-: All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and get started
with the afternoon of the session.
I'm Megan Hopkins for those of you who don't know me.
I'm Project Manager
for the Nebraska Collegiate Consortium.
And I just wanted to basically go through
a couple of housekeeping items
because we have about an hour an a half,
and then Linda will close workshop for today.
So first of all, Linda has mentioned
the NCC's website a couple of times
and made reference to other sealed leading workshops
we've had in material feet available there.
So I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew
the Consortium's website, it's nebraskconsortium.org.
And then if you go to our Activities tab,
under Skill Building Workshops,
you'll find about the last two, three years worth
of workshops and recorded presentations
like we're doing today with Linda,
as well as accompanying materials.
So I want to make everybody aware of that.
The other thing I want to let everyone know is,
we have certificates for all of you
for anyone who's interested in submitting them
for continuing education hours, so those will be
on the same table where you registered today
when you leave this afternoon.
Also, if you could please drop off your evaluations,
which is the hot pink form in your folder,
we'd appreciate that, as well as your name tags,
so that we can recycle those.
And then for any NCC member who has a mileage form
that they need to submit to me,
make sure you just get that to me before you leave.
And I'll be out here by the table.
That's all I have, and we'll welcome Linda back
for the last hour and a half.
-: Great, let's just give Megan a hand.
(audience applauding)
'Cause it's very easy to plan a workshop,
which no person just loves speaking, you know?
I have a basis of comparison, so she's great.
So, when we last spoke,
we were just finishing up looking at the research on
that groups aren't uniform, Bliesener intervention skills
and around social norms.
And so, I asked you during your
team time what to talk about the implications
of that piece for your prevention work.
So, I'd like to hear from some groups about
some of the conversations that you had.
So how about you folks?
-: We are very new at adding this training
to our orientation.
So we're gathering together information to take back.
And we're a unique college,
and we are a college of health scientists,
so I really think we need to start with some data,
before we can really design our campaign
and how we wannna approach it.
-: Yeah, that makes sense.
Did you talk about the particular kinds of data
you might like to collect?
-: Well, we have done one health survey that we have
that has a multitude of information on it.
And it touched on both sexual violence and alcohol.
So that's a start, but whether we wanna use that or not
in the future because it's a really big survey.
So that's kind of where we were at.
-: Yeah, so one of the reasons I put some actual
examples of questions and answers in data in there
is to just start to give you a sense of,
again, it's just some examples,
there's lots of data that I could have put in,
but you know, what does an expectancy question look like,
and what does the results yield,
and what does normative misperceptions looks like?
And so, I hope that kind of helped you think about,
are there specific questions that we want to be asking?
-: And take back. -: Yeah absolutely.
And I believe that there's Consortium help for you,
right, available to help.
So meet Dwayne (laughing).
Dwayne is your friend.
So how about you folks back there?
What did you talk about?
-: I'd say we talked about what we need to do
as far as research first and where they're at--
-: Can you speak up a little?
-: Just where students are at with their research,
with our surveys and how they're doing.
We've done alcohol surveys. -: Yeah.
-: But we haven't done anything
on sexual violence in any way.
We're trying to figure out who would be able to do that.
If we have someone on campus who is specialized enough
or experienced enough to do it.
And then if not, how do we even find someone
who is qualified and experienced enough to do that
in a way that would be effective
for our students and for us.
-: Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, and I think that's a great conversation
for you all to have.
I think part of this finding the intersections
is kind of saying, where's our starting place?
And so I think, thinking about data is a great idea.
Yeah.
I don't know who's the groups, how about you folks?
I don't know who you're with exactly.
-: Well, we don't really have anything
like Bliesener effect. -: Mm-hm.
-: So like what I was talking about earlier,
we train the RAs and present information on sexual assault,
focusing not just what happens
but also what they can do specifically,
if they see it, if it happens, how to recognize it.
-: Yeah yeah.
So did you talk about any
kind of particular ways to do that?
Or you didn't get that far?
Yeah, I think the idea of trying to think about,
how do we build in scenarios?
And actually was that you said that
you have the students create the scenarios?
So that's, I think, a very interesting idea,
because, I mean, you want to kind of coach them
to not create really outlandish scenarios, in a way.
You sort of want them
to be more ordinary than extraordinary,
and maybe have a variety of, you know,
kind of more obvious and less obvious.
Yeah, and how about you folks?
What did you guys talk about?
(talking at once)
Oh, you're all together.
-: One thing is that we know that we have
the Carl Jung profile.
But many of us are new to our roles,
newer in these positions and it's figuring out
where we're at with that,
And the last time it was administered
And taking that data and really kind of fresh eyes,
fresh approach and figure out what we want to do.
The other thing is that we're in a unique position.
We're on three different campuses,
we have three different feels, three different populations.
ours being primarily commuter, the address on Milford
being residential. -: Yeah.
-: And thinking about how we have
some blanket approaches and blanket policies.
How does it still wash out in the mix
with different populations in different needs?
So we're very much kind of at a
break in the race per se.
That we need to kind of regroup
and figure out what to do next.
-: Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense,
thinking about it, and especially,
so maybe the policies don't need to be different,
but what needs to be different
in the way that things are oriented to those policies.
Different context.
-: Because each student population has a different--
-: Yeah right, somebody else was talking to me about
the, there being different.
It was you guys about the different cultures
and the different campuses?
-: Right, we discussed how
you have to take into account people's culture
and what is norm for their culture.
If they're an international student for example,
that may not be acceptable here.
So there's an education piece
that sometimes may go with whatever programming.
And again, it's measuring your campus,
you know, activity or problems, et cetera,
to know you want to do,
but you need to take into account that
people's culture may be-- -: Different.
-: Influencing how they're seeing things.
-: Right yeah, and I think it's helpful
to remember that there's different kinds of data,
ways of gathering data.
And so, starting with conversations,
hey, what are you're seeing there,
going back to that red zone study that I talked about
where the reason they thought to ask
about that winter term
is they did focus groups with students and said,
hey, where would you think there might be risk?
They said, oh winter term!
And they hadn't thought of it.
So I mean, I think that
you can have conversations with colleagues.
I mean it's okay to start with anecdotal data,
because that gives you an opportunity
to figure out where to drill deeper.
So you know,
and people's impressions are their impressions.
And so, again that tells you their impressions
but it doesn't tell you if those were widely shared.
but it sometimes gives you a starting place
to figure out what other data to collect?
That's great, anybody else wanna share
anything from their lunchtime conversation?
I just really appreciate hearing
where you're all at with it.
And I think that, you know, my intention was that
you would all enter this wherever you are.
So I'm very happy to hear the,
kind of the range of places that you're taking it.
Okay.
So let's continue on here.
Here's our road map.
Now we're gonna talk about environmental management
which is actually sort of speaking of the culture,
you know, that issues have cultures.
Environmental management
is a very alcohol and drug specific word.
We created it at the higher ed center.
It's a term at the higher education center.
Actually, when the higher ed center got funded,
a lot of the work was really individually focused,
and it was really a disconnect
with the community literature that showed that
that kind of policy and environmental level efforts
had more promise.
And so in a way, it was just a way
of helping to conceptualize for the campus community
what we're seeing in the literature of,
the community literature around alcohol prevention.
So, but some people have started to use that idea
of environmental management around sexual violence,
and I'm not sure it has complete currency,
but I'm using it here,
because this group is kind of you know,
because today we're kind of the frame is the consortium.
And so, I know it's a pretty familiar term to a lot of you.
I want to just explore the idea of
kind of environmental management around alcohol
and what that has to do with sexual violence
and then kind of the broader idea
of the environment pretty briefly.
So the question is, if managing the alcohol environment
of doing better at management of the alcohol environment
can reduce alcohol consumption and related problems,
is sexual violence one of the problems
that in managing the environment can reduce?
So that's a question.
And so,
so my read of the literature so far
is that people are just starting to look at this question.
It would be nice if all the alcohol prevention efforts
all those years had had really good nuanced
measures of sexual violence,
but they haven't necessarily, but whatever exists is that
sort of strong environmental management.
By strong I mean kind of appropriately
tailored to your community and the sources of risk.
And an environmental level in your community
might be sort of a helpful adjunct
to a comprehensive sexual violence prevention plan.
I think it's pretty clear that,
yeah, certainly heard the suggestion
we should just manage the alcohol problem
and then we would have no sexual violence.
There's no evidence at all to support that.
Okay, you know so I think that
environmental management can support
strong sexual violence prevention efforts,
but that's why that intersection graphic that I created
has distinct alcohol efforts,
distinct sexual violence prevention efforts,
and then we're gonna look for that area of overlap.
So I would argue based on my knowledge
of the alcohol prevention literature
that you know, managing that alcohol environment
is gonna be helpful to some of the other things
that we're talking about,
because we're talking about individuals and groups
getting cued from the environment,
but you never want to say,
that's our entire sexual violence prevention plan.
I mean, that's not a supported statement.
So we're really looking here.
There's some group level
environmental management you can do certainly,
but just kind of for the sake of this discussion,
we're really talking about
that institutional and community levels,
kind of what happens at the institutional level,
including not just kind of programs and policies
but actual structures and practices,
kind of institutional arrangements.
What people are reacting to and not reacting to.
I consider that all at the institutional level.
And then community,
anything that's in the surrounding community.
And I know for some of your campuses,
that kind of campus community distinction
is a little more fluid, you know,
there's not a defined campus
and then it's the community that it's a little more joined.
So that's fine, I sort of think about who was acting.
Is this a sort of city or town level initiative?
Or is this a campus level initiative?
That's another way to think about it.
That's really where we are
in the Social Ecological Model.
So I mentioned earlier when I first started talking about it
that, you know, alcohol and sexual violence
are correlated at a environmental level.
And so, this is again looking at victimization,
not perpetration, but we know that one risk factor
in this particular study for victimization
is if they attended colleges with higher rates of heavy,
heavy, episodic drinking.
So, you know, so some of it was their own alcohol use,
but there was independent risk
conferred by the environment that they were in.
And so, I think that's kind of, you know,
the relevance that we're talking about.
So we've been sort of talking about this all day,
but you know, I hear a lot, you know,
college administrators need to get out there,
educate the students about sexual assault.
And so, my colleague and mentor
and friend of the young said, back in the day,
you know, when he first created the idea
of environmental management
that students receive educational messages
from a number of sources, right,
and that everything that's happening in the environment
is also educating students.
So, until the messages in the whole community are changed,
then it's gonna be hard to make individual change.
And so, I think that, you know,
we sort of kind of carry that forward
into the sexual violence work.
And so, even when we talked, did that exercise earlier,
we looked at that brochure and said,
what is this telling us
about the causes of sexual assault?
That was another example of, you know,
sending educational messages maybe that were unintended,
even though it was an educational piece.
So, in one of the recent
White House reviews that came out,
they mentioned the CDC has been reviewing the literature
in a number of areas, and they mentioned within that piece
that they have done, CDC has done a systematic review
of the potential of alcohol policies to reduce perpetration.
And so they say not that much research has been done.
More is needed, but in this, you know?
So, they're just talking about somebody else's study
that's still not out yet,
but these arere the interventions that they say
have the potential to maybe have some
beneficial effect on perpetration.
Again, they're not gonna,
used alone, they're not gonna reduce it,
but again have that kind of synergistic effect.
So we'll look forward, they're supposed to,
this review is supposed to come out later this year,
so I think we can look for it and see.
See, I'm interested in two things.
I'm interested in the specifics of their review,
and I'm also interested in the conversation that creates
around, you know, around intersections.
But I do think that the alcohol prevention folks
on campuses are doing a lot of great work
around managing the environment,
and I do think that that's a place
where sexual violence people can really be allies
to them in that work,
even if it doesn't have anything to do specifically
with sexual violence,
that we all can use our contacts to help each other
and, you know, serve on coalitions
or help people collect data
or whatever ways that we can be allies to each other
without necessarily saying anything about
the intersection of alcohol and sexual violence.
You know, you don't have to say
alcohol causes or doesn't cause violence
just to kind of help each other.
And so I think is potential for sexual violence.
So environmental management, just I know some of you
have lots of familiarity with environmental management,
and some of you might have less familiarity,
so on page 10 of your worksheet,
it's a table from a study.
Again, it's a little, it's from a review
by Traci Toomey and colleagues
and it's a little bit old now,
but it's still pretty up to date.
It's just basically policies
to decrease alcohol use and related problems
in a number of different domains.
I kind of cut and pasted it together,
'cause it was the wrong shape for a square page.
So you can see there's a little inset at the bottom,
and that just wasn't, at the very bottom on the left side.
So it's some of the things that we're pretty familiar with
in terms of a commercial access, price.
But I think some of these,
we started think about the idea of managing risky settings,
then some of these will also come into play,
potentially alongside some of the things
we might do separately for sexual violence.
In particular, in that little pull out on the bottom,
this idea of de-emphasizing the role of alcohol
and creating positive expectations on campus, I think
is really maybe a potential place for intersections there.
And so, there might be some sort of shared efforts,
or, you know, we could be allies.
I'm not sure that the specific tactics there are,
you know, are the right ones or the wrong ones,
but I think that idea of
if we're trying to do something holistic
around student health and wellness
and promoting positive behaviors and primary prevention,
are there some points of intersection around that,
and around messaging to
parents and potential students and incoming students
about what kind of environment this is.
And so again, maybe that's a place
where we can reinforce some shared messages.
So that's just for you in there as a resource.
Any comments or questions on that?
So that's kind of one piece of what I wanted to talk about.
Way back in the beginning I said
that early intervention and response and treatment
also have a role in supporting prevention.
And so, I kind of wanted to just
dovetail into that for a minute.
In general, I think it's useful
to try to have a conversation about
sexual violence prevention that's separate
from all of the response obligations that we have,
because we have many title line and the,
vow amendments, et cetera,
have a lot of requirements around response
and they're critically important.
And then I also think it's easy for those
to sort of swamp prevention
and you know, make us lose track of that.
So that's really why we're focusing on that.
But kind of in life, these things really are are connected.
And so, I just also wanted to say that
how we respond to incidents of sexual violence
contributes to climate.
And so, these are just some images from,
from a very moving display called Surviving in Numbers
where survivors of sexual assault
kind of write about their experiences in terms of numbers
like this, so this, I don't know if you can read these,
but this one says number of times I've been drunk before,
zero, he didn't tell me what he put in my drink.
Number of people I told, four.
Number of people who listened, two.
I am a survivor.
And so, they have these, actually there's one,
I've got an email that there, this is in the,
this is in the Massachusetts State House right now.
There's a Surviving in Numbers display this week,
which is interesting.
The woman who started this is from Massachusetts.
So just a couple more of these.
Can you guys read this?
Okay, I'm not gonna read it to you if you can read it.
And by the way, this is could be upsetting.
So when we talk about climate,
I think this is a piece of it that we should,
that how people get responded to,
to some extent educates the community
about what we believe about these issues
and what we think causes it and what, you know,
how how we want to be as a culture.
And so.
So and then I will also say that I think
it can work the exact opposite way.
And this one, can you read this one
all the way to the bottom?
No, okay.
So, three and a half years ago, my friend,
in quotation marks, sexually assaulted me.
It took one month to tell a friend,
who cried with me and told me she loved me.
It took one more week to tell my then significant other,
who held and comforted me for the next two years.
And then it took one more month
to call what happened sexual assault
thanks to an amazing counselor.
Number of people I've told,
too many to count due to speaking publicly.
Number of people who have who have blamed me, zero.
Number of awards I've received
for my rape prevention activism, one.
My support network is massive thanks to friends, colleagues,
professors and some incredibly courageous survivors.
I cannot remember the last time I felt
so consistently content and at peace.
Amount of love, courage, support
and happiness in my life, infinite.
So I kind of want to just to look in those two pieces
to say, you know, this is part,
and I think actually when
the White House talks about climate surveys,
I think they're sort of thinking about this,
you know, and maybe not some of the other stuff
that we're talking about,
but I just felt like I couldn't really talk
about the environment
without really talking about this piece of it.
And so, you know, in terms of the national
scene that's happening,
the difference between these two I think
is what's driving the activism right now.
And that far too many are the previous one
and far too few experiences of telling somebody.
And it doesn't say here whether they were found responsible
through the contact system, right?
There's not a lot in here that's procedural.
It's really around how the person
was treated as a human being.
Anybody have comments or want to say anything about that?
Because I know those are all pretty heavy.
So I recommend that you go on this site,
the Surviving in Numbers site.
You can just read tons of these
and it really helps for me.
I've also got to be on campuses
and talk to people who are complainants.
But it just really, it's the reality of the issue,
I think, when you read these.
And a lot of them sound like the last one.
You know, the previous one,
and not enough of them sound like this.
So you have a case study.
What this is, is this is taken,
this is sort of my ...
You guys have a case study, right?
Separate sheet, it's two sides of the page.
Again, this is one of the studies
I think is a really great study.
It's an ethnographic study
from one residence hall floor
and one institution of higher ed.
So it's not everybody, it's not the entire problem.
And so, what the researchers did is
over the whole course of the year,
So this is a floor of a residence hall
that's identified in a partY dorm,
and it's where first year students live
who have self-identified, they've asked to live here,
because they want to be involved in the party scene.
Which is primarily ...
or the most visible party scene on that campus
is in fraternity and sorority life.
And so, but they request to be in the residence hall.
And so, it's they did ethnographic observations
of this hall for a whole year.
They did interviews of the people,
residents who lived on the floor,
they did surveys of people who lived on the floor,
and they talked to a lot of groups outside the floor.
And so, their primary conclusion,
which blew me away when I first read it, well still does,
sexual assault is a predictable outcome
of a synergistic intersection of both gendered
and seemingly gender-neutral processes
operating at individual and pure culture.
They sort of make that is one level.
Organizational and institutional and interactional levels,
so those are three levels.
And so, the findings,
so these are sort of selected findings
and I pulled them out for the purpose
of serving as a case study but it's a fairly complete list.
And so, the A, B and C sections
are each of the three kinds.
So what I want you to do is read through this.
Now, here's the skill.
There's a lot in here that you're gonna want to go,
oh my god, we should do something about that.
I want you to do is ask,
what are the opportunities to reshape the environment
through institutional or community-level change?
So that's your task here, so thinking about
the environmental management types of things
we just talked about, identify those opportunities,
and then we'll talk about them.
I'm gonna give you a couple more minutes.
Again, I sort of put this slide back up,
because we're looking for things
at the institutional and community-level that we could do.
Well, maybe the group level based on that table.
Okay, so let's hear what you came up with.
Is this very interesting, or what?
This description, there's even more detail.
I really encourage you to read this study.
First time I ever read it I thought,
okay, this is the first thing that I've ever seen
that really wove everything together in this seamless way
where you can kind of see.
And of course, we can't do an ethnographic study
on every floor in our campus, or maybe even one,
but for me it was sort of, was a great way to see
how all these disparate factors could weave together.
And so, I think one of the challenges
of dealing with the intersection of these two issues
is sometimes even finding where to start.
And so, this kind of exercise of having to put aside
some of the things I find very provocative to talk about
and just say, what could we do right in this kind of change,
I think is a good exercise.
What'd you come up with?
What were some of the thoughts you had?
-: I saw repeated statements about
not a lot of other opportunities to interact with people,
that this is the only thing they do to meet people.
And so, and that there were,
that the campus residence hall
didn't have any public space for socializing.
So there's some things, is there a way to on your campus
to create some spaces, to create some programming
that would be another opportunity?
Like we do, we have campus nightlife and some other.
Somebody else down there was talking about
doing some evening, late evening programs and things.
So have something that's a balance to.
-: Right, yeah.
So sort of formal activities.
You said two things, sort of both formal activities,
things that are other happening activities,
and just also informal spaces.
You know, so it talked about that the,
the first year students,
they were mostly in really large lecture classes
and just everybody sort of trooped in
100 or 200 people and then trooped out
and there really wasn't any context for interaction there.
At the time, again this is a little dated now,
but at the time, men actually had to be escorted
onto the residence hall floor,
they couldn't just go walk on there,
so really there was, you know,
there just wasn't a lot of good opportunities,
and then this party scene is there and flourishing
and very easy to, you know, to access.
So yeah, what other things?
Yeah.
-: Thinking about the fraternity houses themselves
and their leverage points the institution can employ
to move towards party registration
where at least it might offer an opportunity
for how to create an environment that's less risky.
-: Yep, yep.
-: And includes opportunities for maybe third party vendors,
controlled guest lists, monitoring and enforcement.
-: Right. -: Identification at the door.
-: Right, yeah.
So right now, the members have complete control
over the valued resource, which is alcohol,
and they use that as a lever to keep people in
and let people out of the party at all.
To manage where people are during the party,
to separate women from,
from men that they,
who might be, you know, they're friends
and who they trust and who might protect them,
gonna separate them from those men
and then separate them from their women friends
further within the house.
And so, alcohol is being used in a really,
is a resource in that way,
because they're in charge of the selling and serving of it.
And so, that's a lever that they have access to
that maybe there's.
And again, like none of these solutions
we come up with would be perfect,
but if we sort of start trying
to tap multiple leverage points,
we might move towards more control.
What else did you notice?
-: I think you could work with IFC
and new education through IFC
or even work with the housing corporations since they're
privately-owned houses-- -: Yeah.
-: And just bring that to their attention,
do education that way,
to get them to understand what they're doing
and what is a responsible party.
-: Right, exactly, yeah.
And so, you know, and even beyond education,
you might even be able to you know,
if you got it a kind of good IFC leadership
who's troubled by some of the things
that they've been seeing,
they might sort of be willing to come up with
a voluntary code of, you know, risk management code,
maybe with some of the things that Linda suggested
or maybe not, but you know,
some of these things about party hosting,
they're basically saying
these are the people that are listened to
so your instinct to kind of say,
how could leverage them
through a kind of combined, you know,
just through working them, helping them.
And I wonder what they all think of this arrangement?
'Cause basically there's an implication in here
that some organizations that are more disrespectful
stop attracting party guests.
So I wonder how others,
the rest of the Greek system feels about them.
That's a good one, what else?
-: It says that alcohol, there's lax enforcement there.
So at the community-level, like whatever, doing about it.
-: Yeah.
-: Are they involved or are they, you know?
How do you get them to go in and start?
It's a good way to break up the party scene.
It's start citations and you know.
-: Yeah, yeah, and you know, maybe working with landlords.
Maybe like there's sort of a combination that could be,
could happen there, and maybe some carrot and stick.
You know, here's a safe party,
here's how to put on a safer party, and by the way,
we're gonna start fighting if you don't.
You know, so if there's noise complaintS, so some,
we don't have, we lack data on some things, right?
So we don't know if there's noise complaints or litter
or some of the other nuisance things that can get
neighbors interested in having them be enforced.
But we're gonna look for those levers, that's great.
-: It also said that men control transportation.
So on our campus, the student government worked to create
a cab ride home program
that people can call and get a ride.
So they wouldn't be at the mercy
of the men that had brought them there.
They could get home. -: Yep.
Yeah, so the article describes these,
you know, because there's certain residence halls
that are identified, right?
So the women are lined up in stiletto heels,
getting picked up a lot of times by the pledges.
So we're gonna raise a little question mark
in my mind about hazing.
So they go around and pick 'em up in, you know,
Town Cars or whatever and drive 'em there.
And then they might offer 'em a ride home
and they might not, right?
So now they're in control of where they are
and sometimes they would leave 'em to just walk home
if they didn't, you know,
like how they were responding to the party scene.
So again, that's a vulnerability factor, right?
The women aren't at fault for not having transportation,
but it's making them more vulnerable in this scenario.
That's a good one.
Other levers you saw?
-: I think, with, like, the residence hall,
it's saying that certain ones have that concentration.
Is there a way that you can change room placement?
Can you control that a little bit
so that they aren't all concentrated onto one floor?
And then if that's the case,
how can you work with the RA to get, like have them,
do more specific programming or talk more about,
is this what we want our perception to be on campus?
And this is who we really are?
To get them to realize what they're being perceived as.
-: Right.
So I think enough students came from nearby
that they were able to identify
which would be these dorms to get into,
request to be put there and get their requests honored.
And so, there wasn't really an effort
by the institution in this case
to kind of diversify students.
And so, she really talks a lot about
how that concentration of students
with a kind of unitary focus
created really a almost mandatory,
you know, participation in the parties.
And if you were not,
and there's really some heartbreaking quotes and things
from people who weren't, who didn't fit,
who got put on that floor,
so the better, the ones with sort of better social capital
figured out how to get transferred off,
but some of them kind of just didn't have
the knowledge or connections
or didn't really know how to do that.
And so, you have met,
so there's this minority group of students on that floor
who didn't want to be part of this,
who were literally invisible to the other students socially
and who sat alone in their rooms
while everybody trooped off at the same time
and then kind of eventually trooped back on.
Just think, like that is heartbreaking, you know?
So are we setting up,
what's that environment that we're setting up
that we're kind of allowing that,
that to be part of the system?
So I'm glad you picked up on that,
because I thought, you know, again,
you have to weigh the pros and cons of any of these things,
but I think about it.
We also know that around hazing
that having, a protective factor for hazing
is having friends outside your social group,
that your group that you're trying to join.
Right, so there's reasons to have people
have multiple social networks and connections
as incoming students,
because that also helps 'em find where they belong.
Right.
People on this floor either had to stay in and be losers,
go along with party scene, or transfer off the floor.
Those were pretty much their choices.
Man: Probably some groundwork stuff
that would be good before taking a look at any of this,
would be to take a look at the retention rate,
because a lot of this stuff is gonna take money,
and Linda's done this several times,
about figuring out, who's this base students,
what's that cost the university,
so that you can maybe identify some of that,
that, the things that might cost more
to look appealing to everybody,
let's invest it. -: Yep, yeah.
So looking at retention rate,
seeing how they correlate with some of these factors
either may be a way of bringing it
to the institution's attention.
But some things,
like allowing different residence hall assignments
doesn't seem like that would cost extra.
You know, I mean, it might, people might be mad about it.
Man: Space and like, (speaking faintly off mic).
Rights programs, (speaking faintly off mic).
-: Yeah, yeah.
Yeah?
-: I'm not sure I'd be the one to bring this or not,
but to chance the male dominance,
sororities usually do not allow alcohol in their houses,
so if they were to open up,
it might balance things out at some point.
-: Right, to think about whether you can locate
some of the social scene elsewhere, you know?
So, 'cause in a way,
those fraternity parties only occur
when everybody agrees that that's where you go, right?
If people didn't come, they wouldn't succeed.
And so, is there a way
that you can reconfigure that scene somehow?
Yeah, I mean again,
this is an area that we don't have a lot of data about,
but how many people are happy or unhappy with this?
You know, so again, this is a qualitative study,
so they're not looking at the diversity of views.
You know, so really, the question here,
the research question was,
what factors are contributing?
But there's not that much in here
about which ones were constraining.
And so, there may be more in here
that's constraining than we know about.
So and I think that you're mentioning
one of those that does stand out from here.
Any other ones that you noticed?
I think the only other one that I came up with
was this idea, the widespread belief
that one is supposed to party in college.
There's sort of admissions materials,
there's things that you can do, you know,
orientation, admissions materials, outreach to parent,
you know, some of the work you're doing around parents
that can kinda try to manage some of that image,
or at least say, this institution is not for that.
And, I think that you guys
have done some of that messaging,
and so sometimes, the institutional materials themselves,
and actually I have,
there's an attorney who really loves
to go after fraternities and sororities,
who said their pro,
that if you look on their websites,
that what they say about themselves,
fraternity and sorority life,
what they say about their own organizations is,
you know, nothing's wrong here.
It's all sun, you know, sun and clouds,
and he said, I'll sue them
just 'cause they didn't warn people about the risks.
So I mean, I'll just tell you that,
you know, some people,
so talk about the marketing materials of the college,
also, I have a feeling that if this guy has his way,
that marketing materials for fraternity and sorority life
we're gonna have to become a little more transparent,
'cause that's one thing, he just said,
I'm going after that, you know?
I'll go take screenshots of all the glowing reviews
they say about our, you know,
and they never mentioned
disciplinary sanctions, et cetera and so,
you know, when he wants,
he wants some organizations
to be more transparent about their problems,
so just throw it out there.
So obviously, there's a lot more in here
than we talked about,
and some than we talked about right now,
that's not at this level, right?
And so, and a lot of the things
that we talked about earlier, certain kinds of beliefs,
opportunity for bystander intervention, social norms,
so that you could see the other themes
played out throughout here,
but I think this is an interesting ...
For me, I look at this and think, okay,
so is there a way that we can know,
we can know about our campus more like this,
where we can kind of see those intertwining threads
and where we can make sure
that we're seeing those opportunities,
that when it's laid out like this,
you were able to come up with,
that have nothing to do
with educating individual students for the most part,
but have to do with kinda creating that larger,
that larger climate.
And then I would also say sort of really thinking
about high risk settings
and what are the various levers we could pull?
And again, some of those we named them,
you know, sort of managing these fraternity houses,
some of them would be these other,
these levels of intervention.
And I think it's really gotta be
that multi-layered intervention to think about norming,
and to think about skills training,
and sorta get those pieces to come together, so--
-: You know, one thing that we've talked about it,
even now, but we've never taken the step to do,
but I just thought of it is, you know,
when we were working on the social host,
in the social host setting,
we moved in collaboration with the city
to hold landlords responsible,
but we've never done that with our corporation boards
and holding them personally accountable
for the behavior of their group,
because in essence, they're landlords.
They own their properties and rights,
that you and now, they do.
-: Right, yeah, I mean, and it depends.
Sometimes it's the alums that own it,
it's not really the headquarters,
but I would also say that there are headquarter staff,
who are pretty enlightened, you know,
and who want to partner
around managing their chapters.
You had to feel that out,
'cause it does vary by organization,
but for those of you who have,
and it's not just fraternities and sororities
that have local chapters about national
or international affiliate.
There's marching band and there's honor societies,
and there's a whole bunch of organizations
that have national/international headquarters,
who can sometimes, they're another leverage point,
that I think we,
because sometimes we have
not so great experiences with them.
We forget that there's ones
that can really strongly be our allies.
So I think it's worthwhile investigating
kinda all those possible levers.
Any other thoughts or comments on his case study?
So, I find it pretty provocative.
So here's what I wanna do.
I wanna give you about 25 minutes to sit with your group,
and say what are your next steps?
And so, there's five questions
in your worksheet on pages 11 and 12,
and you don't have to address all five of them,
but they're just again,
designed to provide starting points,
and I just really recommend
that you be as concrete as possible, alright?
'Cause if you sorta speak theoretically
about what we could someday do,
you have less chance of following up,
then what do I really think, what would,
what could we actually do in the next,
you know, week, four weeks, two months,
to move this forward,
and who would do what
and what's our plan for moving,
for getting back together?
I would just like to hear from some of you.
I was mostly in the overflow room,
'cause I feel like I've neglected them,
so I was hanging out with our overflow people
who are working diligently.
So what were some of the conversations
that you guys had?
What were some of the steps that you're gonna pursue?
And you can volunteer or I can just keep calling on you.
(all laughing)
So how about you guys in the back there?
Woman: I think one thing
we talked about in our community
for crossover training the people
from different departments on campus,
so that when these conversations come up,
whether it be in the classroom,
or with student groups,
that the facilitators know how to educate,
and take that moment to educate the student on,
maybe some of those production techniques,
or just get them to do some self reflection,
or whatever they do.
Woman: I would like to get some baseline data
on what are our students expectancies about alcohol,
so we can do some social norming,
and get some messaging done.
-: Yeah.
I think that sounds good.
I was saying to Ian that maybe
something will come out of this.
There may be some area that a lot of you
are interested in hearing more about,
and I think that's good feedback to the consortium,
'cause we touched on a lot of issues today,
and a lot of them,
you could go into them much more deeply,
so I think I'll invite on your behalf to let them know
what other follow up-- -: Might have expectancies
on relationship on this side,
and then alcohol side, just that sliver,
and that would important to have activity--
(speaking faintly off mic) -: Right.
And we haven't really even talked
about intimate partner violence and stalking,
so there's sort of a whole, you know,
all of this can be applied to all that,
but again, you know, you can cover everything,
but that's another piece to be thinking about
is how those fit in.
So, how about you folks?
-: We would like to make a task force or a committee
that will basically identify different risks
of our student, different student populations on,
on and off campus,
and the expectancies of those different groups,
and then coordinate some of the efforts
that we're already doing to make sure
that we're effectively meeting those,
the rest of the expectancies of the different groups,
and then we'd also like to collect a baseline data
and do some surveys and stuff.
-: That sounds great, yeah.
Let's talk about you.
(all laughing)
I'm looking at all three of you,
and you guys just have to decide who to look at.
That's up to you.
-: I think the biggest things we wanna do,
first of all, is kinda gather data.
We haven't gathered a lot of data around this.
We do have, we have looked at some things,
but we'd like to gather some more specific data,
especially around you know,
what protective behaviors do our students have now,
and kinda emphasize those protective behaviors,
kinda look at the expectations,
what is the incidents, so that we can kinda maybe
push the administration for a little bit more budget
with regards to education.
And then I think the other piece that we wanna do
is kinda take a second look at our policy,
and make sure that it's clear,
do some further education around that,
so students kinda clearly understand
how to report incidents,
which is all part of that, the clear act.
And then I think the other piece,
and I wanna touch base with you at some point,
is that clicker.
I do a lot of clicker stuff around alcohol norms,
and I'd like to do something around this.
-: Right.
So even looking at the example of the Florida State data,
and again, you kinda wanna know
any time you ask a question,
you wanna have a sense of what the answer might be.
So, but I think if you if you looked
at some of those kinds of issues,
and maybe did some focus groups and that sort of thing,
and tried to frame out the questions
that would be meaningful to them,
those might be the ones that you could
look forward with doing some interactive.
And we wanna know, right,
if the skill that we're working on
is bystander intervention,
we wanna know, what are the barriers
in this perceptions that keep people from doing,
from intervening, from recognizing,
you know, from noticing the event,
recognizing it is a problem, feeling responsible to act.
And so, if we can really align it around
what the behavior is that we're working on,
I think that that's where we keep people the best.
So, but I'd be happy to talk more, yeah.
How about you folks?
-: We know that we need to collect data,
at least for, we have to collect data for everything,
but, one of the, I guess, meanings we talked about
was just educating our students
about things like the social host liability law
and the implications of that,
knowing that we have both
the commuter and residential campus,
the communities were in,
like, kind of educational campaigns
regarding those sorts of things,
helping students understand that
no matter what happens at your party,
you know, these are gonna have bigger implications
and those sorts of things, in terms of responsibility.
So we know about the data and what we have to do,
but then, those sorts of things as well.
-: Yeah.
And I just keep, I don't know
that I even have this framed out,
but Linda and I talked about this a little bit,
some of us were talking about it today,
you know, kinda inside conversations,
but I just wonder if there's a place,
if we're working with groups
who really wanna do the right thing,
can we have conversations with them
about how to create party environments
that are more likely to be safer for women?
You know what I mean?
Can we have them help us
identify those risks and proactively,
and we're not saying that we're,
it's a mandate and we're not,
you know, it's not from that perspective.
It's because they want actually,
do want to do the right thing.
Can we set up, identify some of those risky contexts
that are in which a predator could walk in
and easily perpetrate without detection,
you know, and do,
is there something that they wanna do proactively
that would make that less likely to happen?
So you know, again, I keep thinking about,
you know, sometimes we talk about the culture
as being sexist jokes and things like that,
and it is, but if we've succeeded
in having people stop telling sexist jokes,
but they're still setting aside a room
to have sex with drunk people during a party,
I think we've kind of lost it.
You've lost the battle there,
so how can we have,
partner with students who wanna do the right thing
to help them proactively manage their environments
in a way that makes problems less likely to happen?
I think that would be a cool conversation,
right, to figure out as students.
Anybody else wanna,
I'm conscious of giving Ian a couple of minutes so yeah?
-: Administratively, we have to deal
with our own impatience.
In collecting information, we sorta gather,
and then we try to address what we see as an issue,
and if don't get results, move on to,
well that instrument didn't cut.
We need to be patient,
look at it from the long haul.
And then the other piece of it is,
we do have a number of sub groups.
Theory department, music department,
athletic teams, and creating a better sense of belonging,
because if discover you're not
the starting quarterback anymore,
then where do you fit
can be pulled behaviors that may not be healthy.
-: Yeah, another thing that I think I pulled
some of the details out of the case study about this,
but one thing they talked about was,
but there weren't really other social,
it's not that there just weren't activities,
but there weren't necessarily a lot of other social scenes
that were easy for people to get connected with.
So is there a way that we could even,
you know, how do we create students
who really do wanna hang out together?
You know, how do we connect them?
And so, it's a little bit different
than what you were saying,
but I think that's a broader pictures are we create,
are we letting the fraternity or,
fraternity environment or some other environment
on campus kinda be the cool place to hang out?
And we're not, and we're just letting
the students either create that
and everybody's left out of it if they're not part of that,
or we started to create environment,
you know, environments and social scenes♪
that other people can connect with.
So, it's a broader wellness question.
So anyway, it's been my great pleasure to be here,
so thank you so much, and I'll turn it back to Ian.
(audience applauding)
-: Thank you, Linda,
and thank you everybody for being here.
Three quick things.
Number one, the Nebraska Collegiate Consortium
to reduce high risk drinking
is funded by the Nebraska Office of Highway Safety,
which is a part of the Nebraska Officer of the Roads,
which is sort of an enlightened view for highway safety,
but they recognize alcohol and young people in crashes.
But, if you ever get a chance
and you run into those people
and you think these things are valuable,
you might mention to them that you appreciate
the fact that they fund
the Nebraska Collegiate Consortium
for high risk drinking,
Fred Zwonechek is the director of that.
He'd often on TV talking about crashes
but on we're optimistic that we
have funding for another year,
but any positive feedback that comes back
always helps us in their decision making process.
I wanna share briefly a quick experience,
then I'll ask you to do something for me.
My wife and I have three sons.
I'd like to think we raised them,
but I'm not sure that they didn't raise us.
(audience chuckling)
I've been a college professor for 50 years
and the end of every day, college professors think,
my god, I understand the world,
and then go home sometimes,
and talk to their families at the dinner table.
In the ninth grade, they can take
a college professor from here down to here.
(audience chuckling) In other words,
they raise all the really interesting questions
about what it is we're thinking about.
We've been thinking here today about new thoughts,
thoughts we've already had.
I want you to go home from here,
talk about this workshop tonight at dinner.
See what sort of reactions you get,
keep the conversation going,
keep your thinking going,
and then, tomorrow when you go back to work,
talk to colleagues about it
and see what they happen to say to you,
and what questions they ask you,
'cause as one of my professors once said to me
before my PhD, final defense,
which was long, long time ago,
says, a janitor can come in here,
a janitor can come in here
and take you down with a question
that you haven't even thought about,
and we need to be thinking about these things.
So talk about workshop, talk to others.
Linda alluded to this during the workshop
about publicity and conversation.
Henry Ford said something really interesting
about Ford motorcars at one point.
He said, I don't care what they're saying about them,
as long as they're talking about them.
So I encourage you to keep the conversation going.
Linda, thank you so much for coming.
Drive safely, everybody.
Thank you. (all applauding)