Behavior Codes

When she’s not publishing fiction (and when’s the next installment, please?), Erin O’Connor has been having fun with college and university behavior codes-speech and sex, mostly. She and her allies have mocked the futility of such codes quite sufficiently. I want to step back from the melee to wonder why the Academe feels driven to create and attempt to enforce such codes.

First, to unlock Memory’s treasure box.

Back in the dawn to time, in the dim dark pre Cambrian time when Richard Nixon was president, before desktop computing, before VCRs, before calculators, even, one of the few ways a tenured professor could get fired was to sleep with the students. They didn’t get fired for this often, but from time to time it happened. Usually they resigned to explore other career opportunities. This time was, of course, the end of the era of in loco parentis (Latin for “your parents are crazy”) and the beginning of the Cole Porter (“Anything Goes”) era.

Did that stop anyone? Not much. Here are anecdotes.

Back in those days most of my friends were engineers, scientists, and musicians. Still are, for that. Musicians are a sociable bunch, and liked to party. I got asked to a few. I was surprised once to hear a usually prim mouthed young woman say of a friend, “She got that A on her back.”

One of my engineering buddies was shocked, very shocked, when a female professor propositioned him during office hours. I believe he was scarred for life.

Another musician, a friend of a friend, took a class in my own English department. We had to write a paper. She wrote hers on a writer notorious for being the prof’s very favorite writer of all time ever, and in it she used a sexual metaphor to describe the writer’s effect on her. She surrounded the metaphor with a light padding of apology. The prof, though, in his red ink comments, fell all over himself to tell her that she needn’t apologize, that he understood what she meant, and that she could come talk about it during his office hours any time. Really, it was embarrassing (she showed me the paper). And this man wasn’t known for any especially vigorous interest in the young female life of the campus. I have no idea whether she took up his offer. She might have, or she might have teased him a bit. Might have ignored him, too.

I serve up these moldy memories as illustrations of a transitional period. For a long time the prof-student barricade by-and-large worked, not because of fear of punishment, but because it embodied a widely accepted ethic of behavior. Of course there were exceptions. When the ethic frayed and then snapped, the behavior code that depended on it was carried away. If you want to diagram this in a different way, it is that for many years more and more kinds of relationship and behavior came to regarded as falling within the circle of private life as against public. The “ethic” of “if it doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s ok” became dominant, and we are still dealing with the consequences as part of the massive undigested meal of the 1970s. I am not evaluating these changes, merely asserting that they have occurred.

So the secular colleges and universities are in painful position of falling between two horses. One the one hand, as secular institutions, they cannot comment directly on the sexual behavior of their students because that aspect of life has entirely vanished into the realm of the personal and private. The popular culture creates an expectation of a free and easy sexuality to such an extent that it reacts with horror at the idea of abstinence. The result is such stories as this, and this.

So our colleges and universities have legitimate interests in maintaining a civil campus culture in a general culture that makes rather a big thing of sexual activity in general, and offers young men little in the way of models of civil behavior. What to do? The administrative mind immediately leaps to a behavior code. But the code has no ethical support, and hangs flapping uselessly in the air for us to mock. The only principal the creators of these codes have to rely on is that of consent, which they elaborate endlessly to the point that I expect that some campuses will introduce the position of matchmaker and go between as a new work-study job. The matchmaker will arrange set-ups, forge agreements between the principals as to exactly what physical contact may occur in what circumstances, and file all paperwork with the appropriate university office. I am sure that instant messaging will assist the function on the more wireless-enabled campuses.

I doubt that the sex codes have any real chance of working; none has ever really worked against normal human randiness. These flimsy things will wear down under their own weight, in time. They won’t present the severe and evil infractions, nor will they be sufficient to punish real evil-doers. I wonder if the speech codes may not carry with them the worse danger. The notion that the campus should be a safe place, inhabited by so many swaddled students, seems to be taking wide hold. I want civility on campus, but that’s a matter of how people speak, not what they say. Some backers of the specially restrictive codes seem to want to be isolated from ideas that offend them. This desire could destroy the inquiry and discussion that we need.