Community in the Classroom
Why I’m grateful for professors like Dr. Kami Kosenko.
Kosenko’s course, which Leena Trivedi-Grenier explored in her piece, is an attempt to break some of the silences that surround the topic of sex. It brought to mind so many of the topics I grappled with as an undergrad at Harvard. Kosenko’s said that “the best predictor of whether a person would engage in safe sex was how comfortable they were talking about it.”
Comfortable. I’m struck by this word. I’m trying to map it onto my own experience — when and where have I felt comfortable talking about sex? Have I ever felt comfortable talking about sex? More broadly, what does “comfortable” look and feel like on a college campus, where navigating difference and leaving my comfort zone was such a huge part of my experience?
I remember being asked to a meeting of student leaders that an administrator convened this past academic year. There was administrative support for a student-led arts project to bring awareness to the distressing results of a university-wide sexual conduct survey. Students were throwing out ideas, talking about the problem, thinking of ways to inspire action. And then a very thoughtful guy spoke up with the only comment I really remember from the meeting.
There’s something in the air here, he said — something about the way we treat each other here. And until we could think of how to address that, he said, he wasn’t sure there was a quick fix to the problem of sexual assault. He was clearly describing something difficult to articulate, but I’ll take a stab at it: I think he was talking about a lack of accountability to each other. A lack of real community — and real communication — on campus.
He implicitly raised the hard question: Even if all of the task force’s recommendations are implemented, even if all student demands of the administration are met, will the situation improve enough? Or is there a deeper problem we’re missing?
Our deans and administrators refer to us as a “community” in their emails to us. Sexual assault, they say, is not something that we should tolerate — as a community. Colleges tend to market themselves as a kind of large family that we’re all supposed to belong to. At Harvard, there are countless systems of support — counseling offices, advisors — that strive to be effective and accessible to students. People should feel comfortable here, they say. We’re supposed to have each other’s backs. And administrators are always shocked and saddened to hear when that is not the truth, when people feel excluded, sometimes violently, on campus — whether that occurs on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, or something else.
My classmate Andrea Ortiz pointed out some of the most important results from the sexual climate survey: that, of the 46.6 percent of Harvard students who had seen a drunk person heading for a sexual encounter, 80 percent didn’t do anything. In other words, “79.8 percent of students who witnessed a questionable sexual encounter did not take a few seconds to ask either party if they were aware of what was happening and wanted it to continue.”
I want to return to this idea of “comfortable,” because we have a long way to go if 80 percent of students didn’t feel comfortable enough to check in with someone who is supposedly part of the same “community” as them.
I formed some of my closest friendships at Harvard, and I found some really loving communities there. But throughout my time at Harvard, I always found the idea of a cohesive campus community to be kind of a myth. What I saw at school was a collection of people with very different relationships to the institution — some who had the sense that its resources were designed with them in mind, and others who found themselves constantly navigating terrain that wasn’t built for them.
So, when I see Harvard’s administration saying it’s going to take some serious steps to combat sexual assault on campus, I feel grateful, at least, that they are working to make good on the promise of community that they constantly spew. After all, a university that calls itself a community of learners should, at the bare minimum, work to ensure the physical safety of its students.
But I also see a more complicated story, because I know that administrative fixes that target a college community might fail to recognize the extent to which the “community” they speak of does not fully exist.
I think students must work to make a non-mythical community. They must be part of fixing this “thing in the air” that guy spoke of.
That, to me, is why a class like Kosenko’s sexual communication course is an incredibly important intervention. Kosenko is making a broader point: Immense value lies in bringing the personal to the classroom. Communication skills are the building blocks of mutual respect — this is how we create communities across difference and help to make sure that the people in our communities are safe.
The global epidemic of violence against women does not stop at the gates of the University but in fact dwells within them. The challenge for colleges lies in turning the highly resourced bubbles of their campuses into models of the world we want to shape and bend our broader society into — a place where people of all backgrounds and genders are respected and seen as people.
Perhaps I am still hung up on the college campus as an important site because it is a space from which I very recently emerged. But I think that, if done thoughtfully, an attempt to build genuine community on a college campus can be more high stakes than it might appear. And so I’m grateful to professors, like Kami Kosenko, and students, too, who do this kind of work.
