Stanford’s cuts to the sexual awareness programs Beyond Sex Ed and Flip the Script have been met with condemnation from the student body. In the wake of the Cornell 7 case being thrust into the national spotlight, these cuts have taken on a new meaning: Stanford is a “systemic accomplice to rape culture itself.”

But these programs were not the panacea that students have retroactively portrayed them to be. Both Beyond Sex Ed and Flip the Script were unfortunately ineffective at fostering a culture intolerant of sexual violence on a campus-wide scale. In my experience, few took Beyond Sex Ed seriously. It was poorly attended, and the sincere stories told by presenters were met with immaturity. Flip the Script only had 15 participants during its final quarter last spring. 

Make no mistake, this piece is meant to accompany the calls for Stanford and other universities to do more when it comes to sexual violence prevention. But if all we do is call for the same ineffective solutions as before, we will fail to make real progress toward a reality where women feel safe on college campuses.

Training and education about sexual violence prevention is undeniably necessary, but it will remain ineffective until we strike at the heart of the culture problem plaguing college campuses across the nation. 

Put bluntly, students around the country expect a laissez-faire environment where there is a high degree of privacy between the student body and the university. In parallel, students desire privacy from their peers. But it is exactly this privacy that makes it so difficult for the university and for our peers to step in when we want them to.

In the name of each person “discovering themselves” and building a new social identity as a college student, we rarely judge the behavior of one another, even when it may cross our own moral boundaries. We lament the pre-social media world when the publicization of photos or videos showcasing behavior at parties was rarer. 

And in seeking out “fun” and the “college experience,” we are outraged when the university gets in the way. Need I remind anyone at Stanford of the infamous “war on fun”? It was only last fall when students decried the absence of most all-campus parties. Michele Rasmussen is perhaps the most maligned administrator on campus, primarily due to her perceived attacks on student social life.

The reality is that the definition of “fun” and the “college experience” in the eyes of most students includes environments where drugs and alcohol run rampant. This is despite the fact that, for a large portion of the undergraduate population, drinking is illegal; most drugs used by students are as well. Students know this, which is exactly why they would prefer the actions of the student body to be placed under a metaphorical veil and not examined too closely by universities.

It is often said that a culture tolerant of rape is built on silence: social norms discourage open discussion of the reality of sexual violence, isolating survivors and protecting perpetrators.

In the same vein, the prevailing culture of privacy that governs college life is also guilty of enabling sexual violence and inhibiting justice for survivors.

In a laissez-faire environment, morally reprehensible and sexually depraved behavior is tolerated up to the brink of non-consent rather than stopped well before it. In the name of privacy, we impose ourselves on the sexual lives of others only by repeating the mantra of clear consent. The reality is that, as a consequence of this privacy, we have substituted a moral standard of care and concern for another human being with a mere legal threshold. 

When horrific instances of sexual violence do occur, it is only then that we expect universities to suddenly ex post facto invade the sacred private sphere of student social life. When they do so, the university is then tasked with extracting information from an environment created to obscure. Cases where the evidence leads to prompt university discipline — let alone a legal conviction — are the exception, not the rule. Typically, the salient details are clouded by both ordinary memory inaccuracies and the literal incapacitation and amnesia which can result from substance use.

Evidently, this culture of privacy makes it unsurprising that institutions of higher education repeatedly fail to properly handle investigations and dispense justice.

I hope that at this point I have made the core tension clear: it seems to me that it is impossible for us to “do more” by way of preventing sexual violence on college campuses without deep introspection as student bodies into our culture of privacy and how it is created by expectations of the “college experience.”

This is why calls for more training sessions, more resources, and more bureaucratically imposed attempts to reform campus culture risk merely masking these deeper cultural issues. We as students are responsible for our campus culture, so any cultural change must begin and end within the student body itself. 

Cornell recently announced a ban on fraternity parties for the remainder of the year. While we should not make the mistake of thinking that our current culture is confined to or perpetuated by fraternities and sororities, it is a starting point. Are the students of Cornell ready to remove the veil and actually embrace a new culture?

Are the students of Stanford ready?