This is in today’s NY Times. Fight Against Sex Assaults Holds Colleges to Account – NYTimes.com. I find the manner in which the young woman was apparently treated in line with how an administration would try to silence anything harmful to the “brand”. I don’t know if that is the case here, but I worry that the problems are bad enough, and widespread enough, that something has gone seriously wrong. Anyway, I commented:
“…many administrators and experts…say…that while the world has been changing, higher education has done a poor job of understanding the shifts and responding…”
Sure, administrators say that (“Shocked, schocked! that this was going on.”), but just the opposite is true. Administrators have learned the lessons of modern business all too well: have a good marketing department, protect the brand, but not the consumer (once quaintly called the “student”).
Though the case reported here is particularly abhorrent, it appears to be representative of an prevailing attitude at Columbia. Clark Kerr saw this attitude in universities as early as 1980 when he noted that,
“[the shift] from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of American higher education..”
The move toward “consumerism” not only leads administrators to value marketing over integrity and student safety; it also pervades the whole system. Making students happy doesn’t just include letting them party (even if a few get raped); it also includes not stressing them by educating them. Here is just one example from Columbia.
“…one in five recent graduates of teaching programs at Columbia…were given low marks for how much they were able to improve student test scores…” (From NYTimes 8/15/2013 article on Bloomberg’s Scorecard)
For more about what is happening to higher education, go to my blog, inside-higher-ed.com. You might be shocked.”
Here are some posts about Columbia: Scammed Grad Students Bloomberg’s Report Card STEM? Anyone Can Go to Col.?
One sexual is one too many.
That said, I have to wonder if there is any more sexual assault on a college campus now than there ever was in the past. I’ve been hearing that “sexual assault if rampant on campus,” but when one asks for data, one gets on answers, just generalities.
When I was in college decades ago, we would hear that rape was occurring wholesale on campus. Ask a student from another college and, yes, it was wholesale on his campus too.
Any young woman sexually assaulted must report it immediately so that the perpetrator is dealt with. As I said, one assault is one too many.
So much of this “epidemic” has all the earmarks of urban legend.
Are college administrator “covering up”? If they are, then such cover ups must be exposed.
Question is: Where is the data supporting the allegation?
Thanks for you comment. You make a good point about there being little data available. I don’t think administrators want much data to be available about anything that could hurt their image. Thus, we can’t really know the answer to your question, and probably never will.
I have not personally had to deal with criminality. Dealing with people trying to get me to dumbing down courses to cater to a few students is bad enough. I would be livid if I had to deal with people trying to hide sexual assaults, or to discourage students from reporting them.
In today’s New York Times (5/11/2014) there is an op-ed by Ross Douthat “Rape and the College Brand” that focuses on that same “brand” issue.