On Saturday mornings at 10 a.m., hours after swimmers, wrestlers, basketball players, and other varsity athletes have crowded through the doors, Dodge Fitness Center opens for Columbia’s general members. We start queueing up at about 9:45. Students in the glass entryway are mostly checking their phones, keeping to themselves. When the student working at the check-in booth gives the nod, people start swiping through, and the race is on. There’s one thirty-minute cardio machine slot per person. At ten o’clock on the dot all the ellipticals and treadmills are full. Headphones on, ponytails bouncing, sweat dripping onto the machines—the goal is to make every minute count.
When the digital clock’s bright red numbers flash 10:29 a.m., people signed up for the next half hour start trying to make eye contact with those on the machines. They are polite, even apologetic: “Um, I think I’m signed up for that machine next?” There’s an awkward moment with the switch: does the person leaving the machine at 10:30 actually have to stop early to wipe down the machine, so that the next person can start exactly at 10:30? Interactions where two people want different things can be very awkward.
Life on campus, as in the rest of New York, can be intense. We have seen students scarfing down breakfast in the gym locker room—a brief moment of quiet, with a bagel and a thermos of coffee, after a shower and before class or an internship. A sign in the women’s locker room reminds students that shaving and urinating inside the sauna are prohibited. Some students circle the jogging track together, but for many, Dodge presents a solitary project—go in, get it done, move on. Those intercollegiate team members, for whom athletics offers not just fitness but a sense of belonging, have separate spaces—rowers saunter out of the crew room, wrestlers with singlets around their waists burst through the doors from the gym’s lower level, and swimmers, clustered together in their long swim coats, hair wet, laughing at a shared joke, exit Dodge as the rest of us wait for it to open. Faculty keep to themselves—occasionally greeting a colleague, but mostly hoping to avoid being seen naked in the locker room by a student or, perhaps worse, a dean.
On a Saturday morning walk home back through campus, we catch a snippet of conversation between a man and two young children: “Of course, you’d need to be good enough to be a Columbia student.” For many students, the sculpted bodies they cultivate in the gym are just one more expression of the appetite for hard work that got them to campus. When the weather is fair and students join all the other runners down the hill in Riverside Park, the treadmills in the gym are emptier. But there are tourists on the Low Library steps year-round, taking pictures of the famous statue, Alma Mater, maybe dreaming that they, or their children, will someday call this campus their own.
And yet the goal of college, and of this moment of transitioning to adulthood, is not just to achieve—it is also to move away from one’s childhood family and connect with a new, “chosen” family. Early adulthood is the time of separation—to make a unique life, one’s own friends, and set out toward a career. For some students, continuities ease the transition. Students who play “rich people sports”—lacrosse, sailing, tennis, or crew—may know their new teammates from national tournaments, private school leagues, or pricey sports camps. Students from elite public and private high schools will see faces from their own graduating class on campus, as well as those from prior years. Religious structures are another bridge connecting students into campus life; sure, the campus prayer space may not be exactly what they had before, but the underlying institution offers a welcome continuity.
In October 2015, we slowed down at the corner of Broadway and 115th to let two young women in long skirts pass us. We caught a bit of their excited chatter. One referred to “this project of Jewish husbandry.” The other laughed, saying, “Isn’t husbandry something about taking care of trees?” “No, silly, it’s finding a husband,” said the first. The guard welcomed them by name as they turned into the warmly lit Jerusalem stone campus center for Jewish student life. Columbia and Barnard have their share of religious students, although nationally, fewer and fewer college students today are religiously affiliated, and of course there are some students, like LGBTQ ones, who find more harm than support in religious spaces.1 Although some fortunate students begin college with a place where they immediately belong, like a team or a religious community, college is a place where young people often find themselves lonely within the crowd.2
Student organizations recruit by offering up the hope of connection. A black-and-white flyer for the women’s rugby team calls out, in block letters, for students to “Join the Family.” The nearly 25% of students on campus involved in Greek life are drawn, in part, by the notion that during that first year on campus, they will be someone’s “little,” and have someone to go to and somewhere they belong.3 Even activities like Model UN come with a complete kin structure, including “MUNtors” (older students assigned to mentor new Model UN students), and in some cases “grandMUNtors” (the muntors of one’s muntor); they even evoke familial incest taboos with their prohibitions on “muncest.”
Students focus so intensely on getting to college that many have not thought about just how wrenching the transition will feel. So much of college life can be seen through the fundamental tension at this developmental stage: a desperate drive for independence coupled with feeling alone and abandoned. Extracurricular organizations and new friendship groups are the glue of college life—where students meet new friends, discover themselves, and find sexual partners. This shapes the landscape of sexual assault—both how people experience and think about it, and why it can be so hard to address. Whether it’s the marching band, a theater group, the Black Students Organization, or a religious group, extracurriculars are both a terrain of accomplishment—offering an opportunity to ascend to leadership, to network, to meet somebody who knows somebody who can help you get through the hell of finding a summer job—and of connection. This context is essential for understanding vulnerability to sexual assault.
Students don’t know what kind of world they’ll encounter in three years, much less decades in the future. The emotional consequences of such uncertainty are an essential component of today’s campus landscape. A 2015 survey of students at 40 schools across the country found that 85% of college students reported being overwhelmed at some point.4 Research with directors of college counseling programs found that over 40% said that anxiety was the greatest concern for college students today, and that one in four of their student clients were taking some kind of psychotropic medication.5 According to an annual multi-campus survey conducted by the American College Health Association, between 2008 and 2018 the percentage of students diagnosed with or treated for anxiety more than doubled (from 10% to 22%), and the percentage diagnosed with or treated for depression nearly doubled (from 10% to 18%).6 This is a fundamental feature of the campus ecology. Even students who don’t experience anxiety or depression live in a context where many do. Roommates, teammates, sexual partners, lab partners: at least one of them is struggling. The collective emotional burden is considerable, and in some communities, especially those that are already precarious, the weight is particularly heavy.
Even high up in Morningside Heights, the ground on which students walk feels as if it’s constantly shifting. We’re not suggesting that it’s so much worse for college students than it is for others—say, the poor who are excluded from opportunities and whose jobs are tenuous at best. But whereas college was once a privileged space that, in large part, protected young people from such uncertainty, for today’s students those protections feel fragile. It’s hard to be settled, to feel secure, with so little sense of what the future holds.7
Yet the purpose of college, is, in part, to unsettle. As educators, we would be failing if we simply reaffirmed what students already thought and felt, or produced a community of comfort and familiarity. New ideas should be troubling and challenging. This is part of what gives them their power. Mind-expanding experiences are not comforting and soothing like childhood blankets. The possibilities are scary, but often thrilling. It’s part of what some students are looking for when they leave home, desperate for something new.
Sundeep’s family was so proud of him for getting into Columbia, and so grateful for the scholarship that covered all of his tuition. But his departure meant that the only adult with papers had left the house. There was one less regular salary coming in, and no one to help the younger children with their homework, make sense of what was happening at school, talk to the landlord, or manage the day-to-day things that were so hard to accomplish without speaking English while also being undocumented. For his part, Sundeep could not wait to get away from a home that felt like a space of fear and repression. The constant worry that his parents could be deported made them even more conservative. They didn’t want him to draw attention. They also didn’t want him to be gay. Sundeep felt relieved, and guilty, when he left.
Sundeep loved his parents; his campus job allowed him to send money home when he could; he recognized and respected all the sacrifices they’d made for him. But he didn’t go home anymore. He couldn’t face being berated about his sexuality. When he walked into our office, we were concerned that he didn’t have a warm enough winter coat. But as his story unfolded, we realized this was just the beginning. Sundeep’s interview was harrowing for us—not because of the assaults he experienced, but because of how his homelessness put him at so much risk. Poverty bred precariousness. Sundeep had spent winter break of his sophomore year—from December 20th to January 20th—wandering the streets of New York. After the dorms closed he had nowhere to go. He didn’t want to talk to his friends about it. To go home with one of his classmates would lead to questions he didn’t really want to answer. He had a plan. He’d scouted out office buildings around Manhattan that had quiet, mostly abandoned spaces in which he could nap during the day: a chair outside an office that wasn’t really used, for example. He had a backstory and even some props: if roused by an office worker concerned about his presence, he’d show his Columbia notebook and ID; he was an intern on another floor, and an Ivy League student; he’d fallen asleep; he’d be on his way. Once discovered, he never went back; he had a whole list of buildings he could use. So during the days, Sundeep slept in Manhattan’s accessible office spaces and in spaces on campus that were open to the office staff and professors still working on campus.
At night he rode the subways. He didn’t feel safe sleeping there, but he would read, zone out, or listen to music. The subway was warm. He didn’t always get enough to eat. He didn’t sleep nearly enough. But he never felt in much danger. It was certainly better than going home. More than most, he was thrilled with the opening of campus after the break—to have a bed, a meal plan, and a place to be. College unsettled his old life. But that’s exactly what he’d signed up for.
Men like Sundeep—queer, poor, nonwhite, with undocumented families—aren’t common at Columbia, but neither are they rare. In the last twenty years, they’ve become a feature of the campus landscape.8 Elite colleges point to these students with pride, “Yes, we might be exceptionally wealthy institutions, but look at what we make possible for men like Sundeep.” In a way that they didn’t used to be, elite colleges are now spaces of encounter, where a man whose family owns multiple homes might share a room with a man who’d spent part of his life homeless. Making this possible, so that an intrinsic part of college is navigating difference, has become a critical mission of American higher education.9 When their students were mostly white people from a narrow socioeconomic background, colleges didn’t have to think so much about strategies to create an equitable learning environment for different kinds of students. But today, they have to ask how Sundeep can feel at home alongside men whose families have studied at Columbia since before the American Revolution, when it was called “King’s College.” How the descendants of slaveholders can study and live alongside the descendants of slaves. How women can thrive on a campus where they have only been able to matriculate as Columbia students since 1983. Today, colleges have to ask what work is necessary so that students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or nonbinary will be accorded the same respect as any other student. These transformations don’t just happen as a result of meritocratic admissions processes or more generous financial aid policies. They are the product of policies and programs that deliberately embrace, or even seek to engineer through admissions policies, certain kinds of difference.10 For incoming students, the transition to college presents at least three distinct social challenges: leaving home, remaking their social world, and encountering forms of difference with which they are unfamiliar. For the institution, the challenge is to bridge those differences in experiences, resources, and self-understanding to create a community of learners.
Juan came to Columbia from a middle-class community in the Southwest. Few families there were poor, though the wealthier children tended to go to a different high school, nestled out of sight behind smooth adobe walls. He described coming to Columbia as “definitely a big culture shock.” At orientation, he learned that the way he spoke about sex, “making jokes about women,” as part of his everyday conversations, was not acceptable. “It was definitely a big jump.” In high school it would have been totally normal to talk about sex in ways that “insinuated that a woman was an object,” but he quickly learned that “I would get killed if I did something like that.” Like most of its peer institutions, Columbia includes in its orientation programming explicit instructions on how students should encounter diversity—with a particular focus on how to have respectful conversations. Called the “Under1Roof” program, it
explores how we individually and collectively create an inclusive community at Columbia University. It provides the framework on how inter-group understanding and community building are achieved through continual engagement and education about the different social identities that all students bring to campus. It is the exciting beginning of a sustained dialogue that will last throughout a student’s education here and beyond.11
While at first glance Juan’s high school tendency to talk about women as objects indicates a lack of respect across lines of difference, it was those very differences that made him want to be part of the community. He considered other highly selective private colleges, but chose Columbia for its diversity:
I thought the idea of diversity was really cool even though I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew diversity sounds like a good thing to have. Turns out it was one of the best things that could have happened in terms of me liking to be around a lot of people who were very different. I didn’t realize I liked it as much as I did until I got to see it. I definitely didn’t know what diversity meant, but now I’m, like, a big fan of it. It’s, like, addicting.
Juan is not alone in finding this difference so meaningful—or in noting its salience in the community that he joined. Colleges today are often far more diverse than almost any other community students have lived in before, and certainly more diverse than many workplaces that they will join after. Columbia College and Columbia Engineering’s class of 2022, for example, is 57% white, 28% Asian, 17% Latino, 16% African American, 4% Native American, and 16% international.12 Seventeen percent are the first in their family to go to college. America’s strong pattern of residential segregation means that almost no high school looks like this. It’s one of the unsettling and exciting features of college. It’s an intentional community of difference that embodies the notion that excellence can come from just about anywhere in society. After college, students will settle back into their more segregated lives. But even within college they can live in separate worlds. The SHIFT survey found that 21% of women and 15% of men identified as something other than heterosexual;13 those students often cluster with other members of the queer community, just as rich and white students often cluster together, as do those who share a religion. But they all cannot help but encounter difference. Students find this both valuable and disruptive.
Freshman year, Juan struggled to find “his people.” His roommates didn’t drink and were dismissive of sports, which were a huge part of his life. Eventually he found a group of men who shared his interests. And for all the diversity on campus, “his people” tended to be people more or less like him. “I’d say I got lucky with the people who I found here. If I didn’t get lucky with the people who I found here I would’ve been miserable. I wanted to transfer in the beginning because I didn’t really like the people I had.”
There’s a lot riding on orientation, when schools prepare incoming students to bridge differences and make connections. It’s a flood of guidance, mostly focused on what students shouldn’t do. Don’t burn candles in your room, because they will set off the fire alarm. Don’t assume someone’s gender pronouns. A natural impulse—to just ask—might not be the right impulse, because asking can make the other person feel uncomfortable, or out their identity as someone who has a fluid or transgender identity before they’re ready. Don’t assume that every Black person is poor, or on financial aid. Don’t inquire where someone’s “weird” name came from. Don’t ask Asian people where they are “really” from. Saying “that’s so gay” to criticize something or someone is offensive and potentially hurtful to LGBTQ people. There are intercultural differences in things like personal space. Don’t tell your roommate, eating a cherished meal from their home country, that their kimchi or curry smells funny. There are students from all fifty states.14 Those from Maine, one of the whitest states in the union, may never have spent much time with, or even met, a Black person before.15 They may have sincere curiosity about their roommate’s hair, but it’s helpful for them to know: don’t ask to touch it.16
As we sat through these training sessions, the information was overwhelming. Some students were hanging on every word, elated to finally be in an institution where they could show their whole selves. Some were sleepy and inattentive, or profoundly hung over. Others were just scared. And many were trying to play it cool—like they knew it all already. Students learn, in many ways, not to assume and not to offend. For some, much of this is painfully obvious. But for many others, it’s not. So many of the lessons are about what not to do. Like most of their sex education, positive lessons about how they should be acting are comparatively rare.
Juan felt no animus toward gay people; he just hadn’t known anyone who was out in his suburban high school. Juan only once made the mistake of referring to something he thought was stupid as “gay.” “I just, I felt really bad. Yeah, and that kind of happened. I thought it was a really interesting thing that I learned. I remember telling people from high school about that. Like ‘dude I can’t really even say the word gay anymore. It’s crazy.’” He was in shock. The phrase was so much a part of his lexicon that he wasn’t sure how he’d even be able to speak. “It was like, ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to describe my life now?’” Adjusting to college is hard enough as it is without getting a reputation as your hall’s resident homophobe. But his friends didn’t ostracize him, and he learned to be careful about how he talked about things. Instead of experiencing this as silencing, Juan embraced these lessons. “I changed the way I perceived a lot of social things.” And he thought of himself as better off because of it. He was even helping others avoid some of the mistakes he feels he made. He told us about a student he was mentoring, in whom he saw a younger version of himself. “He’s also from the same kind of place I am. And he just says whatever’s on his mind like, ‘Oh dude I really wanna hook up with this girl!’ or, ‘Dude, I’m really into Asian girls right now. I really love Asian girls.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, you probably shouldn’t say stuff like that.’ He was like, ‘What do you mean? It’s just the truth.’ I was like, ‘I wouldn’t say it if I were you,’ and now he doesn’t say it anymore.”
While some may bemoan this as the loss of free speech on campus, we see it differently.17 The students we met chose this campus out of a desire to experience its diversity. They generally sought to connect with one another in ways that are respectful—even if they disagree. If these kinds of disagreements are more common today than before, it is in no small part because campuses of the past were places where a relatively homogeneous population did not encounter much difference, and was unlikely to have its power challenged. Men like Juan and Sundeep weren’t there. When prior generations of students said “that’s gay,” there was no organized LGBTQ student community to challenge them. Students who asserted that Black people had an easier time getting into college were rarely in conversation with Black people. Today, those kinds of statements have to be made in front of a far less disempowered audience. Encounters between different groups are built into the environmental design, and demand some accountability. It’s uncomfortable, challenging, and potentially transformative. And as we heard from Juan, those kinds of transformations are not simply forced, they’re what students want out of their college experience—valuable lessons they transfer to others.
In 2018 just over 6% of applicants were admitted to Columbia College.18 Those who got in were overwhelmingly ambitious, disciplined, and driven. And, on top of that, lucky. We sometimes hear from our colleagues, both at Columbia and at other highly selective institutions, about how little experience today’s college students have with failure. There’s an “excellent sheep” narrative about how competitive college admissions, and higher education itself, is producing a generation of conformists.19 Certainly, it used to be much easier to be admitted to college. Jennifer’s children sometimes tell her that she’d never get into Princeton now. When Shamus applied to colleges in 1995, the acceptance rate at the University of Chicago was around 70%.20 Columbia’s admissions rate in the 1990s was about four times as high as it is today—and even that was a sharp decrease from the 40% admission rate prior to coeducation.21 The grandparents of children today may be proud of their Harvard diplomas, but they might forget that back in their day, about half of the applicants were accepted.22
Still, essayists have called this “generation snowflake,” suggesting students who melt quickly under the tiniest bit of heat.23 That critique misses the hardships and challenges that many of them—yes, even the very wealthy ones—face. One young man, as he entered our office for an interview, sporting a thousand-dollar Canada Goose jacket, and mentioning that he’d spent break at his family’s “winter home” in the Rockies, seemed the embodiment of privilege. But as his story unfolded, we heard how hard his junior year in high school had been. His girlfriend had been raped just before they started going out. Emotionally supporting her was, at times, overwhelming, as was managing the sexual intimacy she wanted, but had such a hard time having. College was a time for him to start anew.
The opening days on campus are filled with activity and instruction on policies and procedures. How to sign up for classes. How to access Counseling and Psychological Services. The rules around drinking. The “Under1Roof” program about microaggressions, pronouns, and basic respect. Where you can use the “flex-cash” that is associated with your ID. Deadlines for dropping classes. Panel after panel after panel. Many of the policies and procedures in college expose vast differences in socioeconomic status; even laundry is a terrain of social stratification. Some students may have been doing their younger siblings’ laundry since they could read. Others, who may never even have washed their own clothes, skip the laundry orientation; they’d already signed up for the private laundry service that picks up and delivers.
Colleges and universities such as Columbia are almost semi-sovereign nations, with their own police force, medical teams, housing, work opportunities, and food supply. Getting up to speed is no small matter. Many students find themselves going to fewer and fewer events, whether because they are too hungover, or because it’s overwhelming. As one woman in a focus group told us, her peers nodding their heads, the hardest part of orientation was that there was “nowhere to cry.” Her roommate was always around. This sad moment stood out, in a research project that was full of them. What they were so desperately excited about—coming to college—left them not only wanting to cry, but struggling to find someplace to do so without anyone seeing them.
There are structural dimensions to these challenges. First-year students go from being the most senior people in high school—knowing the most and being the most powerful, even if they aren’t the cool kids—to being the least again, relatively clueless and at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Students look around, and to some it feels like others, mysteriously, have already made friends. The athletes have already been on campus for a couple of weeks; they may not all love their team members, but they have a ready-made pack to travel with. The students whose families could afford it may have gone on one of the pre-orientation trips: a week in the woods, or doing social service, with a small group of incoming students, offers an opportunity to build deep connections before they’ve even made their dorm room bed. A few students look around and see their ancestors’ portraits on campus, or their family name on a building. An increasing number of others step onto campus as the first one in their family to attend college.
Outside the gates of Columbia is a vast city, waiting for you. But its vastness can also be terrifying, giving a deep sense that you’re on your own. The woman who said she had nowhere to cry during the opening days on campus was pointing to the challenge of not having a place to call her own. This “place” is partially metaphoric: she didn’t have a community to rely upon, a new, chosen family of support. But it is also literal: in the geography of campus, she didn’t have a physical room of her own. Roommates can be the first ones to notice that something is wrong and perhaps intervene in positive ways; they can also serve as ready-made friends.24 But having a roommate presents challenges, because if one roommate wants to have sex with a partner, that inevitably involves a third party, who might not want to give up their space for that to happen. Built into the landscape of college is this spatial challenge to students’ sexual citizenship.
Maddox, who’d grown up in the suburbs of the Northeast, had a hard time adjusting to college. His first friends were on his floor, but he didn’t click with them after a while. “I moved away from a lot of them because I, I felt a lot of them were pretty shallow.” Maddox couldn’t quite describe what he didn’t like about his roommate, other than the fact that he was “annoying” and always around. That others on the hall seemed to like his roommate so much annoyed him even further. The marching band became a refuge for him, and he particularly enjoyed the trips away from campus. One of his band friends had an off-campus apartment, which gave him a space to escape to away from his hall. But it wasn’t his own space, and it was a little far away. Maddox’s biggest challenges weren’t actually his own. His best friend experienced serious mental health issues, eventually resulting in a medical leave of absence; given everything his friend was going through, he didn’t feel he could ask for much emotional support in return. Maddox started to spend more and more time alone off campus, particularly at bars. His family gave him enough money at the start of college that he could afford the high cost of nights out in New York City, as well as to get a fake ID that didn’t raise too many eyebrows. His whiteness helped, too, at the local bars. He became a regular at one of the more popular student hangouts. But he felt little comfort there.
When his friend came back from his mental health leave, Maddox hit his stride. “I sort of found my place.” He and his friends found a bar that was near campus, but seemingly a world away. He refused to name the place. As it turns out, he’d been sworn to secrecy.
Uh, I’m a little embarrassed. Uh, it’s one of the best-kept secrets. It’s populated almost exclusively by, like, fairly old locals, so it’s pretty easy for, like, our group of four to eight Columbia students to come in and take a table and just sort of disappear into the background and have our own little area. By now, we’re all good friends with the bartenders and, uh, the bouncer, and so we get free drinks pretty frequently. There’s a jukebox. There’s pool. It’s, like, just a really, really solid place.
When we asked why he was so hesitant to tell us the name, he said, “There’s a very high bar for any of us to introduce this place to anyone new.” We joked that it might become infested. But Maddox was dead serious in his reply. “Yeah, so we don’t want that to happen. Then we would have to find somewhere new.”
Most students can’t use money to help them find a place to feel at home. They stay on campus, with access to physical space opening up over time. As students become more senior, they get access to better living spaces on campus, particularly in their final two years. But for most students, a successful integration into college means having both a private place, a room of one’s own, and a social institution through which students “own the place”—or at least some small corner. In college this can be a fraternity or sorority; it can also be a special interest house like Casa Latina, Jazz House, or Muslim student house; or it can be a room, like the LGBTQ lounge, or the band practice room. It’s a space that lets students proclaim to themselves, “I belong here.” That grounding provides a critical resource as students navigate the terrain of college.
In the fall of 2016 we went to a party celebrating Mexican independence, thrown by the Latino students on campus. We arrived early, around 9:30 p.m., to a darkly lit room and the smell of a home-cooked meal. On the table were bags of tortilla chips and three homemade salsas. Estella told us to try one in particular. “It’s amazing.” It was. Several young women huddled around a large pot in the kitchen, making horchata. A group of boys—a few of them looked as if they were sixteen—sat beneath a large Mexican flag in the living room. We joked with Estella about the women in the kitchen and the boys hanging out; she brushed us off. They were freshmen, she said, too nervous to talk to anyone else. Four gay men and two women hung out in the middle of the room, eating and chatting. Everyone in the space was Latino but from a wide range of origins, some born in the United States, some abroad, some undocumented; almost everyone seemed at home. Estella explained that they called their event a dinner, not a party, so they didn’t have to check for IDs. No one was going to drink that much anyway. They were there to socialize, and mostly, to dance. After about an hour, as the lights were turned off and only Christmas lights remained as illumination, the music was turned up and people started to move their bodies more; it was still a little awkward. But people started to loosen up. It was almost too loud to talk, but Estella brought a parade of people to chat with us. One woman complained about finding roaches in her bed. It was hard to listen to her story; all we could focus on was the line of perfectly spaced scars that ran down her left arm. We figured this was how she dealt with the stresses of her life. We didn’t ask about the cutting. But she was open enough about it, wearing a tank top that clearly showed the healed wounds she’d inflicted upon herself.
The room heated up as bodies danced to the music. Mercifully, someone opened a window, but both the smell and the energy kept building. Estella deftly managed the room, dragging one woman away from us to “go dance with the boys.” Estella wanted to break them out of their awkward huddle. When the woman objected, saying that she didn’t like boys, Estella didn’t flinch. “That’s not the point.” The woman did as she was told, and soon the freshman boys were dancing. “See, it works!” Estella said with a firm nod of her head. She ran off again.
Slowly the kitchen filled with bottles of vodka and the dance floor filled with people. No one at the party actually lived in this space; it was one of the “Latino frats,” the space lent to Estella and her friends to throw this event. When the fraternity brothers arrived, they seemed like guests in their own dorm suite, heading for the vodka rather than the dance floor. Chants of “¡México!” rose from the crowd—and then suddenly the lights were flipped on. The room collectively groaned as a white woman walked in. She called out for the host, eventually finding Estella.
“Okay, I’m not telling you guys to shut it down. There was a noise complaint so I’m just telling you to tone it down. Maybe close the windows to the courtyard, that was probably the problem.” Two men closed the windows, and the woman, evidently a resident advisor, left the room, turning off the lights on her way out. As the party started up again we saw something unusual at Columbia: larger women, dressed to the nines and dancing with boys in the center of the room. College is accepting of all kinds of identities and differences, except when it comes to bodies. There is a lot of pressure to be athletic, even sculpted. These Latina women were some of the few heavier people we ever saw out, partying with other students. The partying in this space was also different from what happened at most student events, particularly those run by white students. There were a few bottles of Negra Modelo, some white wine; the horchata the women had made earlier had been spiked with some vodka. But it was not enough to get anyone drunk. The altered states of consciousness came more from a collective effervescence of community than from alcohol.
Just before midnight the sound of a high-pitched clarinet blared out from the speakers and the students went wild, singing along to Calle 13’s reggaeton hit.
Atrévete-te-te, salte del closet
Destápate, quítate el esmalte . . .
The student voices drowned out the speakers, and as they belted out the lyrics they circled up around a young, heavy-set man. We could barely see him, but the shouts of “Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!” conveyed that he knew how to move. After “Atrévete” Estella turned the music down, telling the crowd, “Okay. Now it’s time for what you came here for!” It was midnight, time for “el Grito.” The chanting began, “Viva! Viva! Viva!” Students who were not Mexican looked confused but quickly joined in. A man jumped onto the dining room table, crouching down to keep his head from hitting the ceiling. Glancing at his phone, he began to read the story of Mexico’s independence, “Two hundred and six years ago. . . .” At first, it was a dull affair. But it all changed when he reached the formal celebration of Mexico’s independence:
¡Mexicanos!
¡Vivan los héroes que nos dieron patria!
¡Víva Hidalgo!
¡Viva Morelos!
¡Viva Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez!
¡Viva Allende!
¡Vivan Aldama y Matamoros!
¡Viva la independencia nacional!
¡Viva México! ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México!
The chants grew progressively louder, more people joining in with each “¡Viva!” At the last “¡Viva México!” the room erupted, transitioning quickly into dancing el zapateado. Estella turned to us, her face glowing: “My heart is just full of joy right now with all of this. All my lil’ babies together. This is a Mexican ass party.” With that, we wished her a good night. She was thrilled to show us her community. On our way out the door we were surprised to run into Anna, who was of Dominican descent. She was someone we’d spent some time with; we’d never seen her out, and she’d told us she never goes to parties. She seemed to recognize the surprise on our face, smiled, and explained that she always comes to these parties. Otherwise they’d stop inviting her. And it’s these events that remind her of family, of home, of where she comes from. She told us, referring to one of the most popular songs we heard during our field work, “Trap Queen” by Fetty Wap,
I don’t go to white parties. I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand what they are doing. Here, like, this is a Mexican party but the music I know and understand. So, I just don’t feel comfortable at white parties. I don’t want to go to a party and just listen to “Fetty Wap.” I guess I’m segregating myself but I don’t care. White people will say to me “Oh you only hang out with Latinos” but I’m like, “Whatever, all your friends are named ‘Brad.’”
There were lots of differences at this party—gay and straight, younger and older, fat and athletic, all together. Most of the students were Latino, though certainly not all Mexican. But a sense of collectivity, of pan-ethnicity, brought them together.25 These were moments, on what students of color often referred to as a “white campus,” where they felt at home. The room’s energy was electrifying. Estella had good reason to be proud of the community they made, and the space they shared—only possible because they had secured a physical space with a living room big enough for more than fifty people to cram into. It also helped that the women took over; their focus was far more on making people dance and talk than it was to drink. And, of course, the music helped. We only heard this mixture of bachata, cumbia, salsa, and reggaeton at parties hosted by Latino students. At what Anna experienced as the “white” parties on campus, Fetty Wap’s rap “Trap Queen” did indeed seem to be on endless repeat. The women had asked the men to use this space; if they were in a sorority, they’d be unable to serve alcohol, and if they did, their national organization could revoke their charter. While the point of this party wasn’t to get drunk, a little bit of booze did loosen the crowd up. Men control far more space on campuses than women. Booze can be expensive. Even if selling it, or collecting a door fee, the hosts never make back what they put in. And so wealthy students, not surprisingly, have more control over social space and the distribution of alcohol than others on campus. As much as the themes of diversity and inclusion dominate campus life, inequality and segregation are stubbornly persistent features of the landscape.
This isn’t just because of public spaces; there are also a vast array of private spaces in and around colleges. Coffee shops and fast casual dining—two famous burger chains, the burrito joint, the noodle bar, the fancy salads—offer a range of options for spaces in which to work or chat with a friend, and there are endless options for dates—if you can afford them. A lot of students can’t—or at least not on a regular basis. We saw some students enter restaurants as regulars, welcomed back by the staff, for fifteen-dollar grass-fed burgers followed by the famous butterscotch pudding. Others glanced in from the street, some with longing, some with disgust. On campus itself, public spaces have been converted into cafés selling five-dollar coffees—which can exclude those who don’t have the money or don’t feel entitled to occupy a table without paying. This is, in miniature, the story of New York. It’s a playground, for sure, but a lot more so if you have the ability to pay to enter anywhere you want, and to be shuttled there and back with the ease of a private car.
Wealth isn’t the only resource for students. There’s race too. Some are never asked, “What are you doing here?” either in so many words, or with a look of suspicion. This is, in part, what students of color mean when they describe Columbia as a “white institution.” White students’ presence on campus is rarely questioned, nor are their capacities as students. Not infrequently students of color hear offhand remarks from peers that imply they’re only at Columbia because of affirmative action. They are also far more likely to be stopped by security, asked to show their ID in a way that says to them, “Why are you here? You don’t belong.”
After one break, Asian students returned to find the name cards that had adorned their dorm rooms torn down and destroyed; the white students’ name cards had been left untouched.26 Another time, the sign an RA had made celebrating LGBTQ diversity was vandalized.27 Sometimes these experiences, which happen at campuses across the country, involve actual rather than symbolic violence. Recently, a Black student was followed by campus security as he walked into Barnard’s campus. Security had asked him for his ID; he refused to show it to them, sick of what he saw as his being policed while white students walked around without interruption. The encounter ended shamefully: campus police persisted in asking him for his ID, eventually grabbing him and pushing his body down onto a café counter when he refused to comply with their requests.28 These experiences serve as a powerful justification for “special interest” spaces on campus: when a student’s belonging upon campus is questioned, having a space where it is not becomes essential.29 White students certainly have challenges finding a place on campus, but rarely are they subject to racial violence.
Students develop a sense of who they are and connect with others in communities that resonate with their identities or that give them a place where they belong. This is part of what makes fraternities or sororities so appealing. It’s the draw of the special interest house, like Casa Latina, for Latino students; Greenborough, for those interested in living sustainably; Manhattan House, for indigenous students; Q House, for LGBTQ students; or Writers House or Pot Luck House, which are both fairly self-explanatory. Sometimes the seniors from a club live together using the common area of their suite—a semi-private room around which a group of single rooms are organized—as a place where club members can head to any time. The problem with space—particularly in Manhattan but almost anywhere—is that it’s expensive to create and maintain. It’s a fiercely guarded resource.
While some people find their own place on campus, it comes with a troubling condition—making sure it doesn’t get too crowded, so overwhelmed that you can’t really go there to feel you belong anymore, or filled with people who aren’t your community. Latino students like the ones we just described experienced this firsthand. Students at these parties had so much fun they started to text their friends—hoping they’d come share in one of the better parties on campus. As new people started to pile in, as word got around that the Latino student parties were the place to be, the dynamic changed. When too many students arrived who didn’t know the words to Calle 13’s “Atrévete,” or who were more interested in drinking than dancing, the people who had built the vibe of the party suddenly felt like it wasn’t their space anymore. They stopped showing up, or started leaving early. Before long it was over. We’ve all experienced this with our favorite café, bar, or gym. There was a reason Maddox was sworn to secrecy about his favorite bar. While space is an essential element of finding one’s place on campus, it’s also built upon the premise that not everyone can be there. Home has to be, to some degree, exclusive.
As students find their place on campus, events tend to get a little more “chill.” Hanging out in suites, sitting on the floor having cooked some rice and stew, passing around magnums of cheap wine poured into Solo cups, is a fun night for a lot of students. The challenge is that these moments come, for most students, at the end of college, and not at the beginning. They require a common area comfortable enough to host a gathering of ten or so friends, a kitchen with a stove and a fridge, and being able to buy wine, bring it into your dorm, and drink it openly without worrying about getting in trouble with the RA. None of these things are easy for freshmen, or even sophomores, because of the campus geography and institutional rules: RAs are more likely to write them up for drinking, and the kind of housing they are given doesn’t have common spaces they can use as their own for these kind of events.30
Groups of men in jackets and ties—some in suits but most in blue blazers with slacks—clustered on the steps to Low Library. They’d gathered there in this quintessential college spot to commemorate the evening. Next to them were women in dresses, mostly black and body-fitting, but some in bright-colored gowns. A few held flowers. A passerby might, at a quick glance, think it was prom. But these people were older than high schoolers. Slightly more confident. And there wasn’t a proud parent in sight; the only “adults” around were a few faculty colleagues, scurrying home from a Saturday afternoon spent in their offices. The students coupled up and took their photos together. No one kissed. But some bodies were clearly more comfortable nestled together than others. Sometimes a small group formed around the Alma Mater statue. Through the crowd there were plenty of smiles, some nervous but most in excited anticipation of the formal they were about to attend. The men had bought tickets to a boat ride around Manhattan for $70 each. The purchase covered a meal and an open bar. Most had purchased tickets for their dates. The few gay men in the group also took women as dates. They weren’t in the closet. It just was what people did. Students really looked forward to these formals. The men clearly reveled in dressing up. Sometimes we saw groups where the men had coordinated their outfits—dark jackets, blue ties, khaki pants, and Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Sunglasses at night are a sure sign of being ready to party. That evening and the next day, Instagram and Facebook would be filled with photos of what unfolded. Some would wake up the next morning and rigorously un-tag themselves in their friends’ posts. They didn’t want public records of their exploits. Employers might find them, and while they felt they looked pretty good, their drunken escapades weren’t always a good look.
There wasn’t much notable about this scene, other than how different it was from “normal life.” We saw this again and again: how far away “fun” was from “daily life.” The thing about a work-hard, party-hard culture is not the line between the two, it’s the distance. To get from “work” to “party” takes work. Special clothes. Often lots of alcohol. Exceptional places. Things you’re not supposed to be doing. Those sunglasses at night. But what if the differences were shorter? Maybe it wouldn’t take such excessive effort to get there.
Plenty of students go to one fraternity party, never to go again. Some never even go to one, or hardly party at all, if by “party” you mean drinking, at the least, and often doing other things like cocaine. For these other students, the distances between the everyday and fun aren’t that great. They don’t need to get dressed up. They don’t need a meal and an open bar. They need a couch and someone else who is psyched to stay up until 4 a.m. playing “Settlers of Catan.” Many simply don’t have the money to go out. But it’s not just that these young people can’t afford to party. They have constructed their identities in opposition to college party culture. They would rather talk about what’s happening in their Contemporary Civilization class, or what they learned in their Computer Networks course. What is existence anyway? That conversation might be a little easier if stoned. But plenty of students have it sober. “How do you know this couch we’re on is real? That we’re not just part of the dream of some tick that lives on a back of a wild cat somewhere in the universe? How can we know?” Descartes asked questions like this, after all, admittedly in a slightly more sophisticated way. We hung out with students as they had cereal and milk on Saturday nights, chatting away with one another. These students hooked up, had sex, and experienced assault—though more often in the context of a relationship than a drunken hookup. There were moments of fun that often disrupted sleep, but not the same way a hangover would. And for the most part, these campus escapades were safer than the drunken ones we spent more time observing. As we noted in the introduction, the majority of students do not experience a sexual assault during their time on campus.
Among the hundreds of stories we gathered about college student sexual experiences, Austin’s story about an evening with his girlfriend was one of the sweetest. During the summer after his junior year, he was living in a great summer sublet in Long Island City, and his roommate had left to see family for the Fourth of July weekend. His girlfriend, who worked near City Hall, had stopped in Little Italy to pick up the fixings for a cheese and charcuterie plate. The night before, he’d stashed a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge. They were planning to drink it while watching the fireworks from his roof. The sublet had many great features, but its air conditioning was not one of them. And so they stripped down to their underwear in the heat, making each other crackers with a sliver of cheese or salami, talking, and sipping prosecco. Austin described the evening as growing “progressively sillier and sexier.” They made out, and then he went down on her while she stood in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter. When she orgasmed, gripping the countertop, she didn’t have to worry about those thin dorm walls. He loved how loud she was. Then they had some of the Manchego cheese, with tiny bits of date jam. They made their way into the bedroom. He put on a condom and she got on top of him. She rode him for a bit, came, and then they turned over so he could be on top; she came again, and then he pulled out, removed the condom, and came on her stomach. They snuggled for a little while. As she dozed, he got up to wash some more grapes and slice more dried sausage, and he brought her a little plate. They spent the night there, curled up together. They were fine with having missed the fireworks.
It wasn’t just the delightful sex that made this such a powerful story in Austin’s memory. It was the whole scene. Having the apartment to themselves meant that they could slowly build to sex while they ate and drank and talked. Away from the dorms, they didn’t have to worry about being overheard by friends. The heat led easily to savoring a cheese plate while semi-naked, and summer also brought a lack of homework or anything to do other than being together. What stands out in Austin’s narrative is the care—for his girlfriend’s pleasure, but also about his girlfriend as a person, and her care for him. They’d met freshman fall, and started dating at the end of that year, so by that evening they’d passed the two-year mark. They were a little buzzed, but weren’t drunk. The prosecco was just part of a loose, joyous, steamy evening.
We see hints in Austin’s life story of what made him so sensitive to his partner’s pleasure, and so comfortable joking about sex that they had developed an elaborate series of nicknames for the variety of orgasms she experienced. Austin never felt like the type of guy that girls just walk up to and want to hook up with. His all-boys school in Pennsylvania hadn’t offered many opportunities to hone his verbal “game”—skill at talking with women in ways that seductively conveyed sexual interest. By his own assessment, girls at parties were more likely to be put off by his scrawny build than they were to be attracted to his warm smile. The only women with whom he’d spent any appreciable amount of time before college were his mom, his three older sisters, and his many women cousins. Austin credited having strong women in his life as a counterbalance to his male-dominated school culture, and the basis of his respect for women.
Like a lot of his peers, Austin had turned to porn to learn about sex in high school—but his search for answers also led him to erotic fiction, where he learned to think about sex as something more than just “getting my nut and falling asleep.”31 Austin laughed when recalling everything he didn’t learn from his high school’s “sexual diseases class.” The class didn’t succeed in scaring him away from having sex before marriage, nor did the photos of pustulant genitalia answer his questions about sex: what people actually do, what it feels like, how to be good at it. He hated that he was a virgin when he started college, and yet the fall of freshman year he had passed up a chance to have sex for the first time—even though a girl had clearly indicated that she was ready to take things to the next level. He recalled his internal struggle, “I’m an idiot, I’m missing a chance to get my dick sucked.” But he experienced the woman as a really negative person and he knew that he was going to break up with her; it felt wrong to have sex opportunistically. He recalled thinking, “Everybody’s gonna be angry at me, there’s always consequences.” Even after he lost his virginity, his few random hookups left him feeling bad about himself. On spring break in Cabo San Lucas, he got drunk and had sex with a girl he met at a club. “Did I need to do that? Having sex with someone you care about is a lot better.”
It had taken Austin several years to grow into who he was when we interviewed him. The Austin who was so attentive to his girlfriend on the Fourth of July hardly seemed like the Austin in this story from freshman orientation.
My roommate was hooking up with this girl, sex and everything. So they made me sleep in her roommate’s place. The first night, she was really drunk, and they were just like, “Oh go over there.” And I didn’t know what to do so I just lay down next to her and she was like “Oh I just threw up, like, I don’t want to do anything,” but I kind of just laid next to her for a bit and kind of rubbed her body for a bit. I definitely grabbed her boob, but then I felt weird about it, because I was also drunk, and then I slept in the other bed. And then the next time I saw her because they continued hooking up I went back and we talked for, like, two or three hours about bullshit. We actually got along pretty well, and like, it was never bad, it never felt like it was wholly a bad thing, but I definitely felt bad about it. I shouldn’t have done that. But I was definitely happy that I had slept in the other bed. Glad I did that. I stopped and was like “Uh, this isn’t it.” She didn’t seem like she was hating it, but she didn’t seem like she was loving it. Okay, she probably didn’t give affirmative or negative consent. This is a gray area. And I was just like “Okay, this is weird, this is a bad idea.” I don’t know, it wasn’t one of my best moments.
When we asked him how he would categorize the event, he said, “Not something I would do again.” When we asked him if it was a “hookup,” he was definitive. “No, because we didn’t make out. I don’t know what to categorize it as. Just kind of shitty.” As the interview continued, we asked Austin to share more about his definition of sexual assault and, in light of that, to reflect on what had happened. “I know the definition of sexual assault, like any kind of nonconsensual sexual action, so yes . . . that would probably be considered sexual assault.”
By now, Austin was near tears. He distinguished between rape and assault. “Well, rape in terms of vaginal rape. And sexual assault being, like, a lot of, like, bad touching. Which is I guess what I did. But umm. But also, like. Yeah damn. Well, fuck me, right? Yeah.”
He looked crushed, as if he’d just realized something terrible about himself.
The assault that Austin told us he committed during orientation week was typical of many campus sexual assault incidents: he and the woman were both drunk, it was not reported, they maintained a social relationship afterwards but never discussed what happened, and in fact the interview seemed to have been the first moment that Austin considered that it was assault. Austin was desperate to accrue sexual experience, anxious about being behind his peers. Intoxication clouded his judgment. People know that being drunk is associated with an increased risk of being assaulted, but less remarked upon are the ways in which heavy drinking raises the risk of assaulting someone. An opportunity presented itself, set in motion by the community norm that part of being a good friend is going along with being shuffled into a virtual stranger’s bedroom, or having a virtual stranger shuffled into yours. We don’t know how the woman in Austin’s story experienced what happened. But we do know how Austin felt, after he began thinking about what he’d done. It’s hard to think about Austin as a sociopath or a predator. Did he commit assault? In our view, yes. Is he a terrible person? In our view, no.
Austin knew about affirmative consent; this didn’t stop him from doing what he did. What eventually stopped him? His sex education had instructed him to fear sex, but provided no guidance about how to have sex in ways that were healthy and respectful. Maybe it was what he’d gotten from reading erotic fiction—thinking about sex as something other than just “getting his nut”—or maybe it was his broader feeling that the way you treat people matters, that “there’s always consequences.” Or maybe it was just the fact that he wasn’t that tiny bit drunker, so he paid attention when his conscience called out to him: “this is weird, this is a bad idea.”
There’s a lot that can be said about this. But the role of alcohol in clouding both his judgment and the woman’s own capacity to express herself is inescapable. Just over half of those who reported being assaulted in the SHIFT survey identified the “method of perpetration” as “incapacitation.”32 That pretty much means that the person who was assaulted was drunk. This doesn’t make the assault their fault, but it does reflect an important reality. We need to grapple with the role of alcohol in the college landscape, particularly because, in our view, it doesn’t just put people at risk of being assaulted: it also puts people, like Austin, at risk of committing assault.