Our deepest gratitude is to the young people who shared their stories and their lives with us. Over and over again, students would walk into the interview room, fling down their backpacks, and open their hearts in an astonishing and incredibly generous way. Some of these students also welcomed a member of the SHIFT ethnography team into their daily life—meeting them for boba tea on Broadway, letting them tag along for meals at the dining hall, inviting them upstairs to a room on fraternity row to chill and talk, having them join in at church and brunch, or bringing them along for a night of barhopping. Both during the data collection and after, we felt moved by their struggles, inspired by their resilience, brokenhearted by their grief, and awed by their willingness to share complicated experiences—frequently things they had never told anyone else. We hope we have done justice to their stories and their lives.
From the moment that this book started to take shape, we began compiling in our heads a long list of people to thank. There are four people to whom we owe not just our gratitude but also an acknowledgment that without their efforts, this book would never have come to be at all. First among them is Claude Ann Mellins, who Jennifer drafted into codirecting SHIFT before the project even had funding (or an acronym). She has been an incredible partner in research, and remains a dear friend, bringing an enormous depth of knowledge about mental health, a capacity to match Jennifer worry-for-worry, intense care and empathy for the young people who were the object of our work, and savvy about navigating a scientifically and institutionally complex landscape. Second, Suzanne Goldberg, Executive Vice President for University Life at Columbia, who saw the promise in Jennifer and Claude’s initial idea, advocated for SHIFT, and helped create the best possible circumstances for research in our own institution, with substantial institutional and financial support complemented by scientific independence. Leigh Reardon, SHIFT project director extraordinaire, faced a first day at work welcoming hundreds of attendees to SHIFT’s public launch—and the chaos never really stopped. We could not have built the airplane while flying it without Leigh’s unflappable good humor, zest for multitasking, and spiral-bound notebook. And finally, Alex Wamboldt, who in addition to doing brilliant and empathic fieldwork, stayed on as a SHIFT team member through the data management and writing phases, demonstrating enormous dedication, wry humor, creativity, and resilience.
Matthew Chin, Gloria Diaz, Melissa Donze, and Megan Kordenbruck, the other members of the team who carried out the extended fieldwork, were also extraordinary—holding students’ painful stories, enjoying their funny ones, and engaging with this challenging work with rigor and respect. Jamie Beckenstein provided invaluable service to our team by helping to check, clean, and de-identify transcripts and track the spatial locations of our observations. The ethnography was only one component of the much larger SHIFT project, and we are grateful as well to the other members of the SHIFT executive committee (John Santelli and Patrick Wilson) as well as to the full faculty investigator team (Louisa Gilbert, Constance Nathanson, Martie Thompson, Melanie Wall, and Kate Walsh). And while we had a great deal of help over the course of fieldwork from many corners, three others are deserving of particular acknowledgment: Peter Taback, for his steady voice and perspective when we hit bumps in the road; Michael Weisner, for his boundless patience in helping us figure out and maintain a collaborative and secure data-management platform, and Alondra Nelson, for playing academic matchmaker by setting the two of us up to work together.
We feel enduring gratitude for the contributions of SHIFT’s Undergraduate Advisory Board (Roberta Barnett, Emma Bogler, Meredith Dubree, Irene Garcia, Corey Hammond, Robert Holland, Morgan Hughes, Trendha Hunter, Sarah Lazarsfeld, Amber Officer-Narvasa, Sidney Perkins, Irin Phatraprasit, Gregory Rempe, Sean Ryan, Stephanie Steinman, Shaakya Vembar, Brendan Walsh, Michela Weihl, Liza Wohlberg, and Nicholas Wolferman). All current undergraduates at the time, they met with us for two hours every Monday morning at 8 a.m. From diverse corners of campus life—from the head of the association of fraternities and sororities, to the head of the militant sexual assault activist group, to students who, by their own account, “kinda did nothing”—these students served as our guides to campus. Spending time with them was one of the great joys of the project, and we are deeply indebted to them for their commitment, advice, and good cheer.
We are grateful as well to the many administrators from divisions across campus who served on SHIFT’s institutional advisory board, both for their willingness to act as a sounding board for our initial findings and for their reflections on the policy implications of what we saw. We hope that they continue to find our work useful as they strive to build a campus where all students can thrive. We are particularly thankful to Cristen Kromm, Dean of Undergraduate Student Life, and her entire office, for all their help and insights.
When we began this research, a group of experts generously joined us for a two-day conference, to help us anticipate some challenges and think through our ideas and design. We are grateful for the generosity and guidance of Antonia Abbey, Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Sarah DeGue, Mary Koss, Tal Peretz, Sharyn Potter, Laura Salazar, Martie Thompson, and Mikel Walters. We also are indebted to those who generously gave us comments on the fully drafted manuscript—Victoria Banyard, Kathleen Clark, Louisa Gilbert, Roger Lehecka, Connie Nathanson, and Adam Reich—as well as to Elizabeth M. Armstrong for incisive comments on Chapters 2 and 9 and to Leslie Kantor for reviewing the conclusion. We did our best to respond to their valuable suggestions. In addition to sharing this work both formally and informally with colleagues at Columbia, we greatly benefited from the feedback we received when we presented this work in other institutions of higher education, including: Carleton College, Haverford College, Hanoi Medical University, Institute for Philosophy in Prague, the Norwegian Center for Violence and Trauma Stress Studies, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Sciences Po, Stanford University’s Clayman Institute, University of California–Berkeley, Trinity College Dublin, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, University of Oslo, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, University of Waterloo, Uppsala University, SUNY–Stony Brook, Vanderbilt University, Washington State University, and Yale University. We also presented ethnographic findings, and received useful feedback, at scientific meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the Population Association of America. Of course, none of those who we consulted along the way bear any responsibility for our failures to fully heed their advice.
We are fortunate to have been able to work with John Glusman and Helen Thomaides at W. W. Norton, with Jodi Beder, the copyeditor of this manuscript, and with our agent, Eric Lupfer at Fletcher and Co. They all worked patiently with us, carefully shepherding our work from proposal to actual book, providing insights and thoughtful feedback along the way. We also acknowledge with gratitude Andres Oyuela’s generosity in shooting our author portraits.
SHIFT was funded by Columbia University, with special thanks to generous support from the Lavine family. The research benefited from infrastructural support from the Columbia Population Research Center, which is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, under award number P2CHD058486. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or of Columbia University.
Along the way the two of us have individually accumulated some debts, primarily to those who have provided moral support during what has been at times an emotionally grueling journey. Jennifer is grateful to her husband John, who did triple duty as a member of the SHIFT scientific team, sex education policy consultant, and captain of the home chicken cacciatore and chili support team; her sons Isaac and Jacob, for their support and willingness to serve as sounding boards for some of the arguments around hooking up; to Kathy Leichter and Jessica Hirsch, for their words of encouragement; and to her parents, David and Ellen Hirsch. Her father did not live to see the book’s completion, but he is in her heart always, and she is grateful every day to have her mother by her side. Although this was not the book that she set out to write during her Guggenheim Fellowship—SHIFT both interrupted that project and provided a very different ethnographic context—it enabled her to explore those same questions at the intersection of sexuality and public health. It would be hard to imagine a more tranquil setting than an office overlooking the Woodrow Wilson School fountain, and so enormous thanks are due to Princeton’s Center for Health and Well-Being for hosting Jennifer during the 2018–19 academic year, and to Ted Nadeau and Kirsten Thoft for sharing their warm roost on Linden Lane.
Shamus is thankful to those people he spoke to about the project and who offered insights, read the work, and provided the emotional support needed to write this kind of book. Thanks especially to Peter Bearman, Sam Kanson-Benanav, Max Besbris, Mark Bittman, Zach Bruder, Andrew Celli, Sara Christopherson, Nick D’Avella, Matt Desmond, Mustafa Emirbayer, Amy Feldman, Heather Ford, Brendan Gillett, Phil Goff, Mark Gould, Andy Hall, Christine Hall, Laura Hamilton, Mike Hirschfeld, Jonny Hunter, Eric Klinenberg, Jennifer Lena, Sharon Marcus, Tey Meadow, Chris Muller, Alondra Nelson, Cathy O’Neil, Eric Schwartz, Harel Shapira, Patrick Sharkey, Harry Stephenson, Alex Tilney, Rebekah Vaisey, Steve Vaisey, Andrea Voyer, Kate Walbert, Bruce Western, Fred Wherry, and Kate Zaloom. His students, and especially his graduate students, provided endless enthusiasm, inspiration, and support. Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub provided a wonderful summer retreat in which to write. Most of all, his parents, Omar, Divya, and Aidan helped make this book possible by reminding him of the joys of being with family.
Finally, to each other. This research has been a struggle and a joy. We—Jennifer and Shamus—didn’t know one another before starting this project; today we joke that because of all the time we’ve spent together researching and writing, we’ve become almost the same person. We cried a lot together, but we laughed more. That may seem macabre, given the topic, but being able to talk about anything and everything, showing up in the work and for each other with our full selves, made the research not just bearable, but maybe even better. For all our work on designing this research, all our attempts to adhere to the highest standards of rigor, and our drive to develop new theoretical and conceptual frameworks for other scholars to draw upon, it was this more humanistic dynamic that made our research what it was. A guiding feature of this book is empathy; making that part of our research, we feel, made this project possible.