Macalester students are keeping the pressure on to change the school’s sexual assault policy. An article in today’s Mac Weekly, the Macalester student newspaper, describes one student’s efforts to find information for a friend after her sexual assault:

After over an hour of searching the college’s website we were as lost as when we had first started. The most relevant information we found was that there were only three reported sex offenses at Macalester the year before, an extraordinary figure given the national average that one in every six college women is affected by sexual violence. The maze-like search for resources on how to respond to rape gave the impression that the college was under the same illusion I had been. That, “we don’t need to talk about, or provide information about, rape because it doesn’t happen here.”

Ugh. Dealing with college bureaucracy is bad enough to make you pull your hair out when you’re just trying to make it through some tedious registration process. I can’t imagine having to deal with this nonsense in the wake of a sexual assault. We’ll be keeping an eye on Macalester as students push this forward.

I keep finding little hopeful signs that we’re getting to a tipping point when it comes to students organizing around campus sexual assault policies. Sounds like Macalester College now has some interesting rumblings going on:

The mood was tense in the lecture hall on the ground floor of Carnegie Hall. Dean of Students Jim Hoppe, invited by Feminists in Action-Students Together Against Rape and Sexual Assault to discuss Macalester’s sexual assault policies, sat alone on a table in front of more than 50 students in attendance at the Tuesday evening event.

As Hoppe explained the procedures of the Macalester College Harassment Committee, the questions he fielded began to express more and more frustration with what students said were failures of the administration to advertise and implement a policy adequately supportive of victims.

Anna Min ’09 broke the tension almost an hour after the evening began with an appeal to Hoppe and the administration.

Min said students on campus brag about avoiding punishment for sexual assault and asked that Hoppe concentrate on prevention by advertising consequences that the college will enforce.

I love a good story about an administrator actually having to face the students who live with the sexual violence policies that have been laid down in some conference room by a bunch of people who use phrases like “let’s touch base.” Too often, there is a total disconnect between the lived reality of students and the breathtaking bureaucracy that is academic administration. Good to see the students of Macalester giving their admins a reality check.