does now. She was born the youngest of four daughters to a Jewish family in Chicago. She has “deep nerd roots,” as she puts it: Her father was a lawyer, and her mother, Nada Stotland, was the 135th president of the American Psychiatric Association, where she oversaw the publication of the DSM-V, the standard manual on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.
“I came from a tradition where educating children and having the best imaginable higher education was a fundamental priority of life,” she explains. “Very central to why we’re here on the planet is to engage with the life of the mind.”
Hanna’s older sister Eve A. Stotland, a public-interest lawyer, says, “Hanna had a very forceful personality from a very young age, and she was not second fiddle to anybody.”
Stotland attended a private high school, where she struggled mentally and academically, flunking out during her junior year. “I had mental illness, but I also had this sort of misplaced rebellion about high school,” she says. “I thought it was civil disobedience to refuse to do my homework.”
In a household of intellectuals, Stotland’s failure to graduate was “a grave violation of what my family’s whole worldview was about.”
“There were times when I was very concerned with Hanna,” says Eve. “Hanna is remarkably open about the challenges she’s had in life — specifically mental health challenges — and those challenges were hard for my whole family. Seeing her struggle and seeing her in pain was very difficult.”
On her 18th birthday, Stotland started working at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. Within the first six months of working there, she started to get “immensely better,” something she attributes to receiving treatment for her mental health issues and “getting away from high school and off of this conveyor belt.”
“I think most of your Harvard readers will identify the idea: There’s a system, and you’re supposed to do X things at Y time,” she says. “I knew that I could not do what I was going to be expected to do on time, so I needed to get off of this because it’s not going to work for me.”
She adds, “I also have some problems with authority. Note now, I don’t have a boss. That’s not an accident.”
Over the course of two years, Stotland became interested in going to college. She got her GED and applied to several schools with the help of her high school counselor. Initially, she was denied everywhere. “I had fantastic test scores and catastrophic grades,” she recalls. Her high school counselor called the admissions offices of all of the schools she had applied to, searching for an opening. He found one at Bryn Mawr, which first put Stotland on the waitlist and then admitted her that July.
“Within a couple of weeks, I realized that I was really, really good at this college thing,” she says, “I hated being at a little women’s college in the suburbs,” she recalls. After two years at Bryn Mawr, she transferred to Harvard.
Stotland’s experience at Harvard was transformative. “I can only talk about it in terms that sound insane, because I had such a good time, and I loved it so much,” she says. “It was like this crazy healing, wildest dreams coming true from every direction, all day, every day. It was like being high on meth for two years.”
She lived in Leverett House, sang with the Veritones (whom she describes as “the happiest people at Harvard”) and studied psychology. Referencing her mother’s career, she says “it was sort of mother’s milk to me to focus on human psychology.” Stotland’s studies come up often in her work now. “We’re all doing some unlicensed therapy in practice,” she says of private college consultants. “Me much more so than most people, because I have more people in crisis.”
Stotland also gave tours of Harvard for the admissions office. She describes a spot near the end of the script where tour guides talk about their path to Harvard. Families were shocked to hear Stotland’s unconventional story. “After every tour, some family would take me aside and say, ‘You have to talk to my nephew. He just got out of rehab, and he wants to apply to college. Can you help us? What do you charge?’”
To these parents, Stotland was “proof of concept,” the redeemed problem child. “My mom — and I’m exaggerating that wording a little bit — but basically, she would say to her friends, ‘Gosh, remember my loser child who was living in the basement? You’ll never guess where she is now.’”
Stotland had her first paying clients in the summer of 1999, between her graduation from Harvard College and her first year at Harvard Law School. She worked as an LSAT tutor for the test-prep company Kaplan, and she provided private consulting to students she had met through her admissions tours and through her mother. “It was a kitchen table type of thing,” she says.
While working a series of day jobs in the legal world, she consulted privately on the side. In 2008, she left legal work to become a career counselor at Northwestern University School of Law. Compared to the high-stress environment of a law firm, the job was tame, and Stotland had more time to fortify her private practice. She decided to quit her job and work full-time as a college consultant in April 2013.
In May of that year, Stotland met IT consultant Andrew Rubinberg on a dating website. “It’s funny, because we went from the first time we met, where I was working full-time and she was trying to start a business, to the business taking off so fast that I stopped working as a consultant and started working with her,” he recalls.
The Title IX aspect of Stotland’s practice began about a year into her relationship with Rubinberg. “Like most people in the world at that time, when I heard Title IX, I thought of women’s sports,” he says. At first, he didn’t have a defined opinion on the Title IX side of their consulting business. But that changed when he started sitting in on Stotland’s calls.
When he was a student at Bradley University in the late ’80s, Rubinberg was a member of the fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. “I saw a lot of things happen,” he says. “And I’m not saying I did anything bad, but I look at the Title IX world now and go, ‘What if it was like that when I was in college in the ’80s?’ It was such a different world.”
“I know the difference between sexual assault and bad choices,” he adds. “I saw a lot of bad choices. I did not see sexual assault.”
Now, Stotland and Rubinberg are business partners. Stotland handles the public-facing aspects of their consulting business — namely, working with clients and marketing her services — while Rubinberg takes care of the back-end work, like scheduling Stotland’s appointments and managing the couple’s expenses. “I do the logistical side of everything — our lives and our business,” he says.
Even in the brief time I’ve spoken to Stotland, her close relationship with Rubinberg is evident. My interviews with Stotland are scheduled by Rubinberg; when she Zooms me from her Chicago home, I often see him working in the background. Stotland walks in three minutes into my interview with Rubinberg, which he’s taken in one of their home’s bedrooms. “Talk about how I sexually harass you in the workplace,” she says to him.
“Constantly,” he quips.
Even after a decade of living and working with Stotland, Rubinberg remains fascinated with her. “I go to conferences with her all the time, and people walk up to her like fangirls,” he says. “I feel like I’m with the star of the show.”
Patricia Hamill, a Title IX attorney at Clark Hill LLC, has used Stotland as an expert witness in a number of lawsuits against universities. In these lawsuits, Hamill typically represents students who she believes have had flawed Title IX processes that have led to marks on their record. “One of the elements that you try to quantify in a piece of litigation like that is lost opportunity, or doors that have been closed that otherwise would be open if this person didn’t have this type of finding in their record,” she explains.
Because Stotland has worked with so many Title IX clients, Hamill feels that “she has a very good empirical sense of the negative impact that a disciplinary record, particularly Title IX, can have on a student’s ability to do what they might otherwise do without that in their record.”
But those accused of sexual misconduct aren’t the only students worried about lost opportunities. What educational opportunities do students lose out on when they experience sexual violence on campus? The effects of sexual trauma can persist long after the assault itself has ended. Physically, survivors may have to deal with sexually-transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancies. Mentally, they are at risk of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation. All of these factors can impact the quality of a survivor’s college education.
“When people have experienced violence and harm, they can’t go to class like normal. They can’t do their work like normal,” says Rosie P. Couture ’26, an organizer with the Harvard Feminist Coalition.
“That’s especially true for people who’ve experienced sexual violence themselves, and that’s also true for the people who are caring for those people who’ve been harmed,” she continues. Couture gives further examples of how the pervasiveness of sexual assault affects campus life: Students might avoid enrolling in a course if a professor has a reputation for being creepy, or they might avoid a certain social club because of the conduct that occurs within it.
Her words echo MacKinnon’s original theory as to why sexual harassment constitutes sex discrimination: It prevents its primarily female targets from fully accessing the resources of the university they attend.
When asked about Stotland’s work, Couture argues that it passes perpetrators from one campus to another, leaving more students at risk of violence. “It’s very disappointing to know that the students who are harming my friends and my peers on Harvard’s campus have access to these resources to just go to another campus where they can wash away any discipline they received here and be able to harm more students in another community,” she says.
Stotland feels that such a view assumes guilt where there may be none. “The Title IX system only purports to arrive at outcomes with 51 percent certainty,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “This commentator’s 100 percent certainty makes me wonder why we bother with judges and juries. I am muddling along in a world without Delphic oracles, crystal balls, etc. This quote will have all your middle-aged readers fondly recalling our college years when we were infallible.”
Still, when faced with the concern that her clients could go on to harm students at another school, Stotland admits: “They could.”
“That’s why the vast majority of those colleges say no to the vast majority of those applicants,” she says. At the same time, she claims that in the decade she has worked with students found liable for Title IX violations, none of her former clients have been formally accused of assaulting someone on their new campus.
“I can’t prove that they’re not committing assaults, just as I can’t prove they didn’t commit the initial one,” she says. “But I have never had a student — and I’m sure it will happen someday — but right now I’ve literally got zero who were accused at the second school.”
The possibility that she could be helping sexual predators transfer to another university doesn’t weigh on Stotland. “If I’m helping someone to be in another college situation or graduate school situation, as opposed to a work situation, that will not change whether that person is determined to continue raping in the future,” she says.
In fact, she senses an underlying prejudice in this specific critique of her work. “There’s a whole lot of racism and especially classism, in people’s lack of concern about one of my students going and raping a coworker at Wendy’s,” she says. “They don’t care — he's off of a college campus, and the women who ‘count’ are safer. That is not what any of them would say, but it is often what I hear in the critique.”
At the same time, the premise of Stotland’s consulting business implies that there is something especially valuable about a college education — something students are willing to pay Stotland thousands of dollars for a second chance at. In a 2015 profile with Buzzfeed News, Stotland said, “If one of my clients committed rape, who needs a liberal arts education more than that person?”
In one of our interviews, I ask her to elaborate. “The liberal arts education is — at least to my understanding — about understanding the world and the other humans in it and thinking through problems from multiple points of view,” she explains. “I’m not claiming it’s a panacea — just that I think it benefits essentially all humans who are interested in it. And gosh, if anybody is harming other people, deliberately or negligently, this is a component of what I would want them to experience.”
Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26, a Crimson Magazine editor and another organizer with the Harvard Feminist Coalition, points out that a college education can also provide access to power. “Especially in a place like Harvard, where there’s so much privilege and power connoted by simply having a Harvard degree, I think that the institution should challenge whether or not people who have raped other students get to have a Harvard degree at the end of this,” they say. Though Stotland has not helped students accused of sexual misconduct transfer into Harvard specifically, she has placed Title IX clients at other elite private colleges whose degrees may confer a comparable amount of status.
In her book “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women,” the philosopher Kate Manne coins the term “himpathy,” which she defines as “the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior.” I ask Stotland if she thinks her work plays off of these sentiments.
“I’m sure that among my clients are people who have benefited from it, but helping people to tell their stories and to advocate for further education doesn't inherently do that,” she says.
Couture disagrees. “Short answer, yes, I think Hanna is promoting himpathy,” she says. “I think that any dismissal of the harm, violence, and pain experienced by women for the sake of the person committing harm is unacceptable, illogical and an example of himpathy.”
The critique illuminates a linguistic tension between Stotland and her critics. “Note that we continue to have ‘a person committing harm,’ not an accused person,” she wrote in her response. “I await the Harvard Feminist Coalition’s announcement of opposition to public defenders, since their work is illogical.”
Stotland’s efforts come from a place of skepticism of the Title IX process. “Sexual assault, #MeToo, and the Obama-era Title IX regulations are reflecting a real, terrible problem that merits a lot of societal concern,” she says. But, at the same time, she argues: “There is a moral panic happening.”
Pasquerella also finds flaws in Title IX, though their concerns stand in stark contrast to Stotland’s. Their critiques are shaped by their own experiences going through the process as a survivor. “It presents itself as being fact-finding and a fair investigation that is theoretically supposed to benefit you as a survivor, but the only real result that comes about is sowing doubt in your own mind and in your own claims about what happened to you,” they say. “The narrative gets taken out of your hands and put into the hands of the investigators, and there are no clear pathways to actual justice for you.”
“So, yeah, there’s a different problem going on,” says Pasquerella. “It’s definitely not what she’s referring to.”
Stotland countered in her email: “Who says there’s only one problem? An amateur Etsy knockoff of a felony trial will predictably have flaws in multiple directions — sometimes in the same case!”
Pasquerella also identifies a tendency to sympathize more with the person being accused than the person making the accusation. “You are not as deeply concerned with the person who has raised the allegation and with what the rest of their life looks like, as you are with the person who did the harm — and that applies even if you win your Title IX case,” they say. “People never really ask what happens to that person afterwards, what kind of supports there are, if they’re receiving them. It’s more about, ‘What does the person who did the wrong get to have in the community afterwards?’”
Couture understands the frustration with how sexual violence is adjudicated at universities and in the criminal justice system. But, she points out, “for any man that is falsely convicted of committing harm, there are a bunch of women who are also not getting justice who have survived harm.”
“To equate the injustice of sexual violence to the way that people who commit sexual violence are treated — you cannot equate those things,” Courture says. “I would encourage Hanna to change her perspective on where the problem really even lies.”
Again, Stotland points out that the Title IX system can contain several flaws. “And where did this person see me equate injustice A to injustice B?” she wrote in her email. “Maybe she saw it in her crystal ball.”
In the 2010s, when Stotland began her practice, many shared her concern over a moral panic. Prominent outlets ran op-eds warning that the nationwide reckoning over sexual violence was on the verge of swerving into hysteria. In The New Yorker, Masha Gessen likened #MeToo to a “sex panic.” In a cover story for Harper’s, Katie Roiphe argued that the movement was “providing cover for vindictiveness and personal vendettas,” comparing the calling out of predatory men to a “blood sport.” Daphne Merkin criticized the “scattershot, life-destroying denunciations” of #MeToo in an op-ed for the New York Times, lamenting, “to be accused is to be convicted.” One hundred French women signed an open letter in Le Monde that decried the movement as “puritanism.”
But reconsidering these critiques in 2024, how did the “sex panic” pan out? What material consequences did a decade-long reckoning with sexual violence actually have? In his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh argued that “[his] family and [his] name have been totally and permanently destroyed” by Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault. Less than one month later, he was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Donald J. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil suit brought against him by writer E. Jean Caroll: He is running for re-election as President of the United States, and the polls remain close. Perhaps the most high-profile case of the #MeToo movement was that of Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer accused of sexual misconduct by more than 80 women. This past April, his rape conviction was overturned in New York.
Stotland refers to her Title IX clients as students in crisis. Still, she has successfully placed the vast majority of them at four-year colleges or graduate schools, and they often return to her to apply to medical school, business school, and law school. One of her first two Title IX clients from January 2014 applied to residency earlier this year.
Crisis averted: The accused, it seems, are doing alright.
— Magazine Editor-at-Large Yasmeen A. Khan can be reached at yasmeen.khan@thecrimson.com.