Just read this article, and it’s very disturbing.
https://newrepublic.com/article/151596/were-still-living-boys-culture-kavanaughs-youth
I’ve had two daughters go through ND. ('17 and ‘19) Never heard anything like this. Granted, they don’t tell me everything, but from what I know and have observed over the past 6 years, this is not close to their experience, nor their friends’, both male and female, at all.
My daughter is a sophomore and she has had a very different experience than the one written about. She has studied abroad this summer and is on a service trip this week during Fall break. The members of her community at ND are amazing men and women. My daughter confides in me her greatest fears and concerns. She has experienced the complete opposite than what the article speaks of.
The article cited was a political statement nothing more nothing less as evidenced by the following excerpt:
“The elevation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been all about the political calculus of largely old men”.
I wouldn’t consider the description of ND as anything but “unprovable” fiction by the author to support a political narrative. Think UVA and Duke scandals. I am not minimizing in any way the suffering of victims, just refuting this authors convenient “first hand” experience.
Once again I am not expressing a view on the Kavanaugh nomination or Me Too movement (which I unequivocally support). Just suggesting the description of ND should be taken within the context of what it is being used for.
I know dozens of ND students none of whom have ever characterized the environment as described, or suggested a misogynistic culture. To the contrary those students I have encountered describe a great sense of community, service and mutual respect.
I have a daughter who is a senior who is very open with me and her experience has been nothing like this. She has wonderful friendships with many young men and she reports they behave nothing like this. My second daughter is a freshman and I would never have paid for her to attend there if my older daughter reported anything close to this behavior.
Although I have no first hand knowledge regarding Notre Dame, I do have reliable knowledge with respect to another school which had a national scandal & articles suggested that this was a well known, established, on-going common practice when, in reality, it was just a recent, short-term problem caused by a group of 5 or 6 jerks whose childish, selfish behavior affected an entire school’s reputation nationally. But the truth didn’t make for good press.
I wonder if it was a dorm that collects football players. Those guys have a slightly different existence at the university.
My youngest is a sophomore and this is the exact opposite of his experience. He and his group are open to having a girlfriend and not interested in participating in the hookup culture this describes. None of them are coupled and complain openly about how hard it is to get to know the women on more than a surface level. They are all busy with academics.
He does hang out regularly with some of the women at both ND and St. Mary’s. They will invite each other to their respective parties but do not date within the group. One of the ND football players was hitting on them and got excluded.
Do things like this happen in a group of 10,000 18 to 23 year-olds? Undoubtedly, but it is not the overall tenor of student experience.
ummm nope. have 2 Ds there now and have heard nothing of the sort as it concerns them or their pretty wide circle of friends.
I’m sure that in a school known for single-sex dorms, enforced parietals, heavily Catholic student body, and a strong drinking culture that there are a few “wanna be players” who talk about women as sex objects. Every school has its share of “legends in their own minds” who become absolute idiots when a little alcohol gets mixed into their bloodstream. Based on what I’ve heard from my son, however, the student body at ND tends to be very supportive of one another, and that supportiveness doesn’t get blurred along gender lines. My son, who’s not a party-hearty type by any means, just cites the overall unity of the student body and how special it is to be at Notre Dame.
One of the things I typically do when I see a story or an anecdote that doesn’t jibe with my expectations is to examine the source of that story / anecdote. In this case, the author of the story, Roge Karma, is an accomplished student from southern California who achieved some notable things while a student at Notre Dame, and parlayed his undergraduate experiences into a job at McKinsey & Company, one of the premier management consulting firms in the world. However, a simple Google search also reveals that this student is someone intently focused on changing the status quo, and sometimes individuals like this exaggerate their own experiences in order to trigger discourse and debate.
Suggest you take this author’s viewpoint with a large grain of salt. Or just search his twitter account from high school, where some of his retweets would seem to espouse the very same objectification of women that he denounces in his New Republic piece.
@Magnetron one of the beauties of Notre Dame is that the football players are not housed together. Neither are the basketball players or any other athletes. They live in dorms (or off campus as upperclassmen), just like all the other students. And the vast majority of athletes (98%) graduate from the University so they are, in fact, students as well as athletes.
Sadly, as was pointed out above, there is some of this behavior everywhere - on every campus - but that doesn’t mean it is the norm. It’s not a football player thing or lax player thing - it’s just a few idiots that said and did some stupid things and the author ran with it to make a point.
A family member who attended ND and works there indicated that this is an “element” there. Certainly not the dominant culture – but present on campus. And unfortunately, on many campuses.
As @lastone03 notes, it only takes a couple of idiots. And generally, it is something that comes out of group think. It also takes really brave souls to shut them down which perhaps the author thought was a process he was helping. In most cases like this, getting away with bad behavior permits it to persist. Even if it’s only a few, it’s a few too many.
Dorms are randomly assigned, but students have the option of transferring to different dorms. Almost no one does except for the athletes. They tend to cluster with their friends from the team, mainly in the newer dorms with AC, and the random distribution becomes not so random.
Obviously, not all athletes do this.
I graduated from ND in the early 90’s. There was an element of this at ND when I was there. Was it worse than what I heard from friends at a number of other schools? I believe not. I think the ‘Kavanaugh culture’ was actually less than the norm at other colleges, or at least those that my friends and siblings experienced at their schools, particularly those with fraternities (sorry, generalizing, but still). Having single sex dorms and parietals also reduced the opportunity for the small minority of misogynistic deplorables to act. But I was an RA. I heard about several situations that I know for sure my underclass girls did not tell their mothers about, and there are a few of them that still upset me to this day…I wish I had done more, but all I could do was talk in hypotheticals to admin, without the students’ willingness to go on record. The girls were reluctant to want to involve adults in sexual misconduct/assault because of the shame they felt they were bringing upon themselves, and blaming themselves (it’s my fault because I accepted a ride back to campus with him…it’s my fault for having a fake ID and drinking, were two that I heard). Again, I believe it was less prevalent at ND than other places, and I would suspect that’s still the case - but it was there, and I was just one RA, one section of one dorm. And the guys looked like every other ND baseball hat, flannel button down and Levi’s- wearing guys on campus who attended dorm masses on Sunday nights.
This article may say as much about the opportunism of the author as it does about the alleged “culture” he observes. It is timely given what is going on more broadly in society, and he is able to “trade off” his Notre Dame experience to get some attention. Maybe he should spend more time writing about how hard he worked to address this alleged “culture” rather than damning the university that gave him the place at the podium.
I have a son at ND. Respect for women exists broadly. Male students, for the most part, are prepared and willing to intervene in situations that become inappropriate - no less potentially dangerous. Are there male students at ND who act in the way described in the article? Undoubtedly yes. But my sense is that they represent a much much smaller percentage of the male student body than at other schools. Give me a break. No one comes to Notre Dame without understanding and accepting the restrictions (parietals, single sex dorms, etc.) and behavioral norms that define the school. There is a lot of self-selection in who ends up attending Notre Dame…and that is evident to all who step on campus and look around.
My son had choices to go to great universities. He chose Notre Dame for its values and community - just like most kids.
No, in general, it does not strike me as accurate, and I am a woman who graduated from ND in mid 80s. Sadly, no place is 100% safe, and incidents can happen anywhere, but that article, in my humble opinion, does not portray the general ND vibe.
2017 grad here. Not sure what school this guy could be talking about, but it wasn’t the Notre Dame I attended. I had many male friends in several different dorms and never witnessed this kind of behavior. I did not feel unsafe around the men on campus as a female. I was an RA as a senior, and never heard of incidents like those described either. Seems like this guy should have wised up and gotten new friends if this was his experience.
My DD is a sophomore and from her experience (as consistently related to me) this is not Notre Dame. I have me probably over 50 of her friends from various place and backgrounds and they all seem to be having the same experience as her. No place is perfect, but ND is pretty close…
You can find this on any campus. I saw this on my completely dry (truly dry) college campus in the 90s. The talk was the same; the “boys” the same. But no school is only this.
I read the article and some of the responses above and am confused about the “facts” in the article. If Notre Dame has single-sex dorms, how in the world was it possible for the author to witness the morning-after-walk-of-shame-he describes (and which he assumed was the aftermath of a sexual assault without a word from the women he saw.) And, from where in the world was he “walking home on a Saturday morning” as he supposedly witnessed this young lady “limping down a dormatory hallway”?
Just incredible that he would slander his university in this way without a shred of actual evidence. I bet they regret accepting his application.