In hopes of sparking dialogue about sexual violence, the Student Assembly pledged $1,000 of its discretionary budget last week to provide the entire Class of 2005 with T-shirts urging that sexual activity be consensual.
Certainly, sexual violence is a pertinent concern. The Assembly was wise to note that even at elite schools like Dartmouth, date rape and relationship aggression persist. And at a cost of about $1 of the Assembly's money per student, the expenditure is by no means exorbitant.
The danger, though, is that the T-shirts will become a campus-wide joke, much like the social-norms shirts distributed by the Alcohol and Other Drug Education Office. The shirts, which read that over 80 percent of Dartmouth students drink four or fewer drinks when they party, are widely worn ironically by people who either consider the statistic inaccurate or count themselves among the remaining 20 percent.
Our hope is that this will not be the case with the T-shirts the Assembly has agreed to fund. Perhaps students will realize that sexual assault -- apparently unlike binge drinking -- is something too serious to joke about. Perhaps a majority of the '05 class will sport them proudly. Perhaps they will, as the Assembly hopes, promote discussion about the subject.
Still, the Assembly, and the Sexual Assault Peer Program, which is implementing the program, should be aware that the way the information is presented is vital to whether the shirts end up provoking debate and discussion, not jokes and mocking winks.
Students are savvy consumers. As a recent Harvard study has shown, they are not inclined to swallow preachy propaganda presented as social norms campaigns. The Assembly and the Sexual Assault Peer Program should be wary of foisting just one more easy-to-ignore or easy-to-mock statistic on sophomores this summer.
