The Clamor on Campus

By NANCY GIBBS

Universities have always been America's approximate monasteries, embracing codes of behavior too stringent for the outside world. Deans aim to enforce a set of rules that will guide young people from the safety of their family to the freedom of the rest of their life. Some students arrive barely knowing how to drink and sleep, much less drink and sleep together; they have little sense of what is appropriate and what is expected of them. So with a pitcher of beer in one hand and a dorm key in the other, society's children set out to discover who they are.

What many learn first is that within a cloistered courtyard, rape is an easy crime: doors are left unlocked, visitors come and go, and female students give classmates the benefit of the doubt. College officials have led the effort to raise consciousness about the problem through rape-awareness weeks, video series, pamphlets, training manuals and posters: DATE RAPE IS VIOLENCE, NOT A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION. But when a really nasty incident occurs, the instinct too often is to handle it quietly and try to make it go away.

Katie Koestner was a virgin when she was allegedly raped by a student she had been dating at William and Mary College. The dean took her to the campus police, but steered her away from the outside authorities, she says. When she asked for an internal investigation, the accused man got to question her first, and then she had her turn. At 2:30 a.m., after 7 1/2 hours, he was found guilty of sexual assault. Days later she learned his penalty: he was barred from entering any dorm or fraternity house other than his own for four years, but he was allowed to stay on campus. "The hearing officer told me that this is an educational institution, not a penitentiary," she recalls. "He even said, 'Maybe you guys can get back together next year.' I couldn't believe it."

The man later wrote in the campus newspaper that he had suffered the "terrible consequences of being falsely accused." He said he had been dating Koestner for three weeks; one night they slept together, without having sex, and then early the next morning, "without any protest or argument on the part of Ms. Koestner, we engaged in intercourse." He was found guilty, he said, not for physically forcing Koestner to have sex, but for applying emotional pressure.

The debate grew more heated when Koestner went public with her story. Since then she has received stacks of letters and calls of support. Women raped decades ago phone and thank her for saving their daughters. Though the school defends its procedures, vice president W. Samuel Sadler says that "Katie's / coming forward has personalized the issue and led to a more intensive discussion, and frankly improved input."

That discussion goes on at colleges everywhere. "It seems like date and acquaintance rape is the rule rather than the exception on campuses today," says Frank Carrington, a consultant for Security on Campus, a nonprofit group based in Gulph Mills, Pa. "And the way the universities treat it is to cover up and protect their image while a tremendous outrage is building."

Nowhere is it building faster than at Carleton College, Minnesota's prestigious private liberal-arts school and, in 1983, one of the first in the nation to establish a sexual-harassment policy. In the language of the university's judicial code, "rape" doesn't officially exist. School administrators call it "sexual harassment" or "advances without sanction." But those phrases don't seem very useful when Julie, Amy, Kristene and Karen try to describe what happened to them.

In October 1987, Amy had been on campus just five weeks when she joined some friends to watch a video in the room of a senior. One by one the other students went away, leaving her alone with a student whose full name she didn't even know. "It ended up with his hands around my throat," she recalls. In a lawsuit she has filed against the college, she charges that he locked the door and raped her again and again for the next four hours. "I didn't want him to kill me. I just kept trying not to cry." Only afterward did he tell her, almost defiantly, his name. It was near the top of the "castration list" posted on women's bathroom walls around campus to warn other students about college rapists.

Amy went to the dean of students, whom she had been told she could trust. "He told me it was my word against my attacker's, and that if I went for a criminal prosecution, the victim was basically put on trial." So instead she picked the gentler alternative -- an internal review, at which she ended up being grilled about her sexual habits and experiences. Her attacker was found guilty of sexual assault but was only suspended, because of a dean's assurance that he had no "priors" other than "advances without sanction."

Julie started dating a fellow cast member in a Carleton play. They had never slept together, she charges in a civil suit, until he came to her dorm room one night, uninvited, and raped her. Weeks later, she says, he ripped her dress at a play rehearsal and grabbed her exposed breast. Still she told no one. "If I had been raped by a stranger, I would have told someone. But to be raped by a friend -- I began to wonder, Whom do you trust?" She struggled to hold her life and education together, but finally could manage no longer and left school. Only later did Julie learn that her assailant was the same man who had attacked Amy.

Two other students, Kristene and Karen, claim to have suffered similar experiences at the hands of another student; all four of the Carleton women have filed suit against the college. They claim the school knew these men had a history of sexual abuse and did nothing to prevent their attacking again. Even after the men were found guilty of sexual harassment, they were allowed to remain on campus, and the victims were barred from warning their dorm mates under the college's privacy policy. The local police chief says that in the past six years, no Carleton official has brought an assault victim to the department.

Carleton President Stephen Lewis Jr. explains that he is acutely aware of the problem of rape on campus, which is why the sexual-harassment policy was created in the first place. He believes the four students objected not so much to the procedures as to the outcome. All were advised of the option of going to the police. "These women chose to go to the university hearing board but didn't like the result, and now they're suing," says Lewis, who arrived on campus in the fall of 1987, after two of the alleged rapes took place. "We understand they're upset, but that doesn't mean they're right. I accept fully that Amy and Kristene believe they were raped, but the hearing boards concluded that they hadn't been." If the men, who were found guilty of lesser charges, had committed forced sexual intercourse, he says, they would have been expelled. "It's like a court of law. When the accused is acquitted, you can't then sue the jury."

This month Representative Jim Ramstad of Minnesota filed a bill in Congress -- the "campus sexual-assault victims' bill of rights" -- that guarantees students the right to have assaults investigated by police and to live in housing "free from sexual or physical intimidation." Under a law already passed, beginning in 1992 colleges will be required to make campus crime statistics public. That will give parents and prospective students a chance to make informed decisions about the risks they are willing to take with their safety. More important, the law may encourage colleges to be more vigilant about crime in their midst and more protective of young people in their care.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Minneapolis