Inside Higher Ed
This article is not about the specifics of the sexual assault scandal at Cornell University. It instead focuses on the responsibility of educators and national fraternity headquarters staff everywhere to teach college men about rape.
This week, ABC News obtained images of Snapchat messages that a fraternity member allegedly sent his chapter brothers. In one of them, the “boys” were urged to “come whip it out” in the room where the gang rape of a female student allegedly occurred. Everything about this—including the insufficiency or, in some instances, total absence of teaching and learning about sexual assault on campuses—is disgustingly wrong.
I pledged a fraternity in college and served as chapter president during my senior year; I remain an active member via an alumni chapter here in Los Angeles. Also, I started my higher education career working in Greek life at Indiana University. Thousands of fraternity men have participated in research studies I have conducted over my 23-year faculty career. Several others have been mentees and students in my courses. Moreover, I have written extensively on college men and masculinities, including some publications that focus specifically on those in fraternities.
Despite tragedies like the one that occurred at Cornell, I am a staunch proponent of all that is good about the college fraternity. I am staunchly opposed, though, to the dangerous rape cultures that some create and sustain. Shamefully, what reportedly happened at Cornell occurs in too many places. To be sure, one rape is too many. But I know for sure that this highly publicized case is not a one-off.
Rape has been a long-standing phenomenon on campuses. That fraternity houses are often especially dangerous places for women is an open secret. It long has been. So why, then, is not more done to stop it? Who is most responsible for addressing this? I argue here, as I have done elsewhere, that higher education institutions are culpable when we do too little to teach male students about the most harmful and problematic ways they have been conditioned to behave as men. Educational negligence makes fraternity headquarters complicit, too.
I am an educator. Therefore, I feel strongly that teaching, learning and accountability about sexual violence are essential. Colleges and universities must hold themselves more accountable for ensuring that men within and beyond fraternities understand what constitutes consent, sexual assault and sexual harassment. Fraternities with chapters on campuses also have a responsibility to ensure that every member receives deep, ongoing training on these topics.
At too many colleges and universities, the approach to “educating” young men about this is an obligatory compliance, “box-checking to say we did it” exercise. Sessions are typically one-time and too short. They tend to lack moments for students to engage in critical conversations; instead, they are expected to listen to facilitators who talk at them in sanitized ways.
This is not enough. It helps explain, at least in part, the persistence and pervasiveness of this particular problem in higher education. It is past time to tackle this with more serious educational interventions. Young men need specific examples, scenarios and repeated moments for deep individual and collective reflection. They need more conversations that will ultimately help them exercise good sexual judgment even when all parties are consenting. They would also benefit greatly from substantive opportunities to rehearse how they would intervene when their peers engage in behaviors that put women and others at risk of being sexually assaulted.
Furthermore, they could use assistance, support and frameworks to reach nonnegotiable agreements about what will and will not occur in their chapters, the cultures they are collectively committed to upholding in their houses and the expectations they have for each other as brothers, friends and men.
College men will not get there on their own. They will learn very little, if anything at all, about masculinities, rape and other topics pertaining to manhood in their academic courses. The elimination of gender studies programs will worsen this. The defunding, renaming and elimination of women’s centers and gender programming on campuses disadvantages people of all genders. During this anti-DEI era, men have even fewer spaces to become better versions of themselves. At too many places, male collegians now have no place to go to learn about gender. They are on their own. They need more support and educational opportunities.
I conclude with a call to action for every college and university in America—not only those that host fraternity chapters, but every place that enrolls and graduates men. They must do more to teach male students about a range of manhood-focused topics, including but not limited to sexual violence. My call to action extends to every fraternity headquarters in the nation, including my own. More must be done to offer substantive, rigorous, consciousness-raising and practically useful learning experiences to undergraduate members, including but not limited to those who live in frat houses. These experiences ought to be designed and delivered by experts on college men and masculinities.
