After the legal case brought to the Residential Tenancy Board by former TCDSU President László Molnárfi was upheld on appeal, Trinity’s needlessly bureaucratic and fundamentally anti-fun overnight guest policy was finally amended. Rejoice! – students can now sign in last-minute guests past midnight in College-run accommodation. Not only does this leave residents free to enjoy their one-night-stands in peace instead of having to un-sexily resign themselves to the childhood bedrooms of their alien lovers; this case leaves a legal precedent for students to fight back against overbearing accommodation providers. This is a victory for sexual freedom for students across the country, but the paternalistic rot that underpins it runs deep.
The battle for sexual freedom on campus has a long history. Ever since women were finally permitted to enter universities, sexual tensions – now no longer only experienced by the homosexually inclined – have been a reliable feature of academic life. Famous and sometimes complicated flings between intellectual giants like Arendt and Heidegger speak to the longstanding erotic passions of those who pursue their scholarly vocation. The 28 boxes worth of documents and correspondence in the Trinity Women Graduate Archive hold stories from our own past – perhaps including a few notes slipped across aisles in lecture theatres or some signs of broken curfew rules. Universities, however, have generally been prudish and restrictive, mostly to the detriment of more sexually liberal women. In Trinity, women were barred from College accommodation and had to leave the grounds by 6 pm – apparently, even mixed dinners were too much for the male Trinity dons to handle.
But sexual self-determination was never going to be given up without a fight. In this respect, the 60s was the decade of women’s freedom. On campuses across the West, women campaigned against the curfews that kept them in their dorms while their male counterparts enjoyed the promiscuous, drug-infused, and morally dubious nightlife that also characterised the decade. Students fundamentally rejected the “in loco parentis” ethos of the university, which still fancied itself a benevolent patriarchal figure, protecting its college community from the frightening world beyond its ancient walls. Students who had embraced their youthful penchant for risk and caught a liking for that big bad world fought for their freedom – and were largely victorious.
However, by the 90s, things were slowly changing. The 60s student activists of the Boomer generation had grown up and embraced the comfortably middle-class lifestyles that we know them for now. Gen X were not so politically inclined, and over the course of the later decade, the anti-paternalistic ethos of the likes of Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia in the US was – after a glorious culture war – overwhelmingly stamped out within the universities. These writers recognised the return of sexual repression in the expanding consumerist bureaucracy which couched its expansive infringements on the private lives of students in protective concern. Now, however, we are left with only their polemical writings as a memorable, and ultimately tragic, premonition of a road not taken.
This sad reality is reflected in the ever-expanding list of policy documents that now populate the websites of any supposedly self-respecting institution, even when the professed pseudo-Victorian virtues scarcely match the inclinations of their student bodies. Of course Trinity’s gender-neutral, anti-promiscuity curfew was more “politically correct”, but it springs from the same well-meaning concern of the middle-aged bureaucrat who has seemingly forgotten the pure pleasure (and sometimes pain) of their own student dalliances. Of course, these policies are rarely enforced. But their mere existence reveals the hidden arbitrary power which has no regard for the liberty or privacy of its students.
The university’s sexual misconduct policy defines unwanted sexual behaviour laughably broadly by including even everyday nuisances like “unwelcome comments about dress and appearance” as forms of sexual harassment. On the “non-exhaustive” list of “behaviours associated with” sexual misconduct, we find “creating, accessing, viewing, or distributing pornographic material online or offline”, which would seem to rule out even viewing legal pornography in the privacy of your own room. They are so broad that no student at Trinity hasn’t broken them to some degree – and thereby they give the university grounds to interfere in students’ personal lives completely at their discretion. This remains true even if promising new lovers can, at last, be brought onto the grounds past midnight.
And it’s not just sexual conduct that’s under scrutiny – curious and illogical dictates exist across all realms of student behaviour. While one-night stands have now been liberated, having a friend visit is still needlessly complicated. If residents don’t report longer stays more than five days in advance, they can be asked by the powers that be to provide written approval from roommates. Despite most students being legal adults, the university apparently has no faith that roommate squabbles can be resolved internally. The Dignity and Respect policy encourages students to “give positive feedback” and “celebrate success” in order to combat harassment and “maintain a positive culture” – a guideline more suitable for grumpy pre-schoolers on a playground than young adults.
Most of these rules aren’t even publicised: Trinity’s Social Networking and Social Media policy means students and staff are technically liable for their online conduct if they don’t have one of those obnoxious “views are my own and do not reflect those of my institution” disclaimers in their bios (which, of course, should go without saying). From the smoking ban to the Alcohol policy, it seems Trinity would prefer it if students refrained from having fun all together. Always and everywhere the line between enforceable rule and guideline is intentionally blurred, signifying a general distaste for raunchy behaviour or “negative energy”, whose definitions are always up for interpretation, and consequences disturbingly unclear.
To make matters worse, students are encouraged to report their peers and professors for any breaches of these sweeping policies – irrespective of the views of the aggrieved party. On the one hand, the nonsensical reach of these policies (and the fact that we don’t know about most of them) makes us unlikely to respect the rules. On the other, their mere existence should leave us with a sense of unease. The rules are so expansive that, in practice, students can never be sure how College will react if they do get on the wrong side of the administration, and while “we should always respect the privacy of others”, any “concern” apparently should be raised immediately with the Dignity, Respect and Consent services. Anonymous complaints procedures are in place for everything to ensure we never have to communicate with each other – reinforcing the rampant risk aversion of our chronically online generation.
If we want College to butt out of our private lives for good, getting rid of expansive misconduct policies and nebulous, unaccountable complaints procedures would be a good place to start. But this cannot be achieved as long as the university conceives of its undergraduate population as a bunch of overgrown children in need of protection. We need to insist on our ability to manage our own sex lives and wrestle our basic right to privacy free from well-meaning administrators. The overnight guest policy was just the beginning.
