[M]any non-Christians feel alienated by having such a symbol in their residences…. The Christmas tree must go…. As Stanford sees itself as a leader in the struggle for multiculturalism, it needs to reach out and modify itself to the different religious communities on this campus.74
Ryan's reference to “multiculturalism” resonates strangely: Why would it not be more “multicultural” to include decorations from all religious traditions represented in a dorm, rather than from none? As with the debate over Western Culture, the multicultural regime never opts for genuine pluralism. The preferred solution always involves a community of belief that excludes the West.
Christmas trees do not represent a logical stopping point for these annual denunciations. At Stanford, almost any reference to the Judeo-Christian West is now experienced as per se oppressive and may invite reprobation. Even dorm gift givers (students who are paired up with others during the holiday season to give gifts) are no longer called “Secret Santas”—that reminded residents of Santa Claus, another symbol of Christian oppression. The onetime “Secret Santas” have been renamed “Secret Snowflakes” or even, in one dorm, “Equally Accepting Nondenominational Gift Bearers.” In the process, even a totally innocuous symbol of goodwill acquired a negative ideological connotation. If nothing else, one cannot help but wonder what sort of a childhood some of Stanford's multiculturalists must have had.
The New Puritanism
Given the stress the university places on the value of personal liberation, one might expect students to enjoy an unrivaled degree of freedom in personal matters—freedom to form social liaisons and to join different groups, freedom to explore a wide variety of sexual practices and partners, even the freedom to indulge in illegal drugs without fear of punishment. The multicultural academy would seem a world without restraints.
But liberation and freedom are not identical. As the multicultural treatment of religion indicates, the need for some to be liberated (from traditional mores or from Santa Claus, for example) implies a corollary need to restrict others’ freedom (to use bathrooms unmolested or to display Christmas trees, for instance). And there are other areas where multicultural liberation limits rather than expands the freedom of students—where students’ desire to have fun is given far less free rein than much of the rhetoric would seem to require.
Two closely related examples involve Stanford's troubled fraternity system and the dismal dating scene.75 Once home to over 40 fraternities, the university has in recent decades reduced the fraternity presence to less than 10 houses.76 (There are no housed sororities.) Less than a quarter of students now “go Greek,” but despite declining numbers the system has remained the center of campus social life, with fraternities and sororities hosting parties open to the entire campus almost every weekend. Nevertheless, despite these parties’ ability to facilitate social interaction and to increase “knowledge of the power of the mind” (to borrow Timothy Leary's words) through a liberation from sobriety, they have become a regular focus of attack.
In 1988, a “frat crackdown” began, as Fraternal Affairs Adviser Joe Pisano promised that he would take a “be good or be gone” tone with fraternities.77 Since then minor infractions or even incidents unrelated to house activities have become cause for obloquy and quarter-long probations, as Stanford's administration has declared war on fraternities:
In 1992, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity received “a sharp warning” when an unknown assailant set fire to a tree outside their house and instigated other dangerous acts against members of the fraternity. While a similar attack on the homosexual or black community centers probably would have prompted an immediate university investigation, the fraternity was warned that if the danger continued, it would lose the house.78
In 1992, the Sigma Chi fraternity was placed on social probation following a party in which its “Robin Hood” decorations were preposterously declared a “fire hazard.”79
In 1988, the University Task Force on Fraternities and Sororities effectively sought an end to the fraternity system by attempting to prohibit the “subjective selection” of students for housing.80
While alumni outcry has precluded outright elimination of housed fraternities, the university has prohibited unhoused fraternities from building new homes.81 Since many fraternities are able to raise money from their national charters, the move would actually save the university money by reducing its housing obligations. Nevertheless, in a 1992 issue of the Inter-Fraternity Council Newsletter, Dean Michael Jackson censured fraternal housing, writing, “The notion of students excluding others from access to certain university housing for subjective reasons is one which the University does not seek to foster beyond what has already been grandfathered into the University's housing system.”82 Of course, there is no similar problem preventing Ujamaa or other ethnic theme houses from allocating housing based on “subjective reasons.”
The animus against the Greek system, and the attempts to eliminate it, accompany more informal stigmatization of Greek students, with the usual hysterical denunciations. Thus, junior Jessica Bar attacked fraternities for sexism in a 1992 letter to the Stanford Daily. “Women, wake up!” she wrote. “These men for whom you are starving yourselves are the same ones who objectify you and dehumanize you, who judge you on the basis of your looks and condemn you for showing any signs of insurgency.”83 According to Matthew Moran, a black Inter-Fraternity Rush Chairman, members of the Black Student Union, MEChA (the Latino student group), and the Office of Residential Education dissuade freshmen from joining the Greek system.84 Arturo Armenta, a member of both the Latino community and the Greek system, agreed that MEChA leaders “not only influence students to avoid Rush, they ingrain the idea that to become Greek is to become ‘racist, sexist and homophobic.’”85 Partly in response to “challenges from campus groups and the administration,” sororities and fraternities in 1989 began to require that new members “attend workshops focused on discussing racism, sexism and homophobia.”86
At first glance, the stigma attached to Greek social organizations is puzzling. Social interaction between men and women, of the kind found at campus-wide fraternity parties, date functions, or other Greek mixers, would seem like an absolutely necessary precondition for any kind of sexual revolution. But the need to liberate victims from the forces of oppression supposedly embodied in fraternities (racism, sexism, and homophobia) trumps such practical concerns. Multicultural opposition to the Greek system perfectly illustrates that the flip side of liberation for some (anti-Greek racial minorities, women, and homosexuals) is reduced freedoms for others (Greeks and those who attend Greek functions). For every social barrier removed in the name of liberation, Stanford's administration often imposes new restrictions elsewhere.
The new Puritanism sometimes manifests itself in open hostility to the dating scene. In 1987, for instance, Stanford's RAs and RFs started banning parties in which roommates would find one another blind dates. These parties represented a prime social opportunity for timid dorm residents to meet other students, to mix with the opposite sex (in short, to get a date), and to develop important social skills. Indeed, such events would seem essential if thousands of university-subsidized condoms are not to go to waste. But RA Jerilyn Mendoza explained that such events were baleful because they were based on heterosexual social interaction, which is “very uncomfortable to people who are gay and aren't out of the closet.”87 However innocuous a behavior may be, the new Puritans can rule it impermissible if it conflicts with the need to liberate protected minority groups.
Perhaps the most blatant contradictions between the values of liberation theology and the new Puritanism occur in the realm of sexual conduct. Multiculturalists are not always the defenders of sexual spontaneity on campus. Beginning in the fall of 1991, the Stanford community learned a great deal about the need to limit a new phenomenon called “date rape” when the university proposed a new sexual conduct policy. The policy was proposed after the release of an 18-month study by the Stanfor
d Rape Education Project, which concluded that sexual assault was more pervasive at Stanford than most would have thought possible. On the basis of 70 questions asked each of 1,250 students, the study concluded that 26 percent of undergraduate women and 33.5 percent of graduate women had been sexually coerced. The numbers shocked even outside of Stanford: the San Francisco Examiner luridly headlined its article on the report “Date rape common on Stanford campus—33% of females forced to have sex.”88 According to the Rape Education Project's survey, not only had one in three women at Stanford had “full sexual activity when they did not want to,” but one in eight men had been forced to have sex against their will. The numbers implied that sexual assault was vastly more common at Stanford than in the nation as a whole. (By contrast, an FBI study of 59,000 households conducted at the same time concluded that one in 1,000 women were raped each year.)89
As if to punctuate these numbers, a high-profile sexual assault case hit campus in the fall of 1991. Just as the proposed sexual conduct policy was spotlighting the date-rape problem, a 17-year-old freshman woman accused senior Stuart Thomas of sexually assaulting her in his dorm room (the name of the woman was withheld because she was a minor at the time of the incident). Within a few days, the news was all over campus: “Student reports sexual assault in Stern Hall room,” “Reported rape stuns Stern Hall residents,” announced front-page headlines in the Stanford Daily.90
After the concurrent shock of the rape statistics and the accusation of date rape faded, it soon became clear that the details of both were less concrete than initially publicized. In the Thomas case, it was soon discovered the young woman did nothing she did not consent to. She admitted to drinking eight shots of liquor under her own power. More important, the woman also told police that she never felt “any intimidation, fear, or threat” from Thomas. She consented to the act of sexual intercourse—twice—as well as to oral copulation. Her participation was active (according to the police report, she rubbed his back as he undressed her), and indeed, at one point while she was undressed she borrowed his robe, walked downstairs to the women's bathroom, and then returned to his second-floor room to continue the session.91
Upon reviewing the evidence, the district attorney realized that no jury would convict Thomas of rape and instead sought the lesser count of “illegal sex with a minor,” or “statutory rape” (which does not involve the issue of consent, only age). Although Thomas was clearly guilty of serving alcohol to an underage woman and taking advantage of her resulting lack of judgment, there was no sexual assault. Had the incident occurred just a few weeks later, after the woman's eighteenth birthday, there would have been no case at all. Understandably, however, the woman regretted the whole incident afterwards. She, as much as Thomas, had accepted the multicultural dogma that “people are going to have sex anyway” and that “abstinence is simply not a viable option.”
The particular symbolism of this incident, involving a victimized woman who complained about a white male, posed a poignant catch-22 for Stanford's multiculturalists. It was ideologically impossible for them to side with the man. But siding with the woman would require calling into question the kinds of promiscuous attitudes they advanced in so many other contexts.92 After all, nothing happened between Thomas and the woman that was not encouraged by Timothy Leary and Dean Ramsey-Perez. Taking either side would undermine their political coalition. Given the extreme publicity this incident received, however, it could not just be swept under the rug. The multicultural coalition required a solution that would put the blame squarely on Thomas (the white heterosexual male) but would not require a rethinking of the broadly held attitudes about the desirability of the sexual revolution.
Stanford's multiculturalists solved this dilemma by shifting the focus of the woman's sexual assault charge. The woman told police that she had felt a “certain coercion” due to Thomas's size and “the smooth, persuading manner” in which he talked to her, and that her judgment was impaired due to the alcohol he had served her.93 If the emphasis was placed on these circumstances, the sensational charge that the woman had been “coerced” into sex could overshadow the fact that she had consented. Since “coercion” was synonymous with rape, the rape charge against Thomas could still be justified (even if the district attorney did not prosecute), and it would thus be possible to avoid confronting the underlying moral questions. Careful observers, however, noted that this usage of “coercion” required a certain linguistic legerdemain. The definition of the word had subtly changed from meaning physical force to meaning nothing more than verbal persuasion.94
The Thomas case provides a microcosm of multicultural thinking about rape. In the Stanford Rape Education Project's survey, as in the Thomas case, the devil was in the details of its definition of “date rape,” which told a somewhat different story than the shocking headlines. Eighty percent of the women and 93 percent of the men claiming to have been coerced into sexual activity did not label their experience as “rape.” Only 10.6 percent of women who had been sexually coerced “definitely” considered their experience to be rape, and only 2 percent reported the incident to police.95
According to Rape Education Project spokeswoman Vivian Vice, “Women had been raped who really didn't even know they had been raped.”96 Dr. Alejandro Martinez, director of Stanford's Counseling and Psychological Services, explained this phenomenon by claiming that because most of these instances involved an acquaintance, it might be difficult for the victim to make sense of the situation. “It's ambiguous to them,” Martinez stated. “They feel bad, but they don't know what they feel bad about.”97
A more likely explanation, however, is that the other 89.4 percent did not understand the multicultural definition of “rape.” In the Stanford survey, persistent argumentation alone was considered sexual assault. The survey never actually asked whether students had ever been raped, leaving that judgment to the organizers of the Rape Education Project, who presumably knew better. Instead the students were asked:
Have you ever engaged in full sexual activity (defined as vaginal, anal or oral intercourse) with someone when you didn't want to because you were overwhelmed by his or her continual arguments and pressure? Because he or she gave you alcohol or drugs? Because he or she threatened or used some degree of force (twisting your arms, holding you down, etc.) to make you?98
Thus, a woman who does not consider herself a rape victim, but who regrets having been talked into engaging in sexual activity, qualifies as a rape victim. Once again, the Thomas case provides the model: His crime—seducing (or “coercing”) a woman who was later regretful—fit the multicultural definition of rape precisely, even if it did not at all fit the legal definition. When verbal pressure means coercion and coercion means rape, then the number of rapes will become as large as the number of seductions that are later regretted.
The university's new sexual conduct policy is predicated upon the Rape Education Project's expansive definition of rape. The policy declares, “Sexual assault by force or coercion, including deliberate coercion through use of drugs or alcohol, is absolutely unacceptable at Stanford University.” An employee of the Dean of Student's Office said that coercion could constitute “verbal pressure without threat” or being “belittled, shamed, or pressured, either verbally or emotionally” into an unwanted situation.99 Doug Dupen, deputy director of Employee Relations and Human Resources Services, who had helped write the new policy, noted that the prohibited coercion was broader in scope than the category of “coercion through drugs or alcohol,” and even suggested that it might include “a moonlit night on the beach.”100 President Kennedy further managed to blur distinctions by noting that “yes” might mean “no,” when there was “even a hint of coercion” or a loss of normal capacity could be detected.101
One critic of what he calls the “rape crisis movement” is UC Berkeley professor of social welfare Neil Gilbert. Professor Gilbert notes:
The estimates of sexual assault calculated by feminist researchers are advocacy numb
ers, figures that embody less an effort at scientific understanding than an attempt to persuade the public that a problem is vastly larger than commonly recognized…. Under the veil of social science, rigorous research methods are employed to measure a problem defined so broadly that it forms a vessel into which almost any human difficulty can be poured…. Among those who practice social advocacy, this is known as “consciousness raising” and is deemed a respectable function of advocacy numbers.102
While preventing sexual assault is a laudable and serious goal, the Rape Education Project unfortunately has succumbed to the temptation Professor Gilbert described. Its findings are “advocacy numbers,” not real facts.
The rape crisis movement transmits its exaggerated fears to freshmen yearly. One of the most carefully orchestrated orientation programs is “Sex in the ’90s,” a series of skits on health issues and rape prevention with such titles as “Nonoxynol-9,” “The Right Time,” and “The Party Zone.”103 In 1992, organizer Kathy Zonana announced to the audience that one out of every three Stanford women, and one out of every eight Stanford men, had been raped—perhaps in the hope that frequent repetition might make these numbers more credible.104
One telling skit even portrayed the morning after a “multicultural” date rape. The rapist did not realize he had committed rape the night before until he talked about the event to a friend. Similarly, the victim realized that she had been raped only after discussion with a confidant. “It must have been the alcohol,” they both conclude. At the end of the skit, the victim was escorted to the hospital, and the confused rapist was left to ponder, and regret, his folly.105
Of course, it is ludicrous to believe that anyone who had been forcefully violated would not know it and bear physical marks. But since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, a woman might “realize” that she had been “raped” the next day or even many days later. Under these circumstances, it is unclear who should be held responsible. If the alcohol made both of them do it, then why should the woman's consent be obviated any more than the man's? Why is all blame placed on the man?
The Diversity Myth Page 18
