2014 has had many of them, but what a depressing week. On Ferguson, all I can say is: a) the controversy should have remained a local one and is a function most of all of corrupt black leadership and its allies in the Legacy Media, and b), even if you disagree with that, you have to admit (to my mind like with Obama’s “Big Amnesty” Constitution violation) that everyone saw the bad outcome that has now occurred–riots–coming from miles away, slowly and surely, and no-one prepared measures adequate to prevent it, nor will anyone who counts now do or say anything that will prevent the next one. It’s just a matter of time before another “Ferguson” happens, and before a good number of people get killed over one.
Our leaders stink. Our media leaders especially.
The recent report of alleged gang-rapes at UVA shows another instance of long-standing American leadership failure. On the NRO main-page, the esteemed conservative-leaning UVA sociologist Bradford Wilcox provides the links and a number of recommendations in response. I’m not expert enough about the legal ramifications to fully judge his first one, which is that colleges shouldn’t take a “neutral” stance towards such cases, and I don’t think his recommendation there is clear enough to fully judge anyhow. The legal aspects of the whole “campus rape-culture” or “campus hook-up culture” issue are tricky ones, and ones that good people can disagree upon, beginning with the proper definitions of rape and of consent, but extending into a number of other issues. In general, I’m for erring on the side of due process, and on the side of keeping colleges from setting up parallel justice systems. But all this gets very difficult in the details–at UVA, for example, one complication is that you already have a parallel student-run Honor system that some think should have a role in some of these cases.
Still, most of what I’ve learned about the newer “Affirmative Consent” laws adopted by some states makes me oppose them as after-the-fact pretexts for lawyerly action that will create as many opportunities for false-accusation abuse as they will deter actual rapes, and which are in many ways ridiculous on their face. Ditto for the a good deal of the content of the Obama administration’s “guidelines” issued to colleges.
But let’s get away from the damn lawyers. The most interesting pair of things Wilcox says is seen here:
Administrators must also rein in and redirect the party, so to speak, both in the fraternities and in college dorms. …UVA, and other institutions of higher education, should require proctors at these [fraternity] parties whose job it is to watch out for and step in to stop abusive behavior. They should also provide more non-fraternal social outlets for students looking to have fun so as to reduce the social power of fraternities.
To Wilcox’s credit, he’s able to see that UVA inevitably has a measure of responsibility for the social life, and the sexual morays that shape it, which spreads out from its official educational and degree-granting activity. Now elsewhere he says he wants UVA to do more to encourage the reporting of rapes, but I think he’d agree with me that if the University is going to do official “advice on sexual morays” stuff, that sure ought to involve more than all this lawyer-talk about how to increase the report and conviction rates. If there’s going to be mandatory readings of the usual feminist literature, then side-by-side there should be mandatory readings of the best social-conservative literature on courting and sexuality generally. Perhaps some readings from Wilcox himself, or from Elizabeth Kantor’s The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, or from Leon and Amy Kass’s Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying would fit the bill. No law-talk without ethics-talk. And no ethics-talk only in the key of modern liberalism.
And as long as we’re open to having our colleges mandate or “nudge” education on such matters, what we should really push is social dancing. I’m flat-out serious about this recommendation. Dance instructors are inexpensive, don’t have to be tenured or admitted to the bar, and don’t have to teach a sexual-ethics curriculum that we’d have to get the typical faculty of 90-98% non-conservative members to agree to. They really would provide a habituation that shapes sexual and social inclinations in ways more positive than not, and which could culminate in youth-culture patterns that diminish the hold of the worst Greek houses and the general expectations of hook-ups and binge-drinking.
The place I really made the case for this idea was in an Postmodern Conservative essay a couple years ago: “Swingin’ Tips for Youth Group Leaders, Courtesy of Whit Stillman and Jane Austen.” This post is mainly just a platform for saying that you ought to read that. Sociologists like Bradford Wilcox can only teach you so much–you also need humanities-guided concern with pop-culture, which in many ways is concern with how we actually train young people to live these days.
In any case, I salute Wilcox for pushing UVA to do more to shape its social scene. Good. But I confess I’m surprised he let his justified outrage take him into making that other recommendation, the one about requiring Greek parties to have proctors present. A moment’s thought suggests that the real parties, the proctor-less ones, would just go underground.
And, hey, there’s an exciting new career field: frat-party proctoring. “Tired of monitoring the TSA nudie-scan machines? Become a frat-party proctor! Enjoy bumpin’ music! Be around beautiful high-status young men and women as they get blasted! Watch out for ‘abusive behavior’ and be ready to ’step in and stop it,’ both in the main-room and upstairs! Attend training sessions run by feminists and lawyers! Stay on the cutting-edge of ever-developing Affirmative Consent language!”
Wilcox is a good guy, but he’s up against the typical college’s resistance to doing anything minimally serious in the way of ethical formation. So you can see how even he could get pushed back into mandating “awareness” and “monitoring” dictated by lawyers and the most lawyer-ly of feminists. While such mandated hectoring might cause some (hard-to-document) improvement on the margins, the rapes will continue so long as drinking and hooking-up are the accepted center-points of college social life. The logic of all this is going lead colleges to either to ban fraternities, or enter more and more into their governance, via measures like Wilcox’s ”proctor” idea. Both will come into conflict with the spirit and letter of American associational liberty, and likely will be unable to prevent the rise of a shadow system.
Hey, who’s up for another “debate” wherein you are either against all Greeks or all feminists? Who’s up for some ”outrage expression” that can only issue in a) the writing of more detailed rules, and then b) the hiring of more lawyer-ly administrators?
Let’s teach the kids the joys of playing with dance steps and Jane Austen sentences instead.
UPDATE: I wrote the above without having read more than a summary of the seed Rolling Stone story. A very dumb move on my part, and I apologize. The tone of the above would be different, particularly about lawyers. First, UVA’s administration has really screwed up, big-time, to some extent for complicated reasons having to due with Title IX, “best practices” for encouraging reporting, and other factors, but it seems also for low, and long-standing, PR-reasons. Insofar as lawyerly action can punish them for it, I’m all for lawyers and such. Second, the rape-culture at UVA is much more real and much worse than I knew. I taught there a couple of years on a ”pre-doc” fellowship, and while I thus obviously interacted with the under-grads there, I just didn’t have any idea of how bad this problem was. I knew the drinking culture there was very bad news, but I just wasn’t as tuned to undergrad life as when I later worked at WLU, a school with similar problems. I am shocked by the Rolling Stone story and certainly hope that one quite that bad couldn’t be written about any other college I’ve worked at. But who knows? Secrecy is at the heart of a lot of this. I do, however, stand by the basic content of this essay and the older one. When the standard expectation, accepted really by almost everyone, the administrations and faculty included, is that an elementary aspect of the college’s life is socializing centered around hook-ups and getting blasted, no amount of law or lawyers is going to do more than slightly improve the situation. You have to go after the culture itself. At a place like UVA, you let the law and the lawyers blast those who deserve it, but in all places, you do not put your faith in lawyer-ly quasi-feminist “awareness.”