Last Sunday a front page article in the New York Times detailed a horrific series of events that occurred not long ago at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. The headline alone is awful: “Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn’t: How One College Handled a Sexual Assault Complaint”. Summarizing the story runs the danger of trivializing a tragedy but here are some necessary bullet points:
- A young woman, who goes by the name of “Anna” in the article woke up after a night of heavy drinking with hazy memories of the night before. Her vagina was bruised. She’d had forcible sex. She remember parts of the evening and not other parts.
Sub-set: she received alcohol at a fraternity on campus. Underage drinking is illegal. Giving alcohol to “minors” is illegal. There are no exceptions to this law.
- A student saw Anna being raped in a campus dance hall and reported it.
Subset: according to the eyewitness there were several students cheering on the rapist.
- The Colleges’ in house investigation found no cause to expel the boys involved.
Subset: the boys were football players.
Subset: as the New York Times correctly reports—“It took the college just 12 days to investigate the rape report, hold a hearing and clear the football players. The football team went on to finish undefeated in its conference, while the woman was left, she said, to face the consequences — threats and harassment for accusing members of the most popular sports team on campus.”
- The local police were out of their depth investigating the conflicting stories.
Subset: the police investigation has haphazard and transcripts show inaccuracies.
- The woman endured hate speech and threats.
Subset: this alone is sufficient to expel people from college.
You can read the story yourself. It is filled with tawdry vignettes and extravagant mistakes, misrepresentations by the accused, and the usual competing narratives from bystanders and officials that appear in every tragedy.
Make no mistake. This story is a tragedy.
The Colleges were quick to release not one, but two statements. First there was an email to the “community” from the Presidents Office. Then a letter to the New York Times from the Chairwoman of the Colleges Board of Trustees.
Talk about Typhoid Mary. If there was a way to infect a bad story with more contagion, Hobart and William Smith found it. They declared the New York Times left out their side of the story and added that because of limitations imposed upon them by the federal privacy act FERPA there are facts the school can’t reveal. There’s another reason the school can’t reveal anything—they’re under federal investigation because of this case.
Here is where I must disclose my own relation with Hobart and William Smith Colleges. I’m the son of a former president of the school; an alum, and a former dean and faculty member. I’ve held tenured positions at Ohio State, the University of Iowa, and now at Syracuse University where I teach in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. I know from broad experience that small and even large institutions of higher education are capable of circling the wagons in the service of their own self interest.
While I don’t know all the facts about Anna’s story at HWS, I know this: there’s a thing called citizenship. Underage drinking, sexual impropriety, hate speech, any one of these justifies taking action against students. Let’s forget the rape allegations for just a minute. Let’s forget about whether or not the staff of the Colleges review committee was competent to hear a rape case. The men in this story were and are guilty of profound misconduct. By pretending the New York Times story is about the “provability” of Anna’s contention trivializes the very notion of community that President Gearan and the Board of Trustees now say they care so much about.
This is for me the most disheartening thing of all.
Planet of the Blind 