Is there anything left to be learned about the mating habits of college students? For years, we have been subjected to a barrage of books about the rituals of drunken sex. In addition to Hooking Up and American Hook-up, there’s the recent Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus and the more explicit Fraternity Gang Rape. Whether you read The End of Sex or The End of Men, the situation has seemed pretty dire. Even if we understand that sexual assault as it’s commonly understood off campus is not very common on campus, there’s a lot of, well, regrettable sex.
Adults on campus generally subscribe to the view that the only way to fix this situation is to reeducate students about how, when, and with whom they should hook up, and then run any male student off campus if a woman accuses him of looking at her the wrong way. But a recent report from some ethnographers at Columbia University may offer a different way out of the problem.
Three years ago, the school launched a program called the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, or SHIFT. Researchers watched students in their natural habitats—at sports events, club meetings, dorm parties, and neighborhood bars—and took field notes. Now the research is going to be published in a book, The Sexual Project, describing “the often hidden forces of campus ecosystems that determine how and when assault happens.”
Many of the findings have not been released yet but the two lead researchers—Jennifer Hirsch, a medical anthropologist, and Claude A. Mellins, a clinical psychologist—recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education about their findings. Here’s how the Chronicle describes them:
So after thousands of hours of observations and interviews, what these ethnographers found is that hanging out in bedrooms is more likely to lead to sex. Indeed, the researchers suggest creating “alternative spaces whose availability might steer drunk kids away from ending up on a dorm bed.” The article explains:
Keen observers will recognize that keeping drunk (or even sober) students out of each other’s bedrooms has long been employed as a method for reducing nonconsensual or regrettable sex. College administrators used to do this with single-sex dorms and parietal rules, restricting the presence of nonresidents in dorms after certain hours of the evening. Sure, it’s possible for enterprising students to find secluded spaces on campus where they might have sex after an evening of carousing. But it’s not that easy. And frankly, it’s much harder to be enterprising when you’re falling-down drunk.
After the sexual revolution swept college campuses in the ’60s and ’70s, there were a few holdouts who clung to the old rules—mostly religious schools. Notre Dame, for instance, never caved. But there was also the late John Silber of Boston University, who received letters of complaint from parents that their children were being forced to live with roommates’ significant others for months on end. In a letter to the student newspaper, he wrote, “It never occurred to us that [BU] was in the business of providing weekend love nests for our students.”
In 1988 Silber instituted a rule that all guests had to be out of the dorms by 11 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and by 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Overnight guests might be permitted a few times a year, but only in rooms of people of the same sex. The students raised hell, but one wonders how many fewer sexual assaults, let alone drunken hookups, would take place under such a regime.
Sex, as most sociologists will tell you, is a matter of opportunity. It’s why we tend to marry people we work with or live near or go to school with. Infidelity is also a matter of opportunity. This doesn’t mean that every person who goes on a business trip with a colleague of the opposite sex is going to cheat. It just means that it’s far more likely to happen. And so the fact that college students enjoy each other’s company (drunk or sober) just a short walk from their bedrooms makes it more likely they will end up in bed together. This has proved to be an especially intractable problem at fraternities, where the party rooms and the bedrooms are often separated only by a staircase.
Announcing his decision in 2011 to make Catholic University’s dormitories single sex again, the school’s president John Garvey wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Like most schools, Columbia is unlikely to return to single-sex dorms. And in an era of “gender fluidity,” who knows what sorts of issues would arise from such a policy? But if college administrators do not think that students can be trusted to monitor their own sexual habits—and the number of students claiming that they have been assaulted or that sitting on someone’s bed renders them powerless to turn down sex suggests these students have not transitioned to adulthood yet—then a return to in loco parentis cannot be ruled out.
Instead of providing metaphorical safe spaces to protect students from speakers whose views they find offensive, college administrators might focus on providing literal safe spaces—lounges, snack bars, and other public areas—where students of the opposite sex can enjoy each other’s company without needing to sit on each other’s beds.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
