It Takes a Campus To Change a Culture

College is a time for exploring new ideas, meeting new people, and entering unfamiliar social worlds. It’s also a particularly dangerous time for sexual violence.

The allegations of violent sexual assault recently made at Cornell University haven’t yet been proven in court. But the fact that such allegations are immediately recognizable as something that could happen on a college campus — including our own — should disturb us.

Across the nation, the first few months of college is often called the “Red Zone,” a period in which first-year women face an especially high risk of sexual assault. The features of college social life tend to be strong predictors: Students drink, party off campus, and join single-gender student organizations. All of these factors increase the incidence of sexual assault.

Harvard is hardly exempt. A 2024 survey found that 22.1 percent of female undergraduate students had experienced unwanted sexual contact. 7.8 percent reported experiencing penetration by physical force or inability to consent.

While there are systems in place that attempt to prevent sexual violence and respond when it occurs, policy can only do so much. The aim should be to change the social environments in which sexual violence is ignored, if not enabled.

That responsibility belongs to us — and especially to male students.

Sexual violence does not persist because of those who commit it. It sprouts from social spaces that foster acquiescence: Clubs that force members to behave a certain way to even join; friends that say little when another man talks about women in degrading terms; parties that ignore the intoxication of their attendees.

A minority of men in college actually commit sexual assault. And yet, undergraduate men tend to believe their friends and classmates are more supportive of rape myths than they are themselves. Most concerningly, the strongest predictor of men’s willingness to intervene is their oft-mistaken belief about their classmates’ attitudes, rather than their own opinion.

Meanwhile, men who sexually assault tend to overestimate the support of their peers. When these perpetrators go on to describe their acts to others, they further distort the beliefs of their bystanding classmates.

This process, termed “pluralistic ignorance,” leads to large groups of people who, though they personally reject a belief, also perceive other members as accepting it.

You should be willing to speak up against sexual violence regardless of what others think. You should speak up no matter how much it makes you a killjoy or whether it costs you a spot in the next round of punch.

But the script isn’t even that hard to flip — it just takes adjusting your mistaken beliefs, and those of your mistaken friends.

It’s easy to merely believe sexual assault is wrong, balking at the horror of the news from Cornell. But actual change requires refusing to treat misogyny, coercion, or predatory conduct as simply part of how college social life works.

The #MeToo movement broke the ice on national discussions of sexual assault and the protection of perpetrators. But its key goal was never merely awareness; it was changing what people tolerate from those around them. When a man can ask, “Shop still open?” and earn a response, it’s clear that work remains to be done.

Every one of us reproduces culture. We do it every time we decide what behavior to challenge, or texts to laugh off. It is time students acknowledge the power they have over spaces they inhabit.

And crucially, Harvard’s culture has echoes beyond its campus.

Many students here will eventually occupy positions and institutions with substantial influence on society. From politicians to Wall Street tycoons, media moguls to eminent engineers, members of our student body will go on to have careers with national and international impact and, by extension, the highest leverage to shape our world’s moral fiber.

But we should not need any future vision of social influence to make the case — it only raises the stakes.

Our classmates are here now. Their safety matters now. And so, the onus is on us.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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