SAT scores are comparable to top-tier state universities and the college has quickly emerged as a training ground for the religious right and a pipeline to conservative jobs in Washington.
Students in the school’s Strategic Intelligence Program can graduate with security clearances from their summer internships, making it a feeder school for the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, various branches of the military, and intelligence contractors.
The Bush-era White House had almost as many interns from PHC as Georgetown, according to Hanna Rosin’s 2007 book God’s Harvard.
But now an expose by investigative journalist Kiera Feldman, published in the New Republic, has unearthed several instances of the administration dismissing or blaming female students who have disclosed their assaults to school officials.
One student interviewed, called Sarah, said she was studying with a boy named Ryan when he invited her to sit on his bed.
She did, and a few hours later woke up disoriented with her jeans unzipped and her shirt up. Later she remembered him on top of her, groping her and pushing her hands in her pants.
When Sarah told the school’s dean of student life, Sandra Corbitt, that she had been sexually assaulted she was told, ‘He’s a nice boy. Are you sure you want to report this?’
According to Sarah, her story was viewed with suspicion by the dean who told her: ‘I don’t think you’re wholly innocent in this situation.’
Sarah also said that Corbitt told her, ‘If you were telling the truth about this, God would have kept you conscious to bear witness to the abuse against you.’
The school concluded that ‘Sarah had made an ‘error in judgment’ by being alone in a boy’s room in violation of PHC rules.
‘You are in part responsible for what happened, because you put yourself in a compromising situation,’ the dean said, according to Sarah. ‘Actions have consequences.’
Another student, Claire Spear, was found by security guards late one night crying in a field and saying she had been ‘violated.’
According to Clare she and her friend John had been drinking with some friends at a nearby lake. He offered to give her a ride home, and before they got to campus, he stopped the car, climbed over the console, and started dry-humping her.
‘He didn’t remove her clothes, but Claire felt terrified and trapped with John weighing her down. Things didn’t compute. John was her friend; he was engaged; he was a Christian, just like her. In her confusion, she managed to tell him to stop,’ according to the New Republic article.
When Claire told Dean Corbitt what had happened in John’s car, she said, ‘it felt like I was just talking to a brick wall.’
The school was far more concerned about her underage drinking than her allegation of sexual assault.
She later dropped out of PHC at the end of her freshman year, while John was suspended for just a semester for drinking and not making sure Claire got back safely into her dorm, not for assault.
These students and others cited by the New Republic article are commonly left feeling ‘silenced and ostracized’, while the perpetrators escape relatively scott-free.
In a statement, the school said that it doesn’t 'elevate one gender above the other' and denied that it views women who experience sexual abuse as 'deserving of their fate.'
As a private institution, PHC does not accept government funding and therefore does not have to comply with the Clery Act, Title IX or the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, all of which can aid student activists and sexual assault survivors in holding their schools accountable.
