Newspapers are alive with stories (e.g., the Guardian) about California’s unanimously passed bill requiring each public college in the state to “adopt a policy concerning sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking”. Nobody seems to be asking the question “Should colleges run dorms?” If colleges got rid of the dorms, they could concentrate on teaching and not on complying with state and federal mandates regarding sex, a subject on which there is no evidence that university administrators are more expert than laypeople.
What to do with surplus on-campus dorms? Either sell off the real estate so that the former dormitories are no longer “on campus” or turn what had been dorms into collaborative study/lab spaces. Maybe students would work harder if they lived in a mixed-age commercial apartment building and saw the dreary jobs for which average college graduates depart every morning at 8:30 a.m. And certainly a student in a commercial apartment building who is the victim of a crime won’t waste his or her time calling a university administrator who will refer to a new state-mandated policy. He or she will dial 911 and people who actually know something about crime and criminals will show up.
To examine another aspect of the intersection of student life and law, see Caitlin Flanagan’s feature “The Dark Power of Fraternities”:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/
You have to understand that the “sexual assaults” that are going on on campus are, in the vast majority of cases, not of the type that could ever produce a criminal conviction. The accusers and the accused have often had relations before, the assaults are not reported until days or months later, the victim has consumed alcohol and does not have clear recollections, etc. No jury would ever convict. No prosecutor would waste her time bringing such a sure losing case to trial.
The whole reason for setting up the system of campus tribunals with lower standards of proof is to give the women who nevertheless feel victimized some way of punishing their “rapists” because they will never get anywhere in the real criminal justice system with its requirements of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, right to counsel, etc. All those so called “Constitutional rights” are, from the perspective of victim and their supporters, merely obstacles to justice. Since there is almost nothing (short of abrogating the Constitution) that feminists can do to change this inside the real legal system, they have tried to move the process to campus tribunals – if they can’t get Lothario sent to jail (and they can’t) they can at least get him expelled from college.
Converting the dorms to private housing would not change this. Students are already free to dial 911 and summon the local police to their dorms (who will do nothing for the reasons stated above). OTOH, there was a case at Stanford where a student was punished for a “rape” that occurred IN ALASKA over the winter break. As is typical in those cases, the local prosecutor in Alaska declined to prosecute. As a consolation prize to the victim, Stanford decided to withhold the “rapist’s” degree for two years.
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2014/08/14/alaskan-district-attorney-to-not-bring-charges-against-francis-assailant/
Universities apparently have the ability (perhaps under Title IX even the duty) to punish student on student misconduct even if it occurs thousands of miles off-campus so surely they could not get off so easy just by selling off the dorms .
Izzie, whatever the goals may be of people advocating on various sides of this issue, if the university is a place where the primary activities are physics lectures and labs, for example, it seems unlikely to me that taxpayers will continue to accept as reasonable the idea that they must fund salaries, benefits, and pensions for administrators whose job is to think about sex on campus.
I went to university for by BA in the late 1980s/ early 1990s. When we got on campus, the administrators made a big deal about how in the past, the universities had acted “in loco parentis”, that they used to act in place of parents and put in place all sorts of rules as to what students could and could not do, but now they knew better and things were much liberal. The thing is already at that time there were a ton of rules detailing what students could and couldn’t do out of class, so I had no idea during my college years what these people were talking about. I was told by older students that the rules got tightened considerably just before I got there.
However, I agree that one reform of higher education that should happen is the demystification of the entire American “college experience”. Higher education should be about taking a bunch of courses after you leave (not necessarily graduate!) high school because you are really, really interested in the subject, or because you think they will help you professionally. This could involve a long period of taking courses while working at a paying job, or not having a job and taking lots of courses in a shortish period, say two years, to get it over with. I would get rid of the BA, if you pass the right amount and mix of courses and maybe a final exam/ thesis, you get a degree related to professional certification, but maybe the BA can be kept as a reward for students that really like higher education and manage to pass lots of unrelated courses. The students, being adult, manage their own living and eating arrangements.
One problem is that many American universities and colleges, like the ones I went to, were deliberately situated in the countryside, and there are simply no good temporary housing options available unless the student provides them.
I do think it would make sense for colleges to contract with hospitality and catering companies to run hotels and restaurants near/ on campus, where people with student IDs could get discounts, and of course students would arrange for long term stays in the hotels, but non-students visiting the university or just staying in the area would also be customers. If the school itself ran courses in hospitality and catering, then its own students could run the hotels and restaurants. This would work really well with urban campuses. For rural campuses the key would be having different, competing companies run each dorm/ residential college, instead of contracting everything out to one company (often the school is its only real client!) as is the norm at present.
> it seems unlikely to me that taxpayers will continue to accept as reasonable the idea that they must fund salaries, benefits, and pensions for administrators whose job is to think about sex on campus.
And yet that is the reality. Increases in the cost of college have outrun inflation for decades now and a large part of it is due to the vast increase in college administrative staffs – diversity outreach officers and sexual harassment coordinators and ADA specialists and blah, blah, etc. Meanwhile, courses are increasing taught by low paid adjuncts. There is no real sign that this is about to stop any time soon. In fact, the momentum seems to be in the opposite direction – colleges are being put under pressure by the Federal government to INCREASE their efforts to prevent and prosecute campus sexual assaults (and doing so will require hiring even MORE administrators). Failure to comply with Title IX can result in loss of Federal funding.
There is lots and lots of government spending that is unreasonable. In fact, beyond unreasonable – one might say utterly ridiculous. I just visited Bath, ME where the Navy has contracted to build 3 “Zumwalt class” destroyers at a cost of $3.5 BILLION+ each. Originally there were supposed to be 30 of these, but the program ended up being so costly that they cut the order from 30 to 3. It’s likely that in the event of an actual war, these ships would be sent to the bottom by anti-ship missiles (or even suicide bombers in speedboats) in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, 3 ships are not all that useful for a global power – that’s 1.5 ships per hemisphere. $12 billion (the total cost of the program) would pay for more sexual harassment tribunals than even the most ardent feminist could bear. And that’s just one weapons system among dozens.
The way that I see this going (unfortunately) is that like the Soviet Union, the whole sh*tshow will go on indefinitely until it collapses from its own weight. Until the last day, the system will continue in accordance with its own crazy internal logic, with costs going up and up, and then one day the whole show will come crashing down. I hope I’m not around to see that because what follows will be even worse.
Izzie L,,
Yeah, there is nothing to prevent a university from stating “you must agree to, this code of conduct governing your behavior outside of the classroom, and we won’t let you attend classes and/ or give you a degree if we catch you not following it.” And this could state that you have to structure your sex life in a certain way, etc. There is nothing keeping employers from doing the same.
There are also lots of people in this country who would be thrilled if universities and employers did this. They would even be happy in a situation where being competent at your job/ studies was not really a big deal, as long as you lived cleanly.
But these things, if applied universally across the sector, are bad ideas, beyond “don’t keep other students from studying or destroy university property.” Even “don’t break the law” type codes are bad ideas, given what is actually in legal codes and how they are enforced. They inevitably tend to lead to conformist, stagnant societies, that eventually develop alot of hypocrisy and under the table dealing, defeating the original purpose of this stuff.
At the least we can recognize that puritanism is puritanism, even if the justification of the month will often change.
Ed – schools that are located in expensive urban areas may have the opposite problem. If, for example, Columbia University or NYU sold off all of its dorms, the market rate for students seeking housing might be unaffordable to most students. I suppose they could subsidize housing for students with financial need but this would negate a large part of whatever gains they made from selling off the dorms in the first place.
Arguably, there are educational and social benefits to putting the students together in dorms rather than having them scattered throughout a metropolitan area. There are also financial benefits to the school. Very few “commuter schools” are the recipients of large gifts from alumni compared to schools with their own on campus housing.
There is no doubt that the American college system is overdue for a restructuring. There are a handful of top schools and programs where there is a positive return on investment, but below that, most students are wasting their money (or their parents money or state money) getting degrees whose costs will exceed the increase in lifetime income. The country is oversupplied with generic “college graduates” so many of them work as baristas, etc. and would have been better off in some sort of technical school where they might have learned a useful skill. But it doesn’t seem like this is going to change anytime soon. Probably we will go on muddling thru with the current rotten system. A few marginal colleges will close due to demographic factors (the overall number of college age students is falling) but most will stay in business turning out semi-worthless degrees because despite all the talk, most middle class students still aspire for a college degree. You might suggest to OTHER people that they not get a degree, but you will want YOUR kids to get one because they are special and deserve it.
My idea for urban schools is that the school sign a contract with one or more hotel chains, to either convert existing dorms to a hotel, or to use an existing nearby hotel owned by the chain. As part of the contract, students would be able to rent rooms at the hotel long term as a discount, or the schools would reserve a block of rooms long term at a discounted price for use by students and in some cases by faculty. The hotel would have a few rooms that it would rent at higher rates to people visiting the school, or just tourists who want to stay in the university district. With most of their rooms rented on a guaranteed basis throughout the year at a low margin, with some rooms that they would rent on higher margin, the hotel would be profitable enough for it to be worth it to the chain, and the students would not be paying market rent. The school could also do this with real estate companies with apartments in buildings the company owns.
The idea is to get away from school-as-community, which I’m not really opposed to but think was way overdone. Schools would still put on social events for the students, plus alot of stuff open to the public but which students could attend at a discount to whatever the school was charging.
Personally, my daughter has sixteen years until she hits college age, and my wife is not American, so I am hoping to avoid the current US higher ed system either by it changing in the next ten years, or through relocation (because like with health care, things are really awful with the system that are unique to the US). But I have no idea what advice to give parents now. Its a worse trap than people think, since graduating “too high” can actually bar you from much of the labor market through being overqualified, but graduating “too low” or not graduating can bar you from the labor market altogether. Change will come either with entry level employment opportunities expanding again so that the degree is less of a requirement, or collapsing to the point where its irrelevant, there are no regular jobs available anyway.
Ed, I don’t think it is puritanism per se but rather a question of situational ethics. Who, whom? as Lenin said. Whose ox is being gored? During the last administration, we heard a lot from the left that “dissent is patriotic”. Now, under Obama, not so much. When it suited the feminist agenda to get government OUT of the bedroom, they demanded that. Now when it suits their agenda to get the government back INTO the bedroom (to police drunken hook-ups, to pay for contraception), they ask for that. As Philip said, you have to look at the goals of advocates -that’s all they care about. They really have no principles, just goals. Theoretically, we have public servants who are supposed to be looking out for the broader public interest, but in reality they are subject to regulatory capture, either by ideologues (EPA taking its cues from the Sierra Club under Democrat administrations) or by industry (EPA taking its cues from energy companies under Republican administrations) .
Believing that colleges should disband the dorms reflects a profound misunderstanding of the primary benefit, for most students, of going to college. College isn’t about the coursework…it’s about the networking opportunities. Coursework is just the excuse one uses in order to con other people into paying for it (and, of course, keeping a large number of otherwise useless people employed in managing the enterprise).
If “college isn’t about the coursework…it’s about the networking opportunities,” then the role of the administators is to ensure that students network in a comfortable environment without having to worry about unwanted sexual advances!
Too bad about the coursework, but maybe someday we will get some institutions that actually do higher education, the previous institutions who did this having been too corrupted. Thats the way its happened in the past.
lelnet: Are you sure that the typical college is “about the networking opportunities”? Since the majority of Americans attend at least “some college” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States ), by definition the people one meets in college are more or less average. So the “networking opportunity” in college is no better than the “networking opportunity” at the local supermarket (probably worse than at Whole Foods, given the income level required to buy free-range carrots there). And actually given that young people have less money and power in society than middle-aged people, the networking opportunities at college should actually be worse than in a non-college environment. Finally, what would stop people from networking during daylight hours on a college campus devoted to learning?
Izzie L:
The increase in tuition has more than one cause. Yes, the growth of administration is one factor, but so is the building spree one sees on campuses today which provide, for example, state-of the-art fitness centers.
Another factor related to the tuition increase at public institutions is the fact that state governments provide less revenue to university general funds. In the 1990s, my institution received 2/3 of its general fund revenue from the State of Michigan and the rest came from tuition. Now, only about 20% of money entering our general fund comes from the state and the remaining 80% comes from tuition dollars.
The “networking opportunities” at a place like Harvard or MIT are considerably better than those at say Mt. Ida College or Regis College. If you are a below average student attending a below average college, you might indeed be better off doing your “networking” at Whole Foods. OTOH, if you are at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg might be your roommate and you could end up a billionaire.
The college pricing system in the US is not rational. Aside from state schools which are subsidized, the cost of say a Yale degree is not significantly more than the cost of a degree from Connecticut College, and yet the value is very different. Likewise, the cost of say an engineering degree, which is actually worth something in the market, is no different than an art history degree which will qualify you for a job at Starbucks.
Likewise, colleges don’t act as businesses – the acceptance rate at top schools is under 10% and yet they do not increase the number of seats. A little exclusivity is good – if you are a hot club you want to turn away some losers at the rope line to make those getting in feel special. But what business would turn away 90+% of their potential customers?
Izzie, paying for contraception is not getting in your bedroom since nobody is making you use it. However it is the government job not to get stuck supporting single parents with kids who nobody wanted in the first place. There are gazillion studied showing that money spent on contraception pays off in many ways from direct payments to crime rates.