Update | The sit-in ended with a negotiated agreement on Friday after more than one hundred hours. Read my recap here.

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I received word not long ago that as many as three hundred students are sitting in at the admissions office of Colgate University, a private college in central New York with an enrollment of about three thousand students. The sit in began on Monday morning, which means that it just passed the 48-hour mark with no end in sight. You can keep track of events as they develop on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and there’s a good write-up on Tumblr from some supporters at nearby Hamilton College.

The protest was sparked by concerns about campus climate and inclusivity at Colgate, particularly around issues of race and socio-economic status. Some Colgate students’ noxious attitudes are reflected in Yik Yak responses to their action that the activists are collecting and posting to Photobucket — the gallery includes plenty of overtly racist trolling, as well as more insidious comments like this one:

“If you want equality, then fine. Either I come here for free too of you all can pay $60,000 a year like I do. I’ll let you choose.”

Top Colgate administrators released a statement yesterday saying that they “are eager to work with all members of our community to fulfill our mission to be an inclusive institution, and to move the campus forward in a purposeful manner. We are working on a comprehensive response to the student petition,” the statement continued, “which we expect to share with them tomorrow.” (A previous statement from the administration can be found here.)

The students sitting in haven’t presented a list of demands, but neither are they engaged in the kind of open-ended campus occupation that has been seen so frequently in recent years. Instead, they’ve published a Petition of Concerns/Action Plan — a 1200-word, 23-point proposal for campus reform. The Colgate students’ Action Plan is wide-ranging. It calls for more student-centered, culturally conscious admissions and orientation policies; more robust financial aid; improved diversity training for new and existing faculty, as well as improved attention to “systemic power dynamics and inequities” in the curriculum; improved support for Colgate’s economically disadvantaged and educationally less-prepared students; and new efforts to attract and retain students from underrepresented groups. The whole thing is worth reading, but one proposal in particular leaped out at me:

“We ask…that, because Financial Aid cannot remedy systemic socio-economic disparities, including access to transportation services, Colgate reinstate a free and safe transport system to and from Syracuse for the entire population at Colgate. This would work to alleviate the experience of isolation on the basis of socio-economic status.”

Colgate is a college of three thousand students in a town of sixty-six hundred. Syracuse, the nearest big city, is forty miles away. The college offers a shuttle service to Syracuse, but prices start at $108 each way. And although I haven’t been able to find specific demographic information online, my strong hunch is that many of Colgate’s least well-off students come from cities, making their isolation in small-town America that much more acute.

A report from the sit-in’s Twitter account suggests that there’s likely to be a new statement from the Colgate administration at eleven o’clock this morning. I’ll be following this story as the day goes on.

Update | Post edited to incorporate additional information from Inside Higher Ed. Also, this week’s protest follows one thirteen years ago in which a group of students occupied the same building for seven hours in response to a series of racist incidents on campus. Several of the demands from that sit-in are repeated in the current occupation’s action plan.

12:15 Update | According to a source within the sit-in, daytime participation in the action has been hovering around four hundred students. Some two hundred stayed overnight last night, up from one hundred the night before. Given that total enrollment at Colgate is a little less than three thousand students, these are big numbers.

12:30 Update | The Colgate administration has apparently prepared a response to the sit-in proposals, and had intended to release it in a mass email to the campus. The demonstrators have convinced the admin to discuss that response with them before making it public.

2:00 Update | In a new statement, the Colgate administration says that “President Jeffrey Herbst — along with Suzy Nelson, dean of the college, and Douglas Hicks, provost and dean of the faculty — met for many hours over the past two days with ACC representatives to discuss their concerns. Herbst, Nelson, and Hicks also joined the sit-in for several hours to listen to the students’ stories of having endured incidents of racism, classism, homophobia, and sexism on campus.” The statement says that senior administrators have prepared “a written, point-by-point” response to the demonstrators’ proposals — apparently the response that the demonstrators have requested not yet be released publicly.

In concert with the release of the new statement, President Herbst and Dean Hicks addressed the demonstrators in person. Activists responded positively on Twitter to the latest developments, but the sit-in is still ongoing.

5:20 Update | According to the most recent report I’ve seen, posted to Facebook at about 4:30, the sit-in is still ongoing, amid discussions among the demonstrators about the administration’s point-by-point response to the ACC’s proposals.

6:00 Update | The occupation’s twitter account just declared that “the sit-in will continue until further notice.” In a series of tweets, they described the administration’s response to their proposals as “vague,” and said the occupiers were taking a dinner break after two hours of discussion regarding “plans to move forward.” More details should be forthcoming sometime tonight.

Thursday Morning Update | The occupiers have spent their third night sitting in, and don’t seem to be in any particular hurry to leave. I’ll be offline most of the day, but I’ll post updates on Twitter if I get the chance. Meanwhile, follow the #canyouhearusnow hashtag for all the latest.

Okay, it’s not just #GamerGate. This passage, from one of his newspaper columns in 1944, applies pretty broadly to online political discourse in all sorts of settings.

“The thing that strikes me more and more — and it strikes a lot of other people, too — is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point. When I look through my collection of pamphlets — Conservative, Communist, Catholic, Trotskyist, Pacifist, Anarchist or what-have-you — it seems to me that almost all of them have the same mental atmosphere, though the points of emphasis vary. Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a “case” with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them.”

A new piece went up at the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday titled Why Campuses Can’t Talk About Alcohol When It Comes To Sexual Assault.

When I saw it this morning, I clicked on it eagerly. The subject of alcohol and campus sexual violence is an important one, to my mind, and the subject of why campuses — specifically administrators — don’t want to talk about it is even more important. 

So when I opened the article, I was hoping to find a discussion of how the 21-year drinking age pushes alcohol use underground, making it more difficult for students to sensibly manage their consumption. I was hoping to find a discussion of the role of fraternities, athletic teams, and alumni in fostering a climate of binge drinking on certain campuses, and of administrators’ hesitance to take on such powerful college constituencies. I was hoping to find a discussion of the ways in which bans on alcohol use in dormitories can render victims of sexual assault hesitant to bring complaints for fear of facing disciplinary action for drinking, and of the fact that such fears are too-often justified.  I was hoping to find a discussion about the various ways in which members of college and university communities are dissuaded from raising these issues, and punished when they do.

I found none of that. Instead, I found twenty-nine paragraphs on how women can reduce their risk of sexual assault by limiting their drinking and on the “taboo” against mentioning it. 

Now, I’m not going to spill a lot of ink in discussing this supposed taboo, but the reality is that women in our society are constantly bombarded with messages about the risks of excessive drinking in relation to sexual assault, and that such messages typically place the onus of preventing such assaults on the victim of the crime, rather than the perpetrator. There’s no taboo against presenting such messages — what there is, rather, is real concern about their efficacy and morality. To her credit, Wilson notes this debate, and gives space to those who fall on the other side. But she repeatedly undermines their arguments, as when she follows critiques from two activists with the line, “but some students are willingly vigilant.”

Vigilance against sexual assault and concern with the unintended consequences of victim-blaming rhetoric are not mutually incompatible. In fact, they are mutually reinforcing. There may be a place in campus sexual assault prevention efforts for discussion of safe drinking, for instance, but any such discussion must foreground sexual predators’ intentional use of alcohol to degrade their victims’ ability to resist and to report sexual assault, a subject to which Wilson devotes only three sentences of a 1600-word essay.

            Campus sexual assault is not a problem that can be eliminated through fostering virtuous behavior on the part of potential victims. It is not even a problem that can be eliminated by cracking down on individual perpetrators. It is a structural, systemic problem with deep roots in the society and in educational institutions themselves. Yes, alcohol plays a role in such assaults. But those assaults, and that drinking, does not take place in a vacuum. It’s not the alcohol, not the drinking, that fosters sexual assault, but the cultural and institutional structures in which the drinking is embedded.

Those structures are what need changing, so if we’re going to have a conversation about this topic, let’s have that one.

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has a piece out this morning offering three suggestions on how to curb rape on campus.

Some of you may be cringing right now, as Douthat’s record on women’s issues is pretty poor, and indeed there’s a lot to cringe over in today’s column. But he’s getting at a real problem, and by my lights two out of his three proposals are worthy ones.

Douthat exaggerates when he says that “nobody — neither anti-rape activists, nor their critics, nor the administrators caught in between — seems to have a clear and compelling idea of what to do” about campus rape, but it’s true that the crisis is a persistent one, and that — as I’ve written before — there’s a lot of disagreement about how to approach it. It’s also true (though not quite, and not only, for the reasons Douthat offers) that after-the-fact remedies for sexual violence are a poor alternative to prevention.

Prevention is Douthat’s focus in this piece, and he admirably (mostly) refrains from victim-blaming within it. Instead, he proposes lowering the drinking age, cracking down on “Blutarskian excess,” and re-imposing some parietal rules — regulations restricting students’ private social activities. Let’s take these three one at a time:

First, Douthat is right that raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 three decades ago had the effect of driving much campus alcohol consumption underground. If you can’t drink freely in public, you’re likely to drink more copiously in private, and if you can’t be seen carrying around a beer, you’re far more likely to drink harder alcohol in a rushed and uncontrolled way.

Douthat fails to name the central factor linking covert drinking with sexual assault, so I will: it’s sexual predators and predation. The drunker students get, the more power rapists will have, and the more covert and unstructured drinking is, the easier it is for rapists to cajole and coerce potential victims to drink to excess. Lowering the drinking age would give students better ways to regulate their own alcohol consumption, better opportunities to look out for each other, and the increased safety that comes with openness. Crucially, as well, lowering the drinking age would free up colleges to reform their own alcohol rules, and remove fear of college sanctions and criminal prosecution as barriers to survivors of assault coming forward.

Douthat’s second suggestion, that campuses crack down on parties, is handled deftly. He is absolutely right to frame that problem not one of neglect but of complicity — as he notes, college administrators have an interest in keeping alumni, big-time athletes, and fraternities happy, and thus bear responsibility for their “often-misogynistic excesses.” Frats, jocks, and their alumni donors have too much power on campus, and are too often given the green light to wield that power in ugly, violent ways.

It’s with his third suggestion that Douthat and I part ways. Here’s the nub of it:

Finally, colleges could embrace a more limited version of the old “parietal” system, in which they separated the sexes and supervised social life. This could involve, for instance, establishing more single-sex dorms and writing late-night rules that apply identically to men and women. Bringing a visitor to your room after 10 p.m. or midnight might require signing in with an adult adviser, who would have the right to intervene when inebriation seemed to call consent and safety into question.

This need not represent a return to any kind of chastity-based ethic. The point would be to create hurdles for predators, clearer decision points for both sexes and —  in the event that someone sneaked an intended partner in, and the encounter ended badly  —  a reason short of a rape conviction to discipline or expel.

I don’t have a problem with posting someone at the door of a dorm requiring late-night guests to sign in. I’m sure that already happens at some campuses, and I suspect that where it doesn’t it’s at least as much a matter of financial constraints as it is concern for students’ liberties. Tasking RAs or RDs with gently monitoring guests’ (and hosts’) level of inebriation might also be reasonable, were current drinking policies reframed along less punitive lines.

But single-sex dorms were the rule back in the bad old days, and sexual violence on campus was rampant. Sexual predation thrives in artificially segregated environments, and our casual, day-to-day social openness across gender lines is an asset, not a liability, of the contemporary campus in the fight against sexual assault.

Penalizing students for sneaking in late-night guests, moreover, is no solution to the problem of rape. If the penalties are to be assessed solely against the perpetrator of such an assault then the policy will simply be a mechanism for punishing students for crimes of which they haven’t been charged or convicted, and further weakening of campus judiciaries’ already inadequate due process provisions. If, on the other hand, the penalties are meted out to victim and perpetrator alike, than the threat of such punishment will discourage reporting and make a just outcome even more difficult to obtain.

In order to effectively fight sexual assault on campus, we need to look to the ways in which current policies and practices foster such violence and aid sexual predators. Their policies should be reframed in students’ interests. Reforming drinking laws and campus alcohol regulations does that. Curbing the frats and the jocks and the alums does that. Imposing gender segregation and punishing students for bringing home guests does not.

Okay, so here’s a thing about last night’s Louie: Louie was angrier when Pamela tried to leave his house without kissing him than he was when she threw out all his furniture. A lot angrier.

That’s pretty messed up.

As bad as the almost-rape episode from two weeks ago was, this week’s pair bothered me more. Because the kind of pressure he was putting on Pamela this time was a hell of a lot more insidious.

Going in for the kiss when you don’t know if it’ll be reciprocated. Mooning around someone instead of asking them out. Wheedling to get someone in the sack instead of finding out whether they’re interested in doing so under their own steam. That constant push to get what you want, and then the pout when you don’t get it — every fucked up coercive trick guys pull to nag and guilt and cajole women into sleeping with them was on display on Louie last night.

And why? Because Louie’s goal was never to figure out whether he and Pamela could work together in a way that would work for both of them. His goal was always just to get her. Get her to kiss him. Get her to go on a date with him. Get her to fuck him. Get her to be his girlfriend. Get get get get get.

And no matter how often we get told that that’s romantic, it’s not. Because the getting isn’t about Pamela, and it’s not about them as a couple. It’s all about him. It’s always about him, just like it was with Amia, just like it’s been with every woman this season. And instead of interrogating that, instead of thinking about how we as men are constantly being socialized into that creepy predator role and brainstorming how to unlearn it — or having Pamela call him on his shit in a way that would have been far more shocking, far more transgressive, far more useful than the monologue he gave the fat woman last month — he gave his creep the happy ending.

Louis the writer populates his show with fascinating, smart women, but Louie the character has no interest in them. And since I figured that out, I’ve got a lot less interest in him.