Alfred University is Leading the Fight Against Campus Rape Culture--with a Public Reckoning

Alfred University is Leading the Fight Against Campus Rape Culture—with a Public Reckoning


This time last year, eight women steeled themselves to take the stage for a town hall meeting on sexual assault in the hills of Western New York. Brought together by artist Traci Molloy, this was the first moment that many of these women, all current or former students of Alfred University (AU), publicly acknowledged the grim fact that their bodies were violated, or the sadness, guilt and humiliation of being groped or raped. In the moments leading up to the event, one panelist shook uncontrollably; another momentarily retreated inside of herself. But on stage that evening, they celebrated the power of having a platform for their stories. We suffered in silence and felt shame, but it was not our fault,” one survivor said, “I’ve always hoped that someday people would listen to my story. Now that I see it happening, I finally feel a sense of freedom.”

For the past two years, Molloy has interviewed and painted portraits of over 20 AU women connected by the common bonds of surviving sexual assault or sexual harassment. Her work entered campus life in two forms: through public engagement and open discussions moderated by the artist herself, and by way of her portraits of survivors, hung as banners, that lined the walkway of Alfred University’s Academic Alley in 2018 during Sexual Assault Awareness Month and again during new student orientation.



(via the NASPA blog)

Handwritten text below each portrait tells us what happened, in her own words. Collectively, they tell us:

I was naive and flattered that he picked me out of all the others.

I trusted him as a friend. He forced himself on me.

I remember him brushing my teeth. I remember feeling penetrated and I remember saying no.

He said that my body language showed I wanted it. Some days, I don’t think I want to be alive.

I was sexually assaulted as a freshman. I still say hi to the guy who did that to me.

As an AU alum, a professor at the University of Michigan and an artist, I’ve followed Molloy’s powerful work and AU’s radically responsive actions to address issues around consent—all of which has unfolded alongside the ever-worsening policies of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that impose greater deterrents to survivors who courageously come forward, and my own institution’s decision to maintain its public image rather than directly acknowledge survivors’ claims. “Against My Will” is Molloy’s creative disruption of the placid facade of campus life, and AU’s administrators and trustees are encouraging this disturbance. Other universities would benefit from adapting their model of partnership—and heeding lessons from the outspoken ways Molloy and AU are welcoming testimony from survivors and exposing all students to issues around consent.
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Every college that Molloy visits as a visiting artist has inevitably heard and confronted stories of negligence on the part of administrators. When one female student at Ashland University reported being raped, and the accused student claimed not that she hadn’t said no, but that she hadn’t said no enough, the university corroborated his justification by assigning her a paper on consent. When an “Against My Will” participant narrowly escaped sexual assault after six drunk male co-eds invaded her home, she asked a faculty member for protection—and was instead assigned to work on a lab project with the lead perpetrator. Molloy’s work—which preceded #MeToo, but works in harmony with it now—is one of the forces confronting these failures. The radical proposition of “Against My Will” is to bring the trauma of sexual assault to light in a very public way. And Alfred University—a small institution most familiar to artists and material science engineers—is, remarkably, allowing itself to be challenged and changed by it.

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https://msmagazine.com/2019/04/03/how-one-university-taking-on-campus-rape-culture-by-way-of-a-public-reckoning/