Who cares if anyone was actually raped in a frat house? Frat houses bad because “rape culture”

My latest for Minding the Campus:

Wesleyan’s Greek culture—especially as represented by its three all-male fraternities, plus (to a lesser extend) four co-ed fraternity houses and one sorority that has no residential facility–has become a nationwide ideological battleground in the war against campus “rape culture,” as feminists call it: the perceived epidemic of sexual assault in academic settings that has riveted the attention of the media, the Obama administration’s Education Department, and most recently, Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who on July 9 released a survey that she said indicted college administrators for not properly investigating sexual assaults at their institutions.

Ironically, Wesleyan wasn’t even named among the 55 colleges and universities, from Harvard on down, that the Education Department indicated in late April it was investigating for improper handling of sexual-assault claims. (By contrast, nearby Amherst College in Massachusetts, which banned fraternities from its campus nearly 30 years ago and has recently forbidden its students to join even off-campus Greek organizations, is on the Education Department’s sexual-assault blacklist.) Furthermore, defenders of the Wesleyan fraternity system point out that annual campus-crime disclosure reports required under the federal Clery Act indicate that there is no greater incidence of sexual violence at schools with all-male fraternities than at those without.

But hey–there have been two allegations of rape at Wesleyan fraternity parties in three years!

Posted by Charlotte Allen