‘Neverending’

Editor’s note: This story mentions multiple depictions of sexual abuse and assault. For anyone wishing to report a sexual assault or find help, a list of resources is provided at the end of the article.

Introduction

The IU Jacobs School of Music faced a reckoning in 2022 when students organized protests to demand a better response to sexual violence within Jacobs. Two years later, a culture of sexual abuse persists without much effective action from the Jacobs School, sources told the Indiana Daily Student.

The IDS reported this story for eight months, interviewing six women who directly experienced sexism, harassment or assault from individuals within the Jacobs School of Music.

Jacobs Dean Abra Bush pushed back on the characterization of the school in an interview with the IDS but emphasized her commitment to helping students feel safe, pointing toward a new sexual misconduct task force she organized over the summer.

But despite efforts from Jacobs, several women described the issue of sexual abuse in the Jacobs School as “neverending.”

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Freshly graduated from her master’s degree at Jacobs, Leah Warman wonders if her experience in the jazz studies department would have been different if she was a man.

IU’s jazz studies department, in line with most jazz spaces across the country, is overwhelmingly male. Warman, a tuba performance and jazz studies master’s student who said she was one of a handful of women in the jazz studies department before she graduated in 2024, described her experience as isolating and tokenizing.

When news broke about Demondrae Thurman, a euphonium professor who was serving as the Jacobs associate dean and brass department chair until allegations of sexual misconduct led to his April departure, it only intensified Warman’s feelings of alienation. Thurman had been a close mentor and was involved in bringing Warman to the Jacobs School of Music after she received her bachelor’s from the University of Alabama.

The allegations against Thurman came from former University of British Columbia music student Claire Pollock in a Facebook post in April 2024. In it, she alleged Thurman had pressured her into sex six years earlier, when Pollock was 18 and a senior in high school.

She told the IDS in April that she met Thurman when her band flew him into Alberta, Canada in 2018. She claimed Thurman, married and in his 40s, had touched her thigh, made inappropriate comments, performed oral sex on her in a hotel room and asked her to do the same for him. At the time, IU had already hired Thurman, who would begin teaching later that year.

IU moved swiftly after Pollock shared her story. Jacobs Dean Abra Bush called a town hall the following day and announced Thurman was no longer serving in his previous roles as of noon April 29. The IU Euphonium Studio wrote on Facebook it refused to accept a future where he returned to the school.

Pollock quit music as a result of the experience. Years later, she confronted Thurman in a Facebook message. He acknowledged the incident, but denied her claims that there was an imbalance of power.

“I felt it was equal footing that we ended up there,” he wrote.

Pollock blames a culture of hierarchy endemic to the music industry. In small music circles where relationships are everything, Pollock said those who are aware of serial abusers fear speaking out would harm their ability to advance their careers. It’s an element of the industry that was echoed by both established and student musicians the IDS spoke with. Pollock said it’s an attitude that must change to buck this “sinister trend” in music.

•••

Though sexual assault, harassment and sexism have been reported in music schools and industries across the country, sources described the jazz studies department as a particular hotspot for misconduct.

Some former Jacobs students, including alumna Abby Malala, described the jazz studies department as the “frat house” of Jacobs. Jazz piano student Abhik Mazumder said he finds it hard to study jazz due to the frequency of sexual assault allegations and actionless lip-service to social equality.

“Now I can’t even detach the music I play from that kind of moral behavior,” Mazumder said.

The issue may be a byproduct of the culture itself which can play a role in facilitating sexual violence, Zoë Peterson of the Kinsey Institute said. Peterson, who researches sexual violence at the institute, said men are more likely to perpetrate sexual violence if they are part of a peer group where men are supporting violence against women, particularly in male-dominated groups. These spaces can be rife with sexism and “sexual assault-supportive attitudes,” which includes victim-blaming or dismissing sexual assault allegations.

To Malala, even when people are not intentional enablers, they can struggle to come to terms with the fact that they live among people who commit sexual violence — especially when it involves someone talented and successful.

“Even if they’re not guilty of those things, I think they are invested in protecting each other because when the time comes, or if the time comes that they abuse their power, they want to know that they have put themselves in an environment where they will be supported in their abuse,” she said.

It takes a village to abuse someone, Malala said.

“Every single person who heard even a whisper of it is guilty,” she said.

•••

Daisy had expected to feel relieved once IU’s months-long investigation into the student she reported for sexual assault concluded. But when IU expelled the student, a jazz studies major when the assault occurred in February 2023, the former IU student found herself still afraid.

Included in Daisy’s Title IX case was a recording she took of a January 2024 phone call with the perpetrator, Solomon Keim, in which he does not deny sexually assaulting her and admits to raping multiple people.

“Yes, I have raped a lot of people,” Keim said in the recording, which was obtained by the IDS. “And broken a lot of people.”

Keim did not respond to a list of allegations sent to him by the IDS over email and text.

Keim’s case is not the only Title IX investigation into a Jacobs student since the IDS published their first investigation on Jacobs in January 2022.

In February 2022, a female Jacobs student, who requested total anonymity for fear of retaliation, reported a sexual assault by another Jacobs student. IU found him responsible for both sexual assault and harassment, and issued him a two-year suspension after a nearly 11-month investigation. While she waited for a hearing, she was forced to remain in the same classes and ensembles as her abuser, she said.

When IU suspended the perpetrator in January 2023, it did not inform any faculty members, she said, giving her abuser the opportunity to “write his own story” of the reason behind his departure. She said he told one professor he was dropping out of school for mental health reasons.

“Which to me felt like a slap in the face,” she said.

As she waited for the investigation to conclude, she felt unsafe each day she had to be around her abuser. The prolonged contact interrupted the healing process, she said.

“There are two worlds in Jacobs: one that is actively witnessing and experiencing violence and misogyny in their educational environment and one that is willfully unaware of its existence around them,” the student wrote in a text to the IDS. “Educating the unaware becomes another heavy burden to carry for survivors – one that is both re-traumatizing and often fails to enact lasting change.”

Some women who report their assaults are told there is not enough evidence to discipline the alleged perpetrator. The impact of going through a sometimes year-long investigation process only to receive a negative outcome can be devastating, two women told the IDS.

To university Title IX Coordinator Jennifer Kincaid, one sexual misconduct case is too many.

“That’s the goal, right, is just to have every student come here and not be impacted by sexual violence,” she said. “Unfortunately, a societal problem doesn’t stop at our doorstep or end when people leave here, and we just try to do our best work to help students, both with prevention and if they experience sexual misconduct.”

While the process is critiqued both by victims and alleged perpetrators, gaps may be systemic rather than intentional, according to Title IX experts.

Justin Brown, the director of civil rights and Title IX at Denison University in Ohio, said it’s easy for administrators to talk about wanting to stop sexual violence, but that universities are not financially incentivized to work on prevention efforts.

“Those platitudes are very easy, but for the people actually doing the work, they’re mostly meaningless unless backed up with support and resources,” he said.

People who work on sexual violence prevention and response efforts are underpaid, with overall efforts being understaffed and underfunded, Brown said. Ideally, sexual violence prevention programming would go beyond orientation, with touchpoints through sophomore, junior and senior year. But additional pressures on educational institutions, like opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or keeping up with college rankings and donors, can impede the effort for substantive change, Brown said.

Though universities face major trouble if they fail to satisfy Title IX requirements, there are no consequences for universities who don’t provide prevention efforts to begin with. Brown said it’s not an intentional choice — many administrators think the work is being done and just aren’t devoting the time to take stock of their gaps.

While the IU Office for Sexual Violence Prevention and Victim Advocacy offers an array of opportunities to become educated on issues of sexual violence prevention and consent, few programs are mandatory. Besides a training module on sexual violence, drugs and alcohol required for first-year and transfer students, one of the only other ways all students are educated about sexual violence is the It’s On Us Bystander Intervention Program for new students living in residence halls. Students have always been expected to participate but IU only made the program mandatory in 2023, the office’s director Sally Thomas said.

In an effort to understand the work being done within the jazz studies department, the IDS reached out to all jazz faculty members May 1, asking for an interview to discuss what has been done to prevent sexual assault and improve the environment for women. Only Tom Walsh, the department’s chair, agreed to comment, providing a statement four months after the IDS initially reached out. On Sep. 17, Walsh said he would be happy to speak to the IDS over the phone as long as it was off-the-record. When the IDS agreed to the call, Walsh suddenly changed course and refused.

In the statement, Walsh wrote that he invited Sally Thomas to give a mandatory presentation on consent to jazz studies majors in the fall of 2022 and 2023. The jazz studies department also hired Natalie Boeyink, the department’s only female tenure-track professor, in 2023. Other changes Walsh highlighted included more female guest artists, offering playing opportunities and scholarships to women in the department and an increased “presence of women in the photographs displayed in (the) combo room.”

“While we can’t force anyone to behave in a certain way outside of our classrooms, we can convey values that we believe will benefit each individual and the whole community,” Walsh wrote in the statement.

Tom Walsh Statement September 2024 by marnmeador on Scribd

During the summer of 2024, after the IDS had reached out to IU officials for comment and in the wake of the Demondrae Thurman allegations, Jacobs Dean Abra Bush created the Task Force on Sexual Misconduct. The task force’s goal was to analyze the culture of the school and recommend solutions. Their final recommendations, according to an August 2024 email Bush sent to Jacobs students, staff and faculty, included developing guidelines for social interactions between faculty and students, creating a code of conduct for visiting artists and providing education and training.

“The creation of this task force was not in response to any one incident but rather an acknowledgement that work needs to be done in this area at the Jacobs School of Music,” she wrote in the email.

In an interview with the IDS in September, Bush claimed the task force had been planned for a long time. However, she could not give a specific timeframe for when the planning began.

Bush said she takes the issue of sexual misconduct very seriously and listed efforts taken by the school in recent years, such as diversifying faculty and creating a policy specifying appropriate and inappropriate touch. When asked if she believed the Jacobs School or the music industry in general had a particular issue with sexual abuse, she said she had no way of knowing what was happening at other schools and pushed back on the idea that sexual assault was more frequent in music.

“I do think that when people have significant professional profiles, sometimes these issues are more public than they are in other parts of organizations or at the university, for example,” she said.

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Editor's note: Abby Malala previously worked for the Indiana Daily Student.

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