“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”
—Fred Rogers
This week the Good Men Project has run two stories about men who rape. The first was written by a friend of the rapist, a man who violated an acquaintance after she passed out at a party. The second was a first-person account by a man who says he’s raped a lot of women and expects to rape again.
The author of the first of these pieces says she wrote it because “no one is taking responsibility for the mixed messages about sex and sexuality in which we are stewing,” and the editor who approved the second says that “this anonymous rapist’s essay has held a mirror up to us, and it blazes with the news: here are the symptoms of our dysfunctional culture.”
But these justifications don’t hold water. These guys aren’t raping because of society’s mixed messages, and giving a rapist a platform doesn’t hold up a mirror to society.
Why? Because most people aren’t rapists. Most men aren’t rapists. In fact, most asshole men aren’t rapists. The data on this is pretty clear. The vast majority of rapes are committed by a small number of men, and the main reason so many people are raped is that those few men rape over and over again, mostly with impunity.
When right-thinking people talk about rape we tend to talk a lot about the importance of understanding how consent works. “No means no” and “yes means yes” and “enthusiastic consent.” And that’s all important stuff to talk about. It’s vital.
But it’s also vital to remember that when folks get their wires crossed about what each of them is looking for, rape isn’t usually the outcome. Far more often it’s discomfort or awkwardness or going home annoyed because someone who seemed nice turned out to be kind of a jerk.
That’s because most of the time, when someone’s not into something, their partner picks up on it. Maybe not immediately, but soon. And when they realize it, they stop. Because they don’t want to rape anybody.
Rapists don’t stop. Rapists don’t stop when the person they’ve been flirting with passes out — not because they don’t understand that an unconscious person can’t consent to sex, but because they don’t care. Rapists don’t stop when they realize someone is tensing up, or pushing them away, or drifting off, or crying, or saying no.
They don’t stop because they don’t want to stop.
So yes, let’s continue to have conversations about the ways that the sexual negotiation model of man as pursuer and woman as gatekeeper can lead to ugliness and confusion. Let’s continue to have conversations about the ways that intentions can get blurry in the presence of alcohol and drugs. Let’s continue to have conversations about how to get everyone on the same page without breaking the mood. About how to listen, how to speak up, how to check in. About how to deliver and respond to a rebuff graciously.
But let’s have those conversations among decent people.
Let’s leave the rapists out of it.
On Saturday night two campus cops were sent to the dorm room of Graham Gaddis, a first-year student at the University of Kentucky, responding to a report that he’d been seen pouring liquor out of the room’s window. While the cops waited, Gaddis set up a video camera, turned it on, and pointed it at the door.
In the video that follows, Gaddis can be seen denying the allegations against him, then refusing the cops entry, then refusing to move his foot so that they can go around him and into the room. He says they need a warrant, they say they have “administrative rights.”
“Do you want to be kicked out of this university?” one asks. “Because I can pave that road.”
“You have braces,” Gaddis replies. “Nice.”
That’s about when the cursing starts. “Fuck you guys,” Gaddis says. “You guys suck dick. You can’t find shit.” That’s right after he makes a weird, mocking “nee nee nee nee nee” sound at them.
After that, they start debating procedure. “Have you ever read the student code of conduct?” a cop asks. “Multiple times.” “Okay, cool. Then you should know well…”
Gaddis interrupts. “So the student code of conduct — if a cop comes to your door you have to let him in? Nah. Your fucking dorm is exactly the same as your house. You have the exact same privacy rights. You cannot come in my room without consent.” The cop says that’s right, but that administrative representatives, not cops, have the right to enter. When Gaddis asks why his RA isn’t conducting the search, then, the cop says “your belligerence.”
“I’m belligerent, dude? Are you fucking stupid?”
After that they just all hang out for a while, debating the Fourth Amendment, until Gaddis interrupts one too many times.
“No no no! Shut up!” a cop yells. “I’m talking! Okay? I am talking! I am in charge here! This is what’s going to happen. We’re just going to leave your ass alone. And we’re going to write up a Student Contact, and we’re going to the dean of students, and we’re going to kick your ass out of this university. Where you’re going is home. Don’t even bother paying your tuition next semester. Because you’re going.”
Then they apparently walk away, and as they do, Gaddis calls after them. “Good point, guys, good point. Sorry I kicked you out of my room. I just owned you guys. Fuck you guys. You can’t come in my room.”
That’s when the cop comes back, shoves him, and bursts into the room: “I can come in your room, because I’m a university administrator, stud.”
They proceed to search the room while the student continues to mock them.
As of yesterday morning, the video had been watched more than a hundred thousand times on YouTube.
Yesterday afternoon the cop was fired.
Representatives of the Darfur Student Association say that 140 students were arrested and 180 injured in protests at the Omdurman Islamic University on Tuesday when government agents and ruling party supporters attacked activists and burned dormitory buildings. Dozens of students are reportedly still missing.
As I reported on Tuesday, that day’s clashes followed an incident last week in which four Darfuri students were found dead at Al-Gazira University after participating in a sit-in against the university’s refusal to waive their tuition fees as mandated by peace agreements in effect in Sudan since 2006. Their bodies were found in a local canal where witnesses say protesters were chased by supporters of the regime.
The Darfur Student Association says that 450 dorm rooms were destroyed in Tuesday’s attack and that hundreds of laptops and mobile phones were looted. They say that police, troops, and supporters of the ruling National Congress Party delayed fire trucks and ambulances’ attempts to gain access to the campus, and that harassment of Darfuri students continued on Wednesday.
Students were also reportedly beaten and tear-gassed in simultaneous protests in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.
Amnesty International on Wednesday said that “Sudanese security services have clearly used excessive force since the first peaceful murmurings of dissent at last week’s student sit-in,” demanding that the government “respect the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.”
A US representative echoed Amnesty’s statements, calling the students’ deaths “shocking.” Given the government’s failure to live up to its obligations, Ambassador Dane Smith said on Wednesday, “it’s quite reasonable, it seems to me, that Darfuri students are protesting.” The United States has been, he said, “very unhappy about the excessive force used against Darfuri students demonstrating for their rights under the agreement.”
Felix Salmon wrote a really worthwhile piece during the Free Cooper Union occupation discussing — among other things — exactly how Cooper Union’s academic reputation and since-forever no-tuition policy are intertwined:
Cooper has a lot of adjuncts and a very small tenured faculty, and if you ask anybody associated with the school how it keeps its quality high, they’ll tell you that it’s a function of the enormous pool of applicants. The idea is that Cooper is extremely good at identifying America’s most talented teenagers, and can basically get its pick of the crop thanks to its free-tuition policy.
It doesn’t really matter whether that’s empirically true or not; what’s certain is that Cooper’s exceptionalism is an article of faith among both students and faculty, and that it is deeply rooted in the school being free.
If Cooper Union’s reputation comes from its students, then, and its ability to draw students derives from its tuition policy, then there’s not much reason to expect that a tuition-charging Cooper Union would maintain the quality or the prestige it has today. And once you go down that road, you can’t turn back.
Salmon’s argument is specific to Cooper Union, of course — there is literally no other American college of its prominence that has a similar tuition policy. But it implies a more broadly applicable set of principles that receive too little attention.
Put simply, a college’s tuition policy affects its student body. This is true on the level of who applies, of course — if students know for sure that you’re affordable, they’ll be more interested — but it extends beyond that as well.
As we’ve seen over and over in recent years, the more dependent a college is on tuition revenue, the more its admissions decisions are shaped by that dependency. For public colleges that means enrolling ever-more out of state students, abandoning your mission to provide accessible education for the students of your state. For privates it often means need-conscious admissions — turning away the poor or middle-class applicant in favor of someone dumber but richer.
This process is already at work at Cooper Union, where a proposal has been mooted to shrink undergraduate enrollment by as much as thirty percent to make room for a new revenue-generating graduate program. And of course those grad students won’t be up to the college’s historical standards — they can’t be. They’re not supposed to be. That’s not why they’ll be invited, and it’s not how they’ll be chosen.
And this, ultimately, is yet another reason why Cooper Union matters, and yet another reason why the students’ struggle is so important. Because tuition policy gets at the heart of an institution’s character, and because, for well over a century, Cooper Union has been shining proof that tuition-free higher education works.
studentactivism.net 
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