And even some community colleges, usually in rural areas, have on campus housing.
For those suggesting that rape victims report rapes to the police immediately, please understand the reasons this doesn’t happen more often. Rape (date, acquaintance, or stranger) is a violation and a humiliation. It’s also terrifying because the victim has no control over what’s happening. Often the first reaction is shock commingled with a frantic desire to somehow leapfrog back over what happened and thus to a sense of safety and normalcy. Thus the delay.
I operate under the belief that my college girl is at risk…not just on campus but in the highly charged smallish town her college is in…The place is crazy on ballgame days, like you wouldn’t believe…probably 4 times as many people…and everybody is drinking…student and sports enthusiasts everywhere…There are at least 20 bars on one street…and of course restaurants. And it looks like an appealing party scene to young people, I’m sure. But as I said upthread I talk and warn her incessantly…I am kinda of a helicopter mom, I know, plus
I have family in the town…I still worry…
I agree. In a legal sense, a college could wash its hands of the problem by withdrawing from student housing and telling students to make their own living arrangements. The college would then have no legal responsibility for whatever happens off its campus and outside of its classrooms.
But in the real world, this wouldn’t work. The unsupervised housing situation that would result would be far worse than the college-run system. A bunch of eighteen-year-olds living away from home for the first time with nobody watching over them would be a huge pool of potential victims. Crime rates with student victims would shoot up.
And while the college might have no legal responsibility, it still has its reputation to think about. Even if they avoid any legal liability, the college is going to be harmed by having the reputation as a place whose students are getting attacked, even if those attacks are occurring off college property.
So colleges accept the responsibility of owning and running student housing, figuring that the increased liability is worth having a voice in trying to reduce the problems.
This isn’t accurate. Title IX requires colleges to respond to sexual assault complaints regardless of where the assault took place:
Having sent a daughter through college, I understand your worry. And having been sexually assaulted when in high school, in an open suburban park in daylight, I can attest that there is no safe place. My daughter knew I was worried. There’d been an horrific rape/murder there, and the campus had taken steps to make things safer, but there’s only so much a college can do. Instead of reminding her incessantly, though, I asked her how safe she felt and why, along with what she did to keep herself safe. It put the ball in her court and kept her from shrugging me off.
But I worried. Four years of worrying…and then she decided on grad school.
Oh…gawd…your advice is dually noted…I promise I will have that conversation with her!
You totally missed my point. I was saying that what if schools just quit being in charge of greek houses and dorms? And yes, issues at say the science building are different that what happens at a alcohol infused party at a frat house. How can a college administration be able to control what happens in each bedroom between 2 drunk coeds?
Well part of what your saying does make sense but then I also think about how many students, even freshmen 18 year olds, already live off campus. Which actually might be SAFER because that’s often living with parents or family. At least if they only had jurisdiction over campus buildings (say the art building) THEN they can set rules and watch who is doing what.
My whole point of this is I don’t think colleges really can be responsible for the safety of students in housing if they want to accept modern norms of sexual activity and free expression.
Well that’s now what many colleges are starting to look at. Is it really worth it when your looking at expensive lawsuits, compliance with regulations, pressure from special interest groups, and the ever changing sexual landscape?
Something that just occurred to me…in your OP, and here, you’re grouping college-owned dormitories along with fraternity / sorority houses.
At least at my alma mater (University of Wisconsin-Madison), while the Greek organizations were absolutely under the purview of the university, their houses were private property. They were located near campus, but they were not owned nor operated by the university. Living at one’s fraternity or sorority house, thus, was essentially living in a private dorm, and the university itself had no involvement in the actual operation of those houses.
Are you (or is anyone else in this thread) familiar with schools in which this is not the case? Schools where Greek houses are actually university property?
Seems to me that the case for colleges getting rid of fraternities and sororities in an attempt to prevent rapes and assaults is at least as strong (however strong that might be) as the case for getting rid of dorms.
Yes, at my school the University owns all the fraternity houses. The houses are leased to the fraternities and can (and are) taken away if they fail to follow school policy.
I’d like to see some cites for that.
I’m not an expert, but it’s my understanding that college campuses have a variety of security personal, ranging from security guards (roughly equivalent to mall-cops who have few powers beyond breaking up keggers) up to full State-level police departments with their own SWAT teams and K-9 units.
It’s not like if you rape someone, you go before Student Court and get put on Double-Secret Probation.
How is a college dorm fundamentally different from a bunch of people living in a multi-story apartment building?
To your point, I think the problem is a cultural one where college is perceived as this decadent enclave with it’s own reality separate from the rest of the world. Yes, college is a place where 18-22 year olds are often away from home for the first time and learn to be adults. But often they are “learning to be adults” in an environment that provides them access to excessive alcohol, drugs, dangerously promiscuous behavior, misdemeanor theft and/or vandalism and petty violence while shielding or at least turning a blind eye to the consequences.
Think of it this way. If I as a 22 year old adult hosted a party of 100+ people in a residential neighborhood where half the people were underage, drunk, doing drugs, getting into fights in the yard or throwing things at my neighbor’s houses, how long do you think it would take for me to get arrested? And yet, in college that was a routine event in any number of on-campus fraternity houses.
Your first point, a dorm is WAY different than an apartment complex. For one, no RA’s (that residents pay for). Nor all the common areas and staffing, maintenance, and activities, all of which residents pay for if they use them or not. Most apartments are basically its all yours inside and your responsibility.
On your second point, its much easier I think for an apartment owner to kick out bad tenants than the dorm people.
My turn to disagree. 
In most states, apartment renters are generally protected by laws that actually can make it very difficult for the landlord to evict them.
At least at Wisconsin, there was a placard on each dorm floor, detailing what we called “The Big Five” – five actions that would get you immediately evicted from the dorm. Those included pulling a fire alarm, “pennying” someone into their room (i.e., making it impossible for them to leave their room, which is a safety issue), and setting off fireworks inside of a dorm building. (At the moment, I can’t remember what the other two were.)
I knew several people in my own dorm who got booted for violations of the Big Five, and they were, literally, shown the door that very day.
Those that participate in federal financial aid do.
“The Clery Act requires all colleges and universities that participate in federal financial aid programs to keep and disclose information about crime on and near their respective campuses.”
I really can’t tell if you’re doubling down at this point or being serious.
Are you so far removed that you don’t think some apartments have common areas…or maintenance? You’ll find “staffing” and activities at higher end condos or retirement communities but they’re still, fundamentally a place you pay to live in that you don’t own.
ISTM, what needs to be done to fix the issue stated in the OP is educate jr’s and sr’s in high school as well as incoming freshmen that if you’re raped, call 911. Deal with counselors and RA’s and any other on-campus-people later, start with the real. Especially now that everyone carries cell phones instead of having to use campus phones. Further more, make sure that any university that is found out to have not reported a rape with in, say 60 minutes (of them being told) is punished in a way severe enough to make sure they take steps to avoid it.
I suspect the few cases where this was handled internally (to protect a sports team?) until the media got a hold of it) is what started all of this. People (women?) need to understand that these are isolated events and that getting to the police is important. Hell, I remember being told in sex ed class way back in the 90’s (forgive me if this is outdated) that getting a rape kit done within hours is imperative, before abrasions and semen leaks out.
Seems like we’ve got three or four things mixed up here.
If all students lived off campus in housing unrelated to the college would any crime there cease to be the college’s problem? Yes, of course. Duh.
If student-on-student *crime *occurs on campus, is that a police matter? Yes, of course. Duh. Regardless of where either student lives.
If student-on-student misbehavior per campus rules that doesn’t rise to the level of a crime occurs on campus, is that a police matter? No, of course. Duh. But it *is *a matter for the college’s rules-enforcement mechanism. And will be so regardless of where the students live or who owns where they live.
If student-on-student misbehavior per campus rules that doesn’t rise to the level of a crime occurs off campus, is that a police matter? No, of course. Duh. But it still *is *a matter for the college’s rules-enforcement mechanism. And will be so regardless of where the students live or who owns where they live. The point is that student-on-student behavior is subject to campus control wherever they are geographically because they’re both students, not because they’re both on somebody’s particular bit of land.
So ISTM the OP has intertwined two issues which lean in opposite directions.
Yes, the campus can jettison a certain amount of enforcement responsibility by divesting all of its residential facilities. An all-online campus being the limit case of this; since students never interact except over the internet about the only mutual crime they can get into is cyberbullying.
Yes, a campus can jettison a different laundry list of enforcement responsibilities by choosing to have no standards of student conduct whatsoever. They can choose an attitude like “Every possible behavior is either totally OK, or already a crime as already decided by the legislature and as enforced by the government, so we don’t need to do anything.”
Overall the OP’s main complaint seems to me to be that some campuses in some places have erected rules prohibiting what he sees as benign kids-being-kids behaviors. Then these campuses have used a dubiously legit (at best) standard of due process to enforce their dubious rules.
How much this is a real concern today and how much this is just straw-manning by outraged internet pundits is IMO a very open question.
But if this is the OP’s actual point of concern, then removing campus housing from campus control is a tiny and 95% irrelevant side show to it. In this view the Problem isn’t who owns the housing. The Problem is the existence of a student code of conduct applicable wherever / whenever the students are.
The way to fix a Problem is not to fix something nearby that’s tangentially related. The way to fix a Problem is go at the root cause.
The solution to the problem is to require universities to report sexual assault to law enforcement. Fortunately, they are already required to do that; the issue is that enforcement mechanisms were lax until recent years, not that there are dormitories.
Thank you. I appreciate the input.
My point is I while I think universities are pretty good at general security and safety issues on campus say the campus grounds and buildings, I just don’t think they are as effective in the students bedrooms and during weekend parties.
Yet rules state they must do both.
I’m not sure their is an easy answer. Your right though that they need to deal better with the root problem which is sexual behavior.
Let’s talk about this benign kids-being-kids behavior. While there are some private, religious universities that ban sexual activities between students (BYU is one example), I’m not aware of any state universities that do. There ARE often a bunch of rules, misguided or not, that are intended to delineate what constitutes consent. But this doesn’t become an issue unless someone either calls the police or reports the activity to campus authorities: in other words, unless one person doesn’t experience what happened as benign and follows the university procedure to report it. That means either the behavior wasn’t truly benign or that the person reporting it has some other motive in reporting it.
Since the OP says the post is not about false reports of rape (which, again, are as low or lower a percent of report rapes as the percentages of other reported crimes), the question becomes one of whether the university process after the report constitutes due process. And since Betsy DeVos just dumped the Obama Administration’s “Dear Colleague” policy, this becomes a focal question.
So what should due process look like? What constitutes the “preponderance of evidence” in a crime where there often is no physical evidence? Or should universities wait until the justice system has had a chance to convict or acquit, in which case, what do we do with the alleged rapists in the interim? Nothing? Would the university be liable for students who are raped by a student allowed to attend classes and university events while a rape case is decided in the courts?
It’s a tough issue.