To the Editor:

H

eather Mac Donald’s critique [“The Fainting Couch at Columbia,” September] begins by placing innocuous words such as “new required programming,” “participation options,” “reflection,” and “work of art” in quotation marks to suggest something sinister about Columbia’s Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.  In doing so, she announces to readers all they need to know about her agenda.  Subtracting the venom from her column leaves only a series of trumped-up attacks, each of them easily explained or rebutted.

Yes, the initiative is mandatory for our students because we deem the prevention of sexual assault important enough to warrant the requirement.  No, this is not the only obligation beyond academic performance mandated for our students.  Yes, this was the first year of a new initiative, and while goals and objectives were stated clearly, we also experienced the roll-out challenges to be expected for any such effort involving more than 28,000 students.  No, there is no university-mandated code of sexual ethics, a fact made clear by Ms. Mac Donald’s lamentation about the variety of student participation we allow.

The efforts at Columbia to address sexual harassment and assault, like those at many other higher-education institutions around the country, are part of a larger responsibility to ensure educational opportunity in a deeply diverse, shared learning environment.  Indeed, Congress long ago focused federal attention on these issues when it enacted Title IX to prohibit sex discrimination in education.  The Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative at Columbia introduced last spring grows directly out of this responsibility.

Perhaps most tellingly, Ms. Mac Donald labels our Sexual Violence Response unit a “campus-rape boondoggle” (her words).  The unit runs three rape-crisis centers across our Morningside and University Medical Center campuses and provides 24-hour, confidential assistance to our students in need.  There are couches at these offices, though the reference to Victorian fainting couches offered by Ms. Mac Donald has surely not been the focus of the students who seek help there.

Suzanne B. Goldberg

Columbia University

New York City

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fter reading Heather Mac Donald’s essay about Columbia’s new sexual-respect initiative, I started to wonder whether there was formal faculty approval for this assault on personal liberty. It is clear that this is treated as an “academic” exercise, with classes, papers, and so forth. Did the faculty approve this? Ms. Mac Donald says that the requirement covers both graduate and undergraduate students. Are law students, medical students, and architecture- and engineering students also forced to submit to this totalitarian exercise?

The requirement seems to be imposed only on students. What is the justification for letting administrators and faculty off the hook? Surely the most powerful members of the university community are in a position to do the most damage. Perhaps President Lee Bollinger would like to set an example by becoming a participant.

Larry D. Nachman

Paradise Point, Australia

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eather Mac Donald’s essay aptly highlighted how Columbia has lost sight of academic excellence in favor of encouraging females to think of themselves as potential victims and believe that all men are potential rapists. Ms. Mac Donald makes it quite clear just what Columbia’s nonsense program “achieves”: instilling in students a fear of the opposite sex. If Columbia instead strove to instill in them self-respect, female students would understand that they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, and male students would understand that pestering a girl or getting her drunk is unkind.

John Richmond

Tring, England

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am very glad to have read, at last, a discussion of Columbia’s sexual-respect initiative written by an adult, of a kind rarely seen on a university campus!

Shortly before I retired, I was sent from the dean a warning to refrain from making “unnecessary sexual humor.” I responded by stating that I had never said anything in class I would not have said in the presence of my daughters, his daughter, or our wives. His reply was that this “was not good enough.” Vexed, I pointed out that I taught literature, a human expression disproportionately concerned with the follies of man’s sexual impulses. Would this helpful administrator, I asked, please send me guidelines to help me distinguish between the appropriate and inappropriate commentaries allowed by my discipline? And would he next define what was necessary or unnecessary political humor? I received no answer, but the exchange went into my file, where it rests among papers describing many other similar incidents.

Frank Gado

White River Junction, Vermont

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et’s assume for a moment that there really is a sexual-assault problem at Columbia University, one so serious as to justify Columbia’s bloated sexual-assault bureaucracy. What, then, do the following “options” in the just released 2015 Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative have to do with preventing sexual assault, a mission which Executive Vice President Suzanne Goldberg deems “important enough to warrant the requirement” of attending the initiative?

• A workshop on “Addressing Hetero Privilege
• The film, Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up, which “demonstrates the toll of deeply held stereotypes and rigid gender policing”
• A workshop on “Basics of Sexuality,” from which students will “learn more about gender identity, sexual orientation, and unraveling shame caused by stereotypes and misinformation”
• Videos on “relaxing gender roles, norms, and identities”

Connoisseurs of academic identity politics will spot in this bureaucratic mission creep a nascent struggle between traditional feminist apparatchiks and a parvenu class of gender theorists, who are now colonizing the victim territory once held by females, which was itself seized from blacks. Perhaps as a sop to old-school feminists, Columbia’s 2015 Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative does offer some quaint consciousness-raising items right out of Ms. magazine circa 1976, such as the film Miss Representation, which “looks sharply at the ways gender stereotypes in mainstream media and culture underrepresent [sic] women in positions of power and influence.”

But this warmed-over Betty Friedanism raises the same question: What does it have to do with preventing sexual assault? Executive Vice President Goldberg says that I have an “agenda” apparent in the fact that I put quotation marks around phrases from the 2014 Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative. She does not spell out what that agenda is, but I am willing to cop to one: preserving the university as a place for studying civilization’s most sublime works of imagination and ingenuity.

The “agenda” of the Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative is clear, however: indoctrinating students in a particular and very recent ideology about liberated sexual behavior and the constructed nature of “gender.”

Executive Vice President Goldberg nevertheless claims that there is “no university-mandated code of sexual ethics,” as evidenced by the “variety of student participation we allow.” Some Columbia students may be forgiven for failing to feel grateful for this magnanimous “allowance.” The “variety of participation” extends only to the medium in which the message of gender fluidity and casual promiscuity is conveyed. Students who believe that the best way to show sexual respect is to marry one’s desired sexual partner—or even just engage in extended courtship—will find no “participation option” that reflects their own values. Instead, students are confronted by a menu of embarrassingly eager validations of the squalid campus hookup culture, such as a workshop “designed to help you navigate…dating, hookups, and the ‘walk of shame’ on campus and in dorms” and a workshop on “Sex in the Digital Age,” which “examines online hookups and the role of technology in sex today, including analyses of sexts and real-world examples of poor communication.”

One can only ask: Columbia, have you no shame? Offering students advice on hookups and “how to know if someone wants to have sex with you” should be beneath the dignity of a once-great research university.

If there were an epidemic of sexual assault on campus, the surest way to stop it would be to send the message of personal empowerment to girls: You can help control whether you are “raped” or not by exercising prudence and personal responsibility. I will give Executive Vice President Goldberg the benefit of the doubt and posit that she does not really believe that girls are getting raped at Columbia. The possibility that she does think co-eds are getting raped but refuses to send the most efficacious message for protecting them simply in order to preserve the principles of male fault and maximal promiscuity is too horrible to contemplate.

In response to Larry D. Nachman’s question, I do not know whether the faculty approved the Sexual Respect Initiative, though various professors did offer unctuous praise for the “brave” students who created works of “outrage” and “defiance” to fulfill their participation mandate. Every graduate and professional student falls under that mandate.