How Harvard Undermines Agentic Consent

The Harvard Title IX Office gives three scenarios for freshman entryways to discuss during start-of-year orientation meetings. They’re all written in the third person: Questions after each scenario prompt students to discuss how they could be “active bystanders” in these situations. Never do the scenarios prompt students to consider what they would do if they themselves were being harassed or felt uncomfortable.

Harvard teaches students how to protect others’ agency, but apparently not how to exercise their own.

Following recent allegations of sexual assault at Cornell University and ensuing tumult, discourse about the role of college administrators in addressing student-to-student harm has come back in full force.

It’s tempting to think that the bureaucratic response mechanisms are insufficiently supportive, efficient, punitive, or proactive. Perhaps they should be more educational — would another mandatory eLearning module help?

What these considerations miss is an underlying flaw in administrators’ approach to consent: Harvard’s all-consuming risk aversion has produced a philosophy that treats students as non-agentic entities whose emotions need to be managed by peers rather than dealt with head-on.

We practice “everyday” consent, according to The Harvard Office for Community Support, Non-Discrimination, Rights and Responsibilities, when we “Are conscious of how we are using our power and influence with others,” when we “Consider another person’s needs” and “Honor a person’s agency,” lest we forget to “Offer choice where possible,” and “Respect our own and others’ boundaries,” and, of course, “Lead with inquiry in our interactions with others.”

Well, I am conscious of my power and influence as a Crimson Editorial columnist after all. I hope it’s not violating your agency to say that it’s absurd to think we should have one approach to consent that applies to both everyday interactions and sex.

In sexual encounters, the burden falls on you to seek affirmative consent, rather than assume it until told otherwise. But ordinary life operates differently.

Say you’d like to ‘honor a person’s agency’ in the classroom, for example. That might mean you take it as an assumption that the person will disagree with you, and so you should avoid airing your concerns. Instead, I’d argue that to censor yourself or modify your arguments in order to appease fellow classmates would fail to treat them with respect.

The reason is that you are failing to treat people as agents — recognizing that they can communicate their thoughts and decisions. There’s a difference between an approach to consent that makes people comfortable enough to say no and one that respects people’s ability to do so. CSNDR’s proposal for “Cultivating Consent” risks singly endorsing a non-agentic version of consent.

Kindness is a perfectly reasonable value. But if we take it upon ourselves to operate under the assumption that our peers cannot be trusted to speak up when they disagree or don’t want to do something, we beget a culture of mutual distrust. Respecting someone’s boundaries need not entail tiptoeing around boundaries they’ve never expressed.

Harvard’s attempt to make an environment where students are so concerned with each other’s comfort that they never get into interpersonal conflicts is not mere virtue-signalling coming from the usual suspect. It’s a part of the fabric of Harvard’s policy towards college parties — something that should be pedestrian is instead another outlet for administrative interpersonal therapy slop.

In college, if your party is loud and bothering your neighbors, they should come whack on the door and yell at you to turn it down. But in the age of administrative pacification, the e’er-benevolent hand of the administration is always involved in preparing for your festivities. The party registration page for Winthrop House (yes, you’re required to register a party) reads: “Anticipate crashing by outsiders attracted by music or word of mouth. Ask friends to be ready to assist you in asking uninvited guests to leave. Discuss with your entryway tutor what to do in the event that your party attracts too many people.”

The redirection from interpersonal conflict, in this realm, not only babies students by imposing upon them the view that party crashers are bad but also suggests, yet again, that they are helpless actors and in so doing promotes students as non-agentic.

The elaborate party regulations, mandatory educational programming, and inexhaustible administrative guidance are all symptoms of the same instinct: If students might conceivably encounter an uncomfortable situation, surely University Hall ought to intervene.

There’s a well-intended impulse, particularly when addressing sexual misconduct, to avoid victim-blaming. But in our eagerness to avoid denying anyone’s experience, we shouldn’t deny their agency either.

Harvard’s approach threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Treat students as incapable of navigating disagreement, and they won’t learn how. Teach them that others are responsible for anticipating their every discomfort, and they’ll become less accustomed to communicating their own preferences.

The passivity of orientation scenarios, the therapy slop-packed consent guidance, and its broader determination to sanitize student life reflect the same conceit: Students are helpless actors in need of supervision.

The more useful version of consent training would affirm that each of us is an agent, capable of making our own decisions, and not beholden to the will of others. It’s time Harvard starts treating us as such.

Amelia F. Barnum ’28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Winthrop House.