CW for discussion of SV.
I am in the middle of the Gangster Capitalism season about the Falwells and Liberty University. It is outraging in all of the ways you might expect, but it is also frightening how much the differences between Liberty and the typical contemporary US university are differences of degree, rather than kind.
The first episode concerns the sex and booze and real estate shenanigans of Falwell, Jr, his wife, and a pool boy. Scandalous, sure, but in a kind of fun, late Burt Reynolds character way.
The Liberty stuff is terrifying. Liberty Online, Liberty's sketchy AF e-learning program, put the college on a very solid financial footing, at the expense of thousands of students who took out millions of dollars in federal loans they can't pay back b/c what Liberty delivered was worthless. (This is the tl;dr version.) If you feel good and confident about all of your university's online programs, cast the first stone.
But Liberty's SV response is what really shook me. Episode 3 describes the experience of a few Liberty undergraduates who were raped while they were students. In one instance, a student was grabbed and raped as she was coming out of a tunnel connecting east and west campus. The student eventually left Liberty, after a lot of ugly gaslighting from the administration. Her roommate carried on her fight, which was primarily to get better lighting and security cameras at the location where the rape occurred. Liberty said it was not necessary.
In the grand scheme of things, a few lights and video cameras are not a heavy lift for Liberty. Parsing the responses from the administration, the only logic I can see is that things that would make campus safer also draw attention to the potential dangers that exist on campus.
This is evil, full stop. It also intersects with several things I think about a lot, like infrastructure, the idea of a campus, what a university is, and security theater. When I adjuncted at Boston University, the tour guides would lovingly caress this security phone like Vanna White while they explained how it worked to future tuition check writers. This was the late 1990s, when maybe not everyone had a cell phone, and I don't want to dismiss the actual value of this technology in making campuses safer. At the same time, the fetishization of the security phone seemed like an implicit promise from the university "you can send your kid to school in the city, and she won't get raped - sign here and tuition is due on the 15th."
Since 9/11, we've heard a lot about security theater, taking off our shoes at the airport, etc. The blue phones on campus are another form of security theater. Among other things, they reinforce the myth that campus rapes happen b/c Ruffians sneak onto campus, rather than because of the nice boy in your econ class who roofies you. But they create the idea of an campus infrastructure focused on keeping students safe.
What happened at Liberty was worse. The exchanges between the SV survivor's roommate and Liberty administration often included assertions from the administration that Liberty had the "safest campus on the East Coast." In other words, any visible infrastructure to mitigate or monitor possible threats to campus safety would make the campus seem less safe. Of course, making any change would entail recognizing that a rape had happened on campus, and that the administration had listened to that survivor.
I am not saying this would go down exactly the same way where you go to school, or where you work, or where I work, but in terms of chasing enrollment and tuition dollars, there is an incentive for campuses to seem safe, which can be at odds with campuses being safe. In this context, you will hear schools brag about their journalism school, their champion debate team, their fancy telescope, their art museum, whatever, but I doubt you will ever see a school brag about the quality of the support it offers SV survivors, b/c parents would rather imagine it could never happen to their kid.
In a related vein, the podcast episode detailed how Liberty deadass falsified its Clery report campus crime data. The title IX expert on the episode points out that it's not uncommon for schools to have suspiciously low SV numbers, b/c they don't report rapes, a process familiar to fans of The Wire as "juking the stats." Honestly, considering how low Liberty's fine ($120K) was for lying about campus crime, it's probably good business to do this, in terms of attracting tuition-paying students.
Your school might manage this differently than Liberty does, but your school just might be more concerned about if a specific rape occured on or off campus than you might be. As I understand it, if a student rapes another student off campus, that does not count, as far as the university's crime stats.
Finally, and more generally, in terms of Liberty being a virulent form of the US university ca 2022, it's clear that there was not one of those "systemic failures" we hear about re the university's Title IX response. The system worked just the way they set it up, which was to gaslight, and shift blame from the institution and assailant to the victim.
TL;DR? It is extremely difficult for universities to provide effective support to their students who are SV survivors b/c seeing and hearing SV survivors is bad for the brand. That's true at Liberty, and it's probably true to one extent or another at your school.
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