Reading Rolling Stone and then Carl about the gang rape at the frat house at the University of Virginia has caused me to wonder whether many or most colleges and universities should get out of the housing business. Many or most residential colleges should stop being, strictly speaking, residential. Students can move to Charlottesville to go to UVA, but they, as free and equal adults, should live unsupervised off campus. The supervision they actually do receive on campus seems to make their lives worse – and even more precarious — than they would be if they lived on their own.
Many of our colleges and universities are officially more permissive than ever when it comes to student behavior. When it comes to sex, anything goes — is not only tolerated by affirmed — as long as it’s safe and consensual. This libertarian policy is about treating students as fully autonomous adults. But with this increasing freedom comes an increasing concern with security. That means that policies that should make student-affairs staffs less intrusive actually make them more so. Yet the intrusiveness is ineffective. It was rather ridiculous when the “womynists” in the underrated film PCU prattled on about phallocentric oppression and “the culture of rape.” Now the worry that young women are less protected from sexual assault on campus than they are in society at large seems more reasonable.
The only sexual behavior, on many campuses (such as UVA), that is a violation of the student code is nonconsensual — sexual assault and rape. Well, those are crimes. Virginia’s board of visitors, in the wake of the present scandal, has proclaimed a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault. Well, that’s the policy the law already had. The scary thing is the university had a policy less tough than the one the Commonwealth of Virginia thinks is necessary to effectively protect individual rights.
Surely it’s obvious that crimes should be reported to the police, to the government’s law-enforcement officers who don’t work for the university and only have law and order in mind. Young women are often reluctant to go the police about being assaulted or raped. But it seems to me that many, at least, would be less willing to talk to student-affairs staffs implementing a less-than-zero-tolerance policy for what happened to them.
Our institutions of higher learning, partly at the insistence of the federal government, have tried to handle allegations of sexual assault and rape internally. One result is that the penalties they can impose — suspension or expulsion — hardly fit the crime. Another is various efforts to cover up or minimize incidents in the service of public relations or institutional image. Still another is that young men accused of sexual assault — sometimes falsely or vindictively or with a dearth of real evidence — are expelled without the protections our legal system affords the accused, such as being guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, being able to cross-examine one’s accuser, and the other accepted features of legal due process. So both accused and accuser feel vulnerable to being victimized by what amounts to an insufficiently lawful environment.
It’s sometimes said that the right our autonomy freaks want protected is to engage in safe, consensual sex with strangers while drunk. That actually is a right, after all, but it is a pretty impossible one to enforce. And all the efforts to diagram out the steps of “affirmative consent” in a particular sexual encounter really don’t help out much. It seems to have now occurred to UVA’s board of visitors that there’s a close connection between being very drunk (especially in a place full of people you barely know and certainly have little reason to trust) and nonconsensual sex. It’s occurred to others that there’s a connection between a “hookup” culture and a culture of rape.
It turns out the university has not been enforcing the legal drinking age at fraternities. So freshmen students hop from house to house on fraternity row, searching successfully for cheap liquor that they are forbidden by law to consume. They can’t get served at the bars downtown or buy beer at the corner, and so where else can they go? One solution proposed is to drop the drinking age to 18, breaking the frat monopoly and incentivizing off-campus options for student alcohol consumption. That probably would make campus life somewhat more safe.
The real issue is that the law is not being enforced on campus, making it a less “safe space” for young women than society at large. Only now is the board of visitors open to the possibility of the police sweeping the frat houses and checking IDs. And we can’t help but wonder whether they’re trying to handle a public-relations fiasco or humbling acknowledging their complicity in facilitating a criminal environment.
I rush to add that it’s the extent to which any of our campuses is a culture of rape is often exaggerated — sometimes wildly — for ideological reasons. At UVA, for example, most undergraduates really do live in apartments off campus, the police force of Charlottesville functions well, and life is far from the state of nature. Living on one’s own as an adult is surely better for one’s character, these days, than living on most campuses. Nobody living on his or her own really believes you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as you don’t rape or sexually assault someone.
Carl suggests the transformation of our fraternities into classy establishments that have real dances, encourage a culture of courting, and prepare young men and women for marriage and parenthood and being responsible leaders of their communities. The result would be lifelong friendships based in shared virtues. That kind of reform is way too judgmental and implicitly sexist and allegedly infantilizing to be embraced by our student-affairs staffs. But it would, after all, be about treating students as grownups with real relational responsibilities. It’s because fraternities do, in some cases, facilitate this kind of friendship that I’d be against using the recent scandals as an excuse to shut them down, at least at some places. I immediately think of the student defending the Deltas in Animal House by saying something like not letting a few bad apples spoiling things for everyone. (He also admits that they take liberties with their female party guests at their toga parties, though — a part of the movie that not only feminists should find creepy.) You do have to wonder if even fraternities would be at least not worse if the universities would wash their hands of them and let them function on their own, under the law. (At UVA, I’m told, the fraternities are, under the law, private houses, which frees the university from liability, but they are still are under some umbrella of protection and the university can regulate fraternity activites, as it has done by suspending them in the wake of the scandal.) I’m wondering here; I’m not sure at all.
I recently visited a religious college in the hills of Virginia that required that students to dress professionally (coats and ties and dresses) for class, had separate dorms for men and women with very limited visitation hours, and flat-out prohibited sex outside marriage. One student bragged to me they could sneak into some basement to make out — a prospect thrillingly but safely transgressive. How childish all that seems! But really, really safe! And with no criminal behavior that does or should involve the police. The thing that impressed me the most was that the students freely accepted those limitations on their personal behavior as an indispensable condition for pursuing the goods they shared in common. Who can deny that there’s a lot more “adult behavior” on that campus than in some dorm or frat at a more typical college or university? Obviously, I’m not recommending that living arrangement for everyone; I’m just saying they know what they’re doing at that place.
Most private residential colleges — especially those with some genuine attention to character formation — are somewhere between state-of-nature dorms and frats and the college I just described. In most cases, they should give a close look to scuttling the residential part of their mission. At Berry College, the dorms aren’t that libertarian and so they aren’t that securitarian, and there is a serious effort to make campus life about character formation. But even here, I can see why a student would regard life in the dorms as very overrated in terms of “value added” and would prefer the security and responsibility (not to mention savings) of living on one’s own off campus.
It’s pretty obvious to me that anyone starting up a liberal-arts college today wouldn’t choose fraternities or dorms or many other of the amenities (including intercollegiate sports, perhaps) that most campuses are saddled with. I’d choose a small, cheap, safe town where students could live just around the corner from the academic center.