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Textbook Consent On Campus A Manifesto Donna Freitas Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Consent On Campus A Manifesto Donna Freitas Ebook All Chapter PDF
Donna Freitas
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CONSENT ON CAMPUS
CONSENT ON CAMPUS
A Manifesto
Donna Freitas
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
CONTENTS
NOTES 193
Index 221
About the Author 231
P R E FAC E
DEAR ALL UNIVERSITY
PRESIDENTS . . .
vii
viii Preface
student. But perhaps the most important audience for this book,
however audacious it might sound, is university presidents.
I will tell you why.
I’ve spent the last decade lecturing all over the United States
about my research on sex and hookup culture on campus. The
campuses where the president shows up for these conversations—
or any conversation with students about anything to do with sex
and relationships—have completely different climates than other
campuses. The faculty, too—don’t get me wrong—are tremen-
dously important to the climate, but there is just something about
the president of the college taking the time to show that she or he
cares that makes an enormous difference. It empowers everyone to
take up the conversation and with gusto.
I’ll give you an example—one of the most memorable of the
150 or so lectures I’ve given about sex on all types of campuses.
A Catholic liberal arts college not far from Chicago invited me to
give the annual lecture that the college president hosts each year in
March. Prior to my visit, the president met with a faculty and staff
reading group on a regular basis to discuss my book Sex and the
Soul. When I arrived on campus, the president hosted a dinner with
the reading group and some faculty and staff to welcome me. At
one point during the dinner, he smiled, chuckled a bit, and told me:
“You know, there’s a rumor going around among the students
that I’m very angry you’re here.”
“Wait—what?” I asked, confused by what he meant, since he
was obviously not angry and was about as welcoming and jovial as
anyone I’ve met during a campus visit.
This president is also a member of a Catholic order of brothers,
which is an essential piece of this story.
Preface ix
The preface to my first book about college campus life, Sex and
the Soul, tells the story of a class I taught on dating and relationships.
The students decided to produce a newspaper entirely devoted to
discussing sex and hooking up on campus, and they wanted to pull
every person they could into this conversation—students, faculty,
staff, administration, and yes, the president. Not only did they find
willing and open conversation partners everywhere they looked
among their peers, Student Affairs, and Campus Ministry, but
twenty-six faculty members (on a small liberal arts campus) from
all disciplines, including mathematics and the sciences, agreed to
devote some or all of their class time to discussing the newspaper
the day it was released. This thrilled and surprised my students.
BUT—and this is a big but—the president refused to see them or
talk to them about it. His refusal bothered my students so much
they kept returning to his office, hoping he would change his mind.
They asked for a meeting, wanting to present him with a copy of
what they wrote, wanting, in so many ways, his approval—not
necessarily of everything they said, but of the effort itself. They’d
poured their heart and soul into this paper they offered up to the
campus. Full of courage and willing to take this risk, they’d taken
all the intellectual and human passion inside of them and bared
themselves to their community, in the hope of transforming it for
the better. And isn’t that what college is for?
The president never came around. He refused to meet with
these students who had labored night and day to write smart,
honest, respectful, careful, critical, and intellectually astute articles
that questioned attitudes about sex and hooking up on campus;
he refused to engage with students who were calling for an inter-
generational conversation and reassessment of these issues in their
xii Preface
students notice when you show up to the table for this conver-
sation. They want you there, and they appreciate it when you
participate.
Ultimately, this is a book for everyone, because sexual assault
and consent are issues that we all need to think about. This is a
book for students who have to deal with these issues directly, and
it is a book for the people on campus who take on these topics
and the education around them (staff in Student Affairs). It is the
responsibility of all of us to tackle these issues on our campuses.
But I am talking to you, the university presidents in this
country, because you hold so many of the cards and so much of the
power to do right or wrong on this issue. Whether you want this
responsibility or not, it is yours.
PA RT I
with Title IX and the national effort to talk about sexual assault
and consent on campus, would Amy now know to name her ex-
perience as an assault? I’ve also wondered if the young man who
committed this act of violence against her would now realize
what he had done, too—if today he would recognize himself as a
perpetrator, as someone who’d committed a crime.
One thing is clear to me: what happened to Amy (and it indeed
happened to her because she was unconscious) should never happen
to anyone. It is an assault, by definition, because she could not
consent. Amy was the first person I interviewed to report a sexual
assault, but she was not the only one, and over the last ten years many
young women (and some men) have told me stories about sexual
encounters where consent was murky at best, and obviously absent
at worst. The sexual assault problem lays bare a kind of sickness
infecting higher education, one that involves people of all genders
and sexual orientations. Until recently, it has festered largely under
the surface despite the best efforts of those who’ve tried to make
people, especially the people in charge, sit up and take notice. What
we have is a crisis in which college students are committing sexual vi-
olence against their peers without worrying about the consequences
for themselves or their victims. But constitutive of this crisis is the
fact that colleges have been looking the other way for decades.
president, Ken Starr, its athletic director, Ian McCaw, and its Title
IX coordinator, Patty Crawford, were all forced to resign. Art
Briles, the football coach, was fired. A member of the Texas House
of Representatives suggested that it could be one of the worst
college athletic scandals of all time.
But the fact that it was seen as a sports scandal is itself telling.
What about the way it reveals how people in power at Baylor
buried evidence of sexual violence against women to protect
a culture that celebrates violence and aggression off the field
as well as on? It seems as though people were more interested
in the impact of these assaults on Baylor’s football program
than in how they affected the women who were assaulted. It
is indeed a scandal when a college dismisses sexual violence as
something other than what it is (boys will be boys, some people
seemed to be saying). Such dismissals glorify the most repre-
hensible, patriarchal norms of masculinity, enabled by the in-
excusable behavior of men at the head of prestigious academic
institutions. What happened at Baylor is an example of rape
culture in action, and it is also evidence that an institution will
still collude to protect rapists rather than help victims, because
money and football are deemed more important than women’s
safety and well-being.
The fate of Title IX is uncertain with Betsy DeVos now at the
helm of Trump’s Department of Education. DeVos has already
rescinded the two major sets of guidelines for Title IX issued by
the Obama administration, which attempted to use Title IX to
reduce sexual assault and harassment on campus (more on this in
Chapter 1). The Trump administration, via DeVos, released its own
revised set of guidelines in September 2017, muddying the waters
10 The Situation on Campus as It Stands
1990s and is now more than twenty years old. This means that
people, young women like me, have been filing Title IX complaints
about harassment and assault for decades, but only very recently
have schools begun to pay attention. Only in the last few years
have people become outraged about this situation, because certain
representatives in Congress and the Obama administration, quite
literally, made a federal case of it.
And I have thought lately, on a number of occasions: I am a
part of Title IX’s history. It is a strange and unpleasant history to
be a part of. Growing up, I thought of Title IX as a beautiful thing,
a glorious opportunity for my generation of girls and women. It
meant we could play sports; it meant that I grew up, like many
other women my age, as an athlete. I am a part of Title IX’s history
in this way as well. But Title IX has a dark underbelly, one I didn’t
know about or understand until I needed to, and now I have the
misfortune of being a part of that aspect of Title IX’s history, too.
The other thing I can’t stop thinking about is this: If I too filed
a Title IX claim, how many other women of my generation did as
well? Of earlier generations than mine? How many more of us are
out there?
I think it is difficult for people who have never been at the
mercy of their institutions in this sort of way, who have never had
to use Title IX under such terrible circumstances, to understand
the despair a person goes through, to have to pit oneself against a
giant when one is small and young, to stand up to the institution
in which you put all your hope and trust, in which you invested
your future and your dreams—and to do so alone. To feel that you
have no other option because you did your best to exhaust all other
options first.
14 The Situation on Campus as It Stands