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A few years back, columnist David Brooks (who will, as it happens, be the commencement speaker at Brandeis University this year) wrote a piece about campus rape in which he suggested that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took prior to the sexual revolution.
Back in the good old days, Brooks wrote,
educators … understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this, starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address as a historian of American higher education.
As it happens, I recently acquired a copy of the Berry College Handbook for Women, published by the college’s women’s student government in 1956. Berry was (and is) a co-ed private college in rural Georgia, exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to find Brooks’ “formula for character building” in action.
And what does that handbook say about dating? It says this:
DATES — Girls may have dates on Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 5:00 PM, at parties, movies, and other social events and also at the college store between classes. When girls are coming from the college campus, boys do not escort them farther than the ‘parting of the ways’ which is on the road between the Recitation Hall and Mother’s Building. There must be no dating in out of the way places. Petting is not permitted.
Self-imposed restraints? Hardly. This was a world of strict gender segregation. At Berry College in the fifties, male and female students weren’t permitted to be alone together. Ever.
On today’s campus, students are given near-total freedom to socialize in private. That freedom is grounded in the belief that college students have sufficient character to use that freedom responsibly. It is also grounded in the belief that people best learn how to regulate their behavior when they are given the opportunity to regulate their behavior.
On the typical American campus of the fifties, students were not taught self-restraint — they were restrained, and they were punished when they were caught circumventing those restraints. If they learned anything about how to behave behind closed doors, it was at great risk, and in defiance of the mechanisms employed to keep them apart. If a female student at Berry College in 1956 consented to be alone with a guy in circumstances that made sex possible, she was in violation of school rules. She was in danger of expulsion. Every man on campus knew this, and that knowledge gave the worst of them great power.
If a woman was treated badly in such circumstances — if she was raped, if she was coerced, if she was abused, if she was humiliated — she was vanishingly unlikely to speak out. And there wasn’t even any way to have an open discussion about what it meant to be “treated badly” — the campus rules permitted no public dialogue about sexual ethics, no opportunity to arrive at communal understanding about how to behave and how to expect your partner to behave, no space in which to forthrightly compare expectations and experiences.
This world that Brooks pines for is a world of stifling rules and unequal punishments. It’s a world of shame and exploitation. It’s a world of ignorance and silence.
It is a world that generations of students heroically fought to be freed from.
The internet is abuzz with the news that Rutgers paid MTV reality star Snooki more ($32,000) for an appearance than it paid celebrated author Toni Morrison ($30,000). Morrison is delivering the commencement address at Rutgers’ graduation exercises this year, while Snooki did two shows on campus last night. And I’ve got to say, I’m more troubled by Morrison’s paycheck than Snooki’s. Here’s why:
Commencement addresses are traditionally given free or at reduced rates. This is, in fact, the first time in history that Rutgers has paid a graduation speaker. It turns out that the university recently renovated its football stadium, and wants to christen it with a blockbuster graduation event.
There’s a difference in funding, as well. Snooki was booked by a student-run, student-funded programming board whose money comes from student activity fees. The Rutgers University Programming Association exists for the sole purpose of bringing entertainment to campus, and by all accounts this was a popular booking — both of Snooki’s shows were standing-room-only. (Snooki’s fee won’t all go to her, by the way. Her two shows were in a mock interview format, and her interviewer, comedian Adam Ace, charges $2500 for solo appearances.)
Morrison’s fee, on the other hand, is being paid out of revenue from the university’s vendor contract with Pepsi. That money is being drawn out of a fund that is administered at the president’s discretion. It’s not a programming budget. It’s university money. Though Rutgers made a point in media coverage of saying that it didn’t dip into state funds or tuition to pay Morrison, that strikes me as a distinction without a difference, because if they hadn’t used the $30,000 this way, they would have had it available for something else.
I’m not saying — quite — that it’s a bad idea to give Toni Morrison $30,000 to deliver a commencement address, although it does seem a little weird to me to turn the awarding of an honorary doctorate into a paid gig. I’m just saying it’s not obvious to me that universities spending university money on a big-name speaker so they can justify holding graduation in a football stadium is a better idea than students spending student fees on programming that students are interested in.
SAFRA, the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act, passed the House of Representatives yesterday in a 253-171 vote. If passed by the Senate later this fall, SAFRA will end government subsidies to private student loan companies, move those loans federal direct loan program, and use the savings to increase aid to students and colleges by $8 billion a year.
This is a very big deal.
The House’s endorsement of loan reform is a huge step forward, but SAFRA contains another component that’s also worth paying attention to. Since 1998, the Higher Education Act’s Aid Elimination Penalty (AEP) has denied federal financial aid to students with drug convictions on their records. Commit robbery or rape and you can still receive financial aid, but if you’re busted with pot you’re out of luck.
Two hundred thousand American students have lost financial aid because of this law since it went into effect a decade ago, but in the version of SAFRA passed yesterday, the AEP has been scaled back dramatically. If the House language makes it into the final bill, AEP will now apply only those students who are convicted of selling drugs while actually receiving financial aid.
Observers are predicting a tough fight for SAFRA in the Senate, where private lenders are gearing up to protect their turf. We’ll keep you informed as the situation develops.
The PA State Police sent fifteen cops dressed as college students to a Haverford dorm party Thursday night, citing more than thirty students for underage drinking.
Drinking in the dorms is allowed for over-21s at Haverford, and the party was advertised on Facebook. But cops planned the raid after checking out the profiles of students who’d put themselves down as planning to attend and finding that many of them were underage.
Police showed up at the party 10:30, hoping to arrive as it was getting underway, but by the time they got there most of the alcohol was gone. They hung around for half an hour, observing, then announced themselves and started asking partiers for ID. They detained about forty students, and issued citations to 31 of those.
One interesting tidbit: The cops didn’t give the university a heads-up before crashing the party. Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, learned about the raid when a student called him after the police started asking for ID, and Emerson arrived on the scene himself about half an hour later.
See bottom of post for updates.
The first major American student protest of the new academic year has erupted at Howard University.
Hundreds of Howard students gathered outside the historically black university’s administration building on Friday, demanding that Howard address problems with financial aid, campus housing, and other issues. Rapper and entrepreneur Diddy, a Howard graduate, urged the students on via Twitter, telling them to “Do what we did and take IT OVER!!!!”
Classes began nearly two weeks ago at Howard, but many students say their financial aid is still in limbo. Students also complained about a shortage of on campus housing and about administration censorship of the student newspaper, the Hilltop.
The Hilltop reported on Twitter that after campus security locked the administration building down the protest moved on to the university chapel, where Howard student government officers addressed the crowd.
A thirteen-point list of demands presented to the administration included
- The resignation of the leadership of the Office of Student Affairs.
- Immediate reforms to financial aid policies.
- Bringing campus buildings into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
- Budgetary transparency within the university.
- Expansion of on-campus housing.
The protesters asked that the administration respond to their demands by next Wednesday, September 9.
More on this story as it develops…
Update: Here’s a YouTube clip from the protest, and a longer, edited YouTube vid, which includes an explanation of the demands.
Tuesday morning update: The Hilltop, Howard’s student newspaper, is going to meet with university president Sidney Ribeau at 12:30 pm this afternoon. Today’s Hilltop reports that more protests are planned if Ribeau does not adequately address the students’ demands by tomorrow.
studentactivism.net 
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