What germ have colleges contracted to produce such a rank, diseased culture? What is wrong with the overly-privileged? How can violence and abuse be so widespread yet NEVER punished? And why are the old boys’ networks so intent on protecting criminality?
Given that you can’t really fault those charming neo-Gothic buildings, let’s start with the kids who inhabit them. According to Honorary Professor Roslyn Arnold who just quit the St John’s executive, many of them come from the country. Unless they’re scholarship students they’re also probably wealthy as the fees are expensive. As a former Women’s College resident I would tell you that many come from boarding schools.
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For a society as cosmopolitan as Australia, colleges are strangely monocultural. They’re largely comprised of the rich, the white, the entitled and the conservative. They are filled with people who transition from cloistered worlds of cultural sameness (regional NSW or elite boarding schools) to insular institutions devoid of diversity.
Not that all rich, white people will necessarily publicly defecate, have projectile vomiting competitions and promote rape when found in the same room. The problem at colleges is that a pack mentality grows out of this monoculture aimed at protecting its traditions and privilege through violence and coercion.
Year of Justice shirt made to commemorate the near-death of a female student. Amanda Parkinson.
College culture is defined through a series of unwritten rules that new members learn through initiation rituals. Why make freshers drink a concoction of shampoo, tabasco sauce, sour milk, alcohol and dog food for the crime of walking forwards instead of backwards, as The Untouchables did to four first-year women? To build group cohesion through teaching new members to willingly submit to authority and do as they’re told. Those who drop out are ridiculed.
In fact, ‘ridiculed’ is far too kind. In my experience, women and men who challenged college traditions had their rooms broken into and their possessions stolen. One friend had raw meat sewn into the curtains of her room and I received threatening voice messages for a month following my efforts to remove pornography from St Paul’s foyer.
They’re also defined by misogyny. Mary Gardiner, a former resident of Sancta Sophia College which sits beside St John’s, reported that “They had a tradition of screaming ‘mole’ at women as we walked back over their oval to our college,” she said. “And during orientation week they invited us [over] and sang a song which went ‘yes means yes and no means yes’ [and] chanted over and over again.”
Given the kind of punishments meted out to girls who resist, it’s hardly surprising that women are often complicit. When I was at Women’s College, a woman who complained of rape was labelled a slut and in spite of widespread acknowledgement of instances of sexual violence or harassment, the police were never notified.
Binge-drinking was virtually compulsory and was often used by college boys as a weapon against women’s sexual reluctance. Which is not to say that college boys rape women because they’re drunk. Rather, college life creates the perfect conditions for rape and consent is impossible when you’re passed out on an oval.
The term ‘college traditions’ is ultimately a euphemism. What we are dealing with is a racket of organised aristocratic crime.
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