In a recent class, my professor attempted to engage his students in a conversation about “culture.” It began with a definition of terms: what is culture? One girl said culture is comprised of unified community action. Another, that it was a shared set of values.
The professor paused, nodding slowly. “Does U.Va. have a rape culture?” he inquired. Immediately, reflexively, there was a sharp “no” from one of the students in the hall. “No?” he echoed. There was a pause. We looked at one another. Lowering their eyes to the ground, a few students quietly muttered, “yes.”
After a tentative pause, he brought forth another query: “does U.Va. have a community of trust?” There were several straightforward “yeses” from my peers. The phrase “community of trust” is so ingrained in the lexicon of students here that its invocation elicits an almost automatically positive response. One of the various definitions of culture, taken from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, is “the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic.” “Rape culture” is therefore a term used to describe a social paradigm wherein the promoted values and norms are those permissive or even conducive to rape. “Rape culture” is consequently anathema to the conception of such a “community of trust” that its mention generally provokes a knee-jerk “no.” Yet a culture of trust and one of rape are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are closely tied. Trust lends to vulnerability, which is then exploited in instances of sexual assault. The frequency of sexual violence has ostensibly led to a community of (disappointed) trust: a culture of betrayal, betrayal of respect for bodily integrity and dignity of one another. The events of the last academic year revealed flickers of such a culture, in which various groups felt marginalized, both by the administration and their peers.
To assert a broken community of trust is to neglect the agents seeking to promote other facets of the kaleidoscopic “University culture”: the cultures of empathy, of curiosity, of art and burgeoning social consciousness. The efforts of these individuals may be obscured by the overwhelming tendency at this University to reject the fluid and multidimensional in favor of the concrete and absolute, which is easier to comprehend. Thomas Jefferson is touted as the ideal of virtue and leadership, expulsion is the only way to discipline a broad range of so-called “honor offenses,” and people are defined and dismissed by the groups they associate with, be it Honor Committee, University Guide Service, University Judiciary Committee, Student Council, a fraternity or a sorority, a sports group and on and on ad nauseum. In the movie “Across the Universe” — which I’ve quoted before, because it’s wise and wild and set to the music of the Beatles — Max, a college student, is told by his uncle that “what you do defines who you are.” At the University, students seem to take that to heart, appraising people according to implicit characteristics associated with the groups to which they belong.
According to third-year College student Katie Deal, “Even something as banal as Facebook is a constant reminder that you could, should be doing something more.” This creates “a damaging and constructed anxiety.”
This odd normativity — you ought to “do more” — feeds into the notion that your voice is only valid if it is part of a larger choir: the uninvolved are irrelevant, while the over involved are so loud as to appear unapproachable. Every position in a society seems to raise another barrier to candid conversation — if this person is a member of so-and-so, we think, then surely he would not agree with, or would not tolerate, or would deride my views. To establish and maintain a healthy community of trust, superficial group divisions and distinctions must be transcended — only then can the necessary dialogues and outreach take place to mitigate instances of violence. We are not merely a sum of “what we do” — the University student is a person of his own right, and must be conceived as such, beyond a motley assortment of labels.
If we can conceive of each other as individuals in our own right then hopefully we can begin to respect and engage with each other in the same way, undeterred by preconceived notions of personality fed by group stereotypes. Then, perhaps, the manifold positive University cultures can become more manifest.
Tamar Ziff is a Viewpoint writer.
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