by James A. Bacon

Every perceived problem in America today seems to require a bureaucratic response — either a new government program or, in the case of higher education, a new university program. Accordingly, Virginia Tech is addressing the challenge of sexual violence by creating a Sexual Violence Prevention and Education Office.

Virginia Tech seeks to foster a campus culture “free from harassment, discrimination, and sexual violence,” states the Sexual Violence Prevention Initiative Strategic Plan Outline 2024. That’s a worthy ideal. I expect that 99.9% of the Virginia Tech community supports it.

But the bureaucratic organism that is the Virginia Tech administration gravitates, as surely as Newton’s apple to the ground, toward a bureaucratic solution that entails more plans, more rules, more communication, more education, and more onanistic, self-gratifying activity that will accomplish nothing worthwhile.

“I’m pleased to see this work moving forward as a continuing commitment to promote a positive culture free of gender-based violence,” stated Tech President Tim Sands in announcing the new office.

The underlying supposition is that gender-based violence is a problem at Tech. It might be. I have no way of knowing. But in the materials I viewed, I spotted many assertions that gender-based violence is a problem but no data demonstrating its existence. Moreover, I discerned semantic confusion over what constitutes “gender-based violence” that leads me to suspect the whole issue is a fabrication of the woke imagination.

The Strategic Plan Outline makes the statement that “many victims of sexual violence experience their first assault before age 18, when many students begin their education at Virginia Tech (as many as 42-51%).” If half of all students experience a sexual “assault” before they turn 18, imagine what happens by the time they get through four years of college! One would think that Virginia Tech is such a sexual hellscape that women are departing in droves.

Remarkably, though, the Plan contains no data regarding how many students experience sexual assault at Virginia Tech. Nor does it even provide a definition of what constitutes sexual assault.

According to the United States Department of Justice, sexual assault is “any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient.” That can range from a man placing an unwanted hand on a woman’s shoulder to a man raping a woman at gunpoint. Tech employs the terms “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” indiscriminately. Sexual assault, which encompasses a wide range of behaviors that don’t come close to violence, is conflated with acts that undeniably are coercive and traumatic.

Most so-called “sexual assaults” do not rise to the level of a social problem requiring university intervention. If a young man pats a woman on the posterior, that act of rudeness assuredly deserves a response. A curt comment, perhaps. A slap on the offending hand… or a slap in the face… Perhaps the intervention of a male friend with the admonition, “keep your hands to yourself, asshole.” Such matters should be addressed through the interactions of the individuals involved and their peers.

Virginia Tech students do not need educational email blasts, seminars and discussion groups to tell them that groping is unacceptable.

Rape, by contrast, is a very serious matter indeed. But the number of incidents that rise to the level of criminal rape are very few on college campuses. Indeed, despite all the drunken revelry that occurs in fraternities and dorm rooms, violent rape takes place less frequently on college campuses than outside them. Those incidents that do occur do not require a new university bureaucracy to educate students that coercive intercourse is morally and legally wrong.

There is an ambiguous middle ground, which I refer to as alcohol-fueled regret sex. Students often get drunk and have sex. The next morning the man behaves like a cad, the woman’s feelings are hurt, and she decides she was too inebriated to have given consent. Maybe she was taken advantage of. Or maybe she just regrets how things turned out. She tells one story, he tells another. Both were too impaired to provide reliable testimony. This phenomenon is a problem, and there may be a role for universities to sort through the he-said/she-said testimonies to ascertain if some level of coercion was involved.

But that is not what Tech’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Education Office proposes. Astonishingly, the strategic plan only fleetingly acknowledges that almost all sexual violence on campus, alleged or actual, involves heavy drinking. The Strategic Plan Outline does call for “faculty research on the correlation between heavy alcohol use and dating violence on college campuses,” but says literally nothing else about the phenomenon.

Rather, Tech’s vision for preventing sexual violence entails engaging a lot of people to talk all around the drinking problem. Priorities are consumed by bureaucratic process:

• developing an “overarching organizational structure for institutional sexual violence prevention work.”
• creating a “comprehensive communications plan and approach.”
• setting up student advisory groups.
• setting up two subcommittees, one for violence prevention and one for student support and advocacy.
• soliciting student feedback on the strategic plan.
• using data collection and analysis “to inform prevention strategies, program development, and campus management efforts.”

The list goes on.

The exercise will be informed, of course, by the ideology of intersectional oppression (although words like “oppression” and “patriarchy” are not said out loud).

We are told, however, that “considering intersectionality in our approach is critical to both understanding and responding to the needs of our diverse campus community members. All of our work must be broadly inclusive and consider how a person’s identity factors into their experiences.”

Woke platitudes are intermingled with administrative mumbo jumbo. Thus, we also hear, “there must be multiple pillars to a comprehensive anti-harassment program, each requiring specialized expertise, including advocacy, response, and prevention.”

Ah, yes, students cannot possibly work out the routine problems that have bedeviled male-female interactions through the millennia without the assistance of adult “experts.”

The end result of this nonsense, I predict, will be the absolute opposite of what is intended. Tech students will be trained to rely upon higher authority to resolve more controversies between the sexes. They will become more passive. They will lose, to borrow from the vocabulary of wokeness, their agency. They will refer more personal disagreements to administrators for adjudication rather than learn how to work things out among themselves. They will graduate from Tech having experienced less emotional growth and maturity than preceding generations.

Tech students don’t need a bureaucracy to communicate the message, “Don’t get drunk and have sex with people you barely know.” But it looks like they’ll be getting more experts and less common sense.