Safe or Sad?

            Last month, more than 200 Dickinson College students demanded that the administration of this small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania make the existing sexual assault policy more transparent and more stringent. “We want all rapists to be expelled,” said the protestors. “We want to be notified immediately when a sexual assault has occurred.” Two days later, the administration announced that major changes would be made to the sexual assault policy. The administration would work with the protestors to make their campus safe.

            It isn’t just students who want campuses to be safer. Security On Campus, Inc (SOC) provides grants and other resources to groups claiming to fight campus violence. One of SOC’s first accomplishments was the passing of the 1990 Clery Act. Named after the deceased daughter of SOC’s founders (a victim of campus violence), the Act requires that colleges and universities report their crime statistics to the federal government. Recently, SOC has been pedaling educational programs to make campuses safer. Dickinson just received almost $300,000 from the Justice Department (DOJ) to make rape prevention programs mandatory for all students.

But SOC’s campaigns and DOJ money isn’t making campus life particularly safe for the young men accused of rape. With all this money targeted to support the word of the victim, colleges often side with the accuser at the expense of the accused. Brown and Duke were sued for violating students’ civil liberties when they expelled or suspended students later determined to be innocent.

Campus disciplinary panels are particularly susceptible to charges of procedural improprieties. Created to handle accusations of plagiarism, these panels are unprepared to handle accusations of sexual misconduct. Yet that is precisely what SOC and other organizations demand. As one college administrator explained in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “More and more people have started thinking colleges should be the ones to fix this.” According to Peter Lake of Stetson University, colleges have “been lured into doing something in a criminal justice model that the criminal-justice system itself hasn’t been able to deal with.”

            But if colleges are really going to “fix” the problem of sexualized violence, it shouldn’t be with plagiarism panels pretending to be District Courts. Nor should it be with mandatory educational programs that make men afraid of their sexuality and give women a special authority when they speak as victim. Rather than traffic in fear we might return to the classroom and look for solutions in the stuff of our trade.

This semester students in the Spinoza class are looking at how emotional decisions are made. When people feel a certain way, argues Spinoza, they tend to think thoughts that justify their emotional state. By the time of the Dickinson College protest, we had already applied Spinoza’s method to Marlboro’s Drug and Alcohol policy, considering how fear of federal sanctions was expressed in some of the administration’s arguments, and how fear of expulsion was expressed in some of the students’ arguments. Fear, we determined, was creating an obstacle. Rather than discussing common concerns about drugs and alcohol – the positive and negative effects that alcohol had on our social encounters ­–we let fear take over.

The protestors at Dickinson, we surmised, were feeling quite angry and afraid as they considered the evils of rape. When the administration agreed to collaborate, they began to feel better. Working together to organize better encounters on their campus would increase both parties’ happiness, which, in Spinoza’s parlance, feels like an increased capacity to act. As the administrators and protestors recognized common concerns, the community would fall in love with its powers.

 But as we looked at the protestors’ demands, we saw expressions of an enormous sadness. The demands for stricter punishment and more immediate responses suggested that the object of the protestor’s thoughts was not love of their community but hatred of rapists. “Hate,” explained Spinoza, “is a sadness accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” The protestors, we determined were not happy, but very, very sad.

“But of course they were sad,” you say. “They were talking about rape! They would be crazy to be happy.” Not crazy, says Spinoza. Inadequate; their ideas about rape were inadequate. Rather than gather specific information about specific instances, rather than consider the myriad confusing emotions packed into most sexual encounters, the protestors narrowed their focus to something quite simple: the monster rapist who was threatening them all. Rather than create the community they wanted to live in, the protestors demanded the administration fix the problem, thus compounding their sense of inadequacy.

Colleges cannot fix social ills but we can study them. Along with investigating the various forces and interests working on young adult bodies – such as alcohol and sex and wanting to fit in – we also need to examine the various forces and interests that promote a worldview where women are victims, men are rapists, and colleges are at risk of lawsuits. Those forces, such as SOC, are perpetuating their own brand of sadness, one that makes us susceptible to zero tolerance arguments and willing to suspend civil liberties. The good news is that once we recognize our sad condition, we can actually do something about it.

Rather than try and fix the problem with expulsion or mass emails, I hope that Dickinson College uses its remarkable resources to organize better encounters between community members. Roleplays are extremely helpful in this regard. By imagining bad encounters we can consider different ways of responding. Restorative justice panels are another technique. By allowing the multiple emotional responses of accuser, accused, and other community members, this form of justice allows communities greater understanding about what makes an encounter go very sour.  What we can’t do is pretend we’re a more effective version of District Court. Pride and ambition will tell us we’re able to fix everything, but that’s just our feelings running away with our thoughts.