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Fed Slashes Fees on Debit-Card Transactions, Helping Campus Stores

June 29, 2011, 6:15 pm

The Federal Reserve Board approved a final rule today that will limit the fees that debit-card issuers collect from college bookstores and other retailers to a fraction over 21 cents per transaction, according to a news release issued by the Fed. The “swipe” fee, as it’s known, represents a cut of almost 50 percent from what card issuers currently collect, 44 cents per transaction, but it is substantially higher than the 12-cents-per-transaction amount that the Fed initially proposed, in December. College bookstores were among many retailers that lobbied to reduce the fees.

Correction (6/30, 11:20 a.m.): An earlier version of this post incorrectly described the fees that would be covered by the new rule. The rule will cover debit-card fees, not credit-card fees. The post has been updated to reflect this correction.

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  • trendisnotdestiny

    This is one warped world we live in… Funny, how we use the word “entitlement” as a pejorative to describe social security, medicare etc when one of the most observable uses for the word is when young males with privilege reflect a deeply embedded cultural belief that men are ENTITLED to women’s bodies through rape, alcohol induced suasion, marriage, and through porn….

    Can you imagine your sister, mother, aunt, wife, friend, grandmother or a person we don’t know who witnesses them being yelled at by a pack of future hedge fund managers and patriarchal investment bankers from Yale shouting: “No means Yes and Yes means Anal”? Oh! that’s right, only if it happens to someone close to us do we consider the implications… Thanks Dr. Essig, good article.

  • luther_blissett

    By all means, student-victims should be advised to take crimes to the police, not to the administration of a university.

    One reservation, though, about those Yale morons: chanting in front of the Women’s Center will always be defended as political activism, and I think we need more, not less, free speech on campuses. The way to deal with stupid speech is by recording and documenting those who speak stupidly or violently.

    Why not create a website with films of the Yale men chanters and dossiers on each of the chanters with their full names and contact information? That way, when future employers do web searches for job candidates, they will quickly come across films and documents that capture the true spirit of these fools.

  • ledzep

    “It was then that it struck me that there was something really and truly perverse about the way in which white, privileged heterosexual femininity had taken on its own public abjection as a site of sexual promise and pleasure.”

    Amen.

  • bookwormz

    Things might improve is we as a culture didn’t glorify misogyny and violence against women in video games and popular entertainment that we happily buy for our sons.

  • dailyreader

    Women on campus who have been raped or assaulted should stop thinking that the university will protect them, and start reporting their rapists to the police. Unfortunately in a trial situation, defense lawyers often ask questions about how many shots of vodka they had, or to explain how it wasn’t consensual at an orgy or a motel room. So victims are reluctant to report the crime publicly. But, just as in rape cases outside school campuses, nothing happens until the crime is reported.

  • jlowery

    I do believe that there are two factually inaccurate statements in this article:

    “Sixteen Yale students, tired of sexual harrassment like fraternity brothers standing outside the Women’s Center and chanting “No means yes, yes means anal” have filed suit under Title IX and it will be heard by a federal judge.”

    The students didn’t filed a federal law suit. They filed a Title IX complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.

    “The Office of Civil Rights recently sent an advisory to universities reminding them that sexual harrassment is a violation of Title IX.”

    This is clearly not the purpose of the recent letter. Instead this letter sought to clarify exactly what schools (including colleges and universities) are required to do under Title IX in resolving allegations of sexual violence. This clarification was necessary because the U.S. Department of Education has not effectively address this particular topic within the broader context of sexual discrimination and sexual harassment.

  • palmerbob

    All true and alas one more problem. If the victim of sexual assault does go to the criminal justice system with a case that can be parodied as “he says she says”, the likelihood that overworked local prosecutors will take it seriously, treat the victim humanely, and carry the case forward to anything remotely resembling a satisfactory resolution is extremely low. Extremely. So victims will regularly present themselves to the student discipline system on their campus as the only hope for getting a fair shake; but those systems aren’t designed to be criminal courts.

    So a suggestion. Many large campuses now have “real cops” — university employees, but badged and weaponed and empowered to do all the things real cops do. Can one of those universities sponsor an on campus system of “real judges”, where the controlling authority is closer to the community and its norms than to the urban judicial system all around?

  • brezenoff

    Something is missing here, or my computer has been compromised, but the link to “drunk college girl porn” brought me to a bunch of undisquised porn sites, having no connection with the article or academia. I’m not bothered by the existence of pornography, but I don’t believe it belongs on the CHE web site. The article is not a justification for it, although it may be deemed by the author as an excuse.

  • http://www.facebook.com/larvatus Michael Zeleny

    Professor Essig parlays her voluntary visit to a bar equipped with a “booty cam” into an epiphany about there being “something really and truly perverse about the way in which white, privileged heterosexual femininity had taken on its own public abjection as a site of sexual promise and pleasure”. To the contrary, any woman capable of recognizing and resisting picking scabs as a compulsive activity, should be willing and able to divert her booty from all occasions of such abjection. In the alternative, a truly liberated gynaeconomist should be able to celebrate visual pornification of power inequities instead of kvetching inconsequentially about its iniquity under Title IX. For the next level of such celebration, I recommend trolling for BDSM on Craigslist.

  • http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~jweiss Dr. Jillian T. Weiss

    As a professor of law, and as the parent of a young man attending his first year at a school with a thriving frat culture, I am horrified by the implications of this article. Of course, I know that this culture exists, and has long existed, on U.S. campuses, as has rape and objectification of women (and their required but foolish complicity therewith). At the same time, trying to stop this by punishing the few men you catch is like trying to hold back an ocean wave with your hands. I think they should be punished, but that is not sufficient to stop this long-standing cultural phenomenon.

    Heteronormativity is a study of mine, and it is everywhere — in your homes, on your television, in your newspapers, on your blogs and facebook status messages. We don’t see it for the same reason that fish don’t see water, and when it is called out, people start objecting to interfering with the notions of masculinity and femininity, or to the opening up of sexual norms to incorporate other sexual orientations and gender identities. “You feminists have no sense of fun,” they say. “You feminists want to kill masculinity,” they say. They see no connection, however, between heteronormativity and “drunk college girl porn” or situations like that of my student who was drugged and raped and whom the police humiliated and tossed out of the station when she went to report it. The connection between campus rape and heteronormative culture is as obvious as the connection between masculine power and feminine abjectification. The willingness to examine and dismantle our “frat boy” heteronormative culture, however, is minimal.

  • collegeskeptic

    The Yale students referenced in this article filed an administrative enforcement action, not a suit in federal court, because they have no chance of meeting the Davis standard for university Title IX liability. But as is so often the case on this hot-button subject, why let the facts get in the way of preconceived biases and opinions? Never mind the fact that women get the majority of college degrees today – they are the victims of a pandemic of sexual violence that is crippling their access to educational opportunities, such that Title IX liability is appropriate for each and every instance of sexual assault. Ignore the fact that there has never been a longitudinal study of any kind proving the persistence of sexual violence in college – Koss (1987) and Fisher (2000) have asked ambiguously-worded questions, framed psychological coercion and verbal threats as rape or attempted rape equivalents, and produced the famous “1 in 4″ statistic that we all know must be true based on unsupportable mathematical projections and interpretations of the data that ignore their own subject’s characterizations of what happened, so there’s a rape epidemic afoot in college that is worse than in America’s darkest urban centers. And ignore the fact, as EEOC right-to-sue letter determinations keep demonstrating, that a staggering number of sexual harassment complaints are either outright false or insufficient to rise to the standard of an actionable grievance – there’s no need for procedural safeguards like a presumption of innocence, a remedy for false accusations, or the right to cross-examination because women don’t lie and we’re only going to prosecute bad people.
    While we’re on the subject of factual accuracy, the CPI study you mentioned deliberately distorted many of the facts it reported. And to the extent schools worry about anything, it is their checkbooks and not their reputations. These days, not having enough rape statistics to report is a bigger worry than the scandal of having rape on campus at all. UC Davis, for example, just violated the Clery Act by over-reporting incidents of sexual assault on campus.
    But none of these things matter, because white alpha males (who, it turns out, usually play lacrosse for prestigious private schools in North Carolina before being falsely accused) are raping everyone with abandon and getting away with it. Your dystopian worldview may be the way feminism chooses to perceive the contemporary college experience, but it is far from accurate in many respects.

  • http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

    Behold the consequences of the sexual revolution. Just as much patriarchy and sexual dysfunction and subjugation as before, but now it’s in public rather than private, right?

    But before we deliver all blame for this squarely at the feet of white heterosexual men, let us also remember that women are complicit in this culture as well. The women at that bar had to choose to shake their behinds for the camera. The women in the drunk porn have to choose to get drunk and put themselves in the frat-party environs.

    Is this any excuse for sexual assault or rape? No! Essig is right to contend that we need far better enforcement not just of “conduct codes” but of the actual law on these matters. College men who rape college women need to be turned over to the state prosecutor, not trotted before “disciplinary boards” that slap their wrists and then release them to prey again on women.

    But women need to step and not encourage such sexual antics. Women need to say in no uncertain terms, “I will not be sexually objectified by you!” — and not follow it up with counteracts of booty-shaking and dressing like sluts. We as a society can change our views: men can be taught to respect women as human beings, not objectify them as loci of physical pleasure. Women can be taught to respect themselves and not submit to the lewd behavior of objectification. We all can learn to view each other not as sexual objects but as human persons, worthy of respect and intellectual engagement, not cat calls and stripper poles.

  • bonnie5460

    When parents start teaching their children at an early age that this type of sexualization is not acceptable inside or outside the home, then maybe the culture will start changing when those kids stand up against peer pressure and call that behavior inappropriate.

  • newsoffice

    Your point is well made but you underemphasize a very important piece of this: girls’ complicity in the culture. Sad but true. Drunk girls having public and groups sex with drunk boys. I don’t see victimization here. I see alcohol fueled, vulgar behavior perpetrated by boys and girls — but the girls — and boys — know what they are doing as much as they can know when they are all that drunk. And part of the point of getting that drunk is so they will behave that way – that’s one of the reasons they get that drunk so they can let loose, if you will.

    Until women stop degrading themselves to get male attention we will never have true equality. Instead of focusing on the boys, perhaps we need to convince girls that their ability to get male attention should not be the thing they value most about themselves.

    One more thing, in my daughter’s high school over the last few years two girls have accused boys of sexual assult. The response of the other girls: they ran the two “victims” out of the high school – one ended up being homeschooled.

  • richardtaborgreene

    . Crimes are crimes.

  • jcisneros

    I think the problem exists, and is not exaggerated in the least.

    Your venture into the fray exemplifies how one can take statistics and quote them in ways that boost an argument at the expense of someone else. You don’t speak about the reasons those EEOC statistics on sexual harassment complaints swing in the direction you speak of. It is because the vast majority of these complaints have only the word of the victim (say alleged if you wish) versus the word of the defendant. Rape is not usually witnessed since the sex act (ostensibly) is usually considered a private matter. She said, he said…no prosecutor (or committee) is going to go forth without witnesses and evidence other than the statement of the victim. Naturally such cases will be classified as not actionable, whether the act happened or not.

    The practice of law in the court room is about what a lawyer can prove through evidence. Far be it from me to judge you or the failure in some areas of jurisprudence, but your argument is hollow, empty…and disingenuous.

    I am certain some complaints are false, but I would be willing to bet the majority of the complaints are true, but not provable. (not actionable)

    I do not know the answer, but I do know that college age women need to know how to protect themselves from harassment and rape…and that starts with educating them in ways to prevent getting into situations where they may be sexually coerced or forcibly raped.

    ~J

  • trendisnotdestiny

    exactly

  • collegeskeptic

    EEOC right-to-sue letters aren’t about a burden of persuasion. They’re about a minimum threshold of whether this complaint should even be allowed into a courtroom to try to prove the claim in the first place. Roughly half of all complaints fail to even meet this minimum threshold showing, let alone actually prove they happened. And I’d still like some evidence from anyone that this campus rape crisis exists on the magnitude that some claim it does. One in four? Really? I’m certain people do get raped in college, and that women and men need to know how to protect themselves. But like any other rape allegation, the police should be the ones handling it, not colleges.

  • mwcramer

    http://youtu.be/VX3dXiS3mtw
    Yep, it’s all about privileged white alpha males all right.

  • http://twitter.com/drjwlowery John Wesley Lowery

    I believe that it should be noted in the discussion between whether to report sexual assaults to the police or the campus conduct system this is not an either choice. In an ideal world, students would pursue both option simultaneously. In fact the OCR letter mentioned in this article makes abundantly clear that colleges and universities cannot meet their obligations under Title IX simply by relying on a criminal investigation, or for that matter even waiting until the investigation is over before taking action.

  • frankietx

    I was in college fifteen years ago and yes, I had regretted sex at least few times. But, every time I did, I knew exactly what I was getting into the minute I put on that push-up bra and set foot in that bar. All women know it, they just don’t want to admit that they too are looking for dirty, random sex and we, as a society, don’t want to admit that either. After all, these are the women who we will work with and who will run the PTA carnival in fifteen years. That reality makes some people a little uncomfortable.

    Why do we insist on taking away women’s power by allowing them to get away with irresponsible behavior? We are essentially telling them that if they choose to drink/drug they are suddenly too stupid to make the same decisions that men make when they’ve been drinking/drugging. That is where the victimization takes place. Women don’t need men or the law to protect them in these situations when they already have the tools to do it themselves – awareness and caution.

    I have been trying my entire career to pass along a very simple fact to university women. Unless you have a very trusted wingman, you are the only person who has your back in these situations. If you want to put yourself in a dangerous environment you have every right to do so, but please use your head and don’t be surprised by the very obvious consequences.

  • tappat

    Yes, very good: people who make themselves white, beta female objects and appear to enjoy that status contribute significantly to the culture that yields cross-gender rapes executed by those who make themselves white, alpha males. But I don’t know that this is patriarchy, even malevolent rule of the father. It is a sadism and a masochism that consumes others, not unlike exploitative and profit-driven wealth distribution practices do, but it is not some sort of rule of totalitarian and authoritarian rule of the father. I suppose this is a minor point, but you make it bigger than it might ought to be, by dramatically declaring that you’ll “say the word,” with the word then being, “patriarchy.”

  • Valkyrie607

    “Lots of photos of girls drinking lots of beer. Sometimes photos of girls passed out from drinking said beer. Often with boys having sex with passed-out girls.”

    That last sentence is incorrect. It should read, “Often with boys RAPING passed-out girls.”

    If your partner is unconscious, she or he cannot consent. Therefore any sexual contact with her or him is rape. Even in an article trying to decry a culture of sexual violence, we find rape-enabling language. It is sad.

  • Valkyrie607

    Threatening rape is political speech? No, I don’t think so. And I don’t think that telling young college men that such speech is unacceptable on a college campus is a free speech issue. That’s like saying that it’s a free speech issue when your co-workers ask you to stop referring to them as “bitch.”

  • Valkyrie607

    “Until women stop degrading themselves to get male attention we will never have true equality.”

    So, there’s absolutely nothing men can do, and only things women do can have any effect on the situation? Please. Men have been given a pass for their responsibility in enabling sexual harassment and sexual violence. They need to take responsibility for changing the culture too. Take responsibility. Stop trying to dodge it and foist it all off onto the shoulders of women.

  • Valkyrie607

    Did you ever accuse anyone of rape after having regrettable sex? Well there you go then. Your whole screed was a waste of space.

  • Valkyrie607

    Women often participate in enforcing patriarchal values. It pays off to ingratiate yourself with the ruling class. You never heard of “Uncle Tom”? This is not that complicated to understand.

  • http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

    You have completely missed newsoffice’s point. What newsoffice (and I and others in these comments) are pointing out is that BOTH men AND women are at fault for the breakdown and perversions of campus sexual culture. We are not giving men a pass; we are not foisting all of it off on the the shoulders of women. We are saying that men engage in despicable behavior but that women also knowingly choose to encourage that behavior by dressing like sluts and going to frat parties to get drunk.

    It’s time for ALL of us — men and women alike — to step up and take responsibility for establishing personal respect and ethical sexual behavior.

  • katisumas

    Frankie, there’s something wrong with your reasoning, just as wrong as the euphemism “regretted sex”.

    To seek random sex is not the same as seeking to be raped.

    “Dangerous situations” are not made by the victim but by the perpetrator. If you get mugged coming home from your late night shift, is the police going to put the blame on you for “putting yourself in a dangerous situation”?

    I thought the idea of putting on a push up bra causing rape had gone by the wayside long ago. Women and men wear sexy clothes for the same reason: to be attractive to themselves and the gender they wish to impress…. We don’t do that to get raped or robbed or murdered.

    Finally, why do you call “random” sex “dirty”?

  • katisumas

    Sex is not perversion. Even drunken groop sex is not perversion. Consensual sex is not perversion.

    Nonconsensual sex IS perversion because it’s a crime. It’s called rape.

    Why do you and others here beat around the bush and confuse the two? However circumvolutated logic you’re using, rape is rape, and what’s more, most men would never ever have nonconsensual sex with a woman or another man, even if they had drunk themselves in a catatonic.

    The gist of the article is that our culture encourages and trivialize rape. Your responses seem to show how right Laura Essig is.

  • katisumas

    ..and how is your closing anecdote relevant? I read it as you approving that the girls who were raped were ran out of their school? The consequence of course will be that no victim of rape would dare complain to anyone –is this what you’re advocating?

  • katisumas

    You haven’t really gotten the gist of the article, have you?

  • newsoffice

    1. Many women do not simply allow or fall victim to men who have sex with them in groups and in public, they willingly and enthusiastically participate in it. There is some very interesting research out there about drunken behavior which suggests that it is culture dependent. Patterns of drunken behavior are tied to cultures and since people act out in predicatble ways depending on the societies they are in, then it is behavior that can and is controlled and directed. The “pervasive perversion of heterosexual culture” I agree is very real and young people use alcohol to particpate in it — they do not lose control or inhibitions so much as use drunkness as a license to participate in behavior they intend to participate in but can blame on being blitzed. Women and men.

    2. Why does htis exist? Well, for many teens and young people, youth culture is all that they are exposed to and everything about youth culture is vulgar — the music, the clothing, the preoccupations, the lack of intellectual stimulation, the rise of celebrity culture and becuase of the Internet, all of this is filtered through very public acting out. No understanding of privacy because everything is supposed to be posted. So now sex is public and in a group. Isn’t this just an extension of the Internet and over-sharing shall we say. (Rutgers U suicide anyone?) My daughter tells me that the big thing at high school parties is for girls to make out with girls and the boys watch. The girls are not gay, they are simply trying to turn on their boyfriends and other boys. Any wonder boys get aggressive?

    Another girl (who I should add is poor — her mother is deaf , no father — and very overweight) was tricked by her so-called best female friends into thinking a boy she liked was texting her. After “he” talked her into taking a picture of her breasts and sending it “him”, her friends emailed it to the whole school. It was just a joke! Funny, huh?

    Girls are really not much different than boys.

  • katisumas

    Wearing a burka, never going out of the house without a male relative might help?

    What is the difference between “sexually coerced” and “forcibly raped”? What is the difference between “forcibly raped” and “raped”?

    Rape leaves specific injuries on the victim which can be accurately diagnosed by a medical professional….

  • katisumas

    …but what did you think of the act of chanting “No means yes, yes means anal”?

    Many of the commentators are of the opinion that women should avoid dangerous situations in order to resolve the rape problem.

    We already do. For instance we try to not walk alone after our evening classes. When we have no choice we walk fast with fear in our hearts. Just ask any women. That fear is of course reinforced by loud threats of rape waking us up at night while asleep in our dorm..

    Are the commentators advocating women wearing burkas? Would that make us safer?

  • katisumas

    Laura Essig didn’t say that. She said that the alpha males on campus WHO (that doesn’t mean all, just those encompassed by that “who”) are harrassing women are also harrassing gay, gender non-comformists and people of color”

    Look at her phrasing again and use some elementary logic to decipher it.

  • katisumas

    The chanters were pledges who were forced to chant. The whole fraternity is thus involved. All of its members should be singled out.

  • katisumas

    Trendisnotdestiny, I sure second your point and I have to note that you’ve earned your handle.

  • http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

    I want to make it completely clear that I am not (1) trivializing rape or (2) trying to blame women for getting raped. Rape is an extraordinarily serious infraction against the dignity of the human person, and the men (and, in rare instances, women) who rape others commit grievous crimes. Never should they be tolerated, encouraged, or excused.

    That said, I find it odd that we do not at least encourage women in the practice of reason and precaution. If, as has been stipulated, the drunken frat boy culture that objectifies women (seemingly without repercussion) is also the locus of many of the rapes that are occurring — and going unreported or unpunished — on college campuses, then it seems entirely reasonable that avoiding such situations would be a reasonable precaution against being raped. If getting drunk with those frat boys seems often a precursor to being raped, then maybe you shouldn’t get drunk with them. If they seem more likely to take advantage of young women when those women are dressed like prostitutes, then maybe it would a reasonable precaution not to dress so provocatively.

    Finally (and yes, I know that here katisumas, and probably Dr. Essig as well, will find me objectionable), some types of sex are perverted. Drunken group sex is perverted. But then, maybe I think that because I (and my wife) understand sex to be an extraordinarily intimate expression of the deepest love two people can share; such an understanding can only view such cheap exhibitions as drunken group sex to be perverted.

  • trendisnotdestiny

    Spot on Valkyrie607, this shouldn’t be so difficult for most to understand. Also, good points here katisumas…. Attractiveness, Drunkeness and Consensuality are much different concepts than what the behaviors of rape reveal. Rape and its worship projection is about:

    1) Power
    2) the physical expression of an inadequacy or “A Shame Transfer”
    3) Incitement of Male Cultural Reactivity:
    – You’re On Your Own (YOYO) – blaming the victim w/: “what do you expect”
    – Perpetrators are not responsible for their actions (male or female)

    And its not like we don’t see in used a military tactic as well (especially in Africa, Balkans and most places where people believe its OK to take what they want (money, resources etc.)

  • jcisneros

    …forcible rape has the element of violence in it, sexual coercion means using any means other than physical violence to rape, best example I can think of is feeding an unsuspecting person drugs that impair judgment (date rape drugs are cheap and common on campuses, an “old school” date rape drug is Ecstasy). Consensual sex needs legal consent, and if a person is sufficiently impaired, their ability to reason and think clearly goes out the window. A person sufficiently impaired by alcohol is unable to give legal consent, same goes for these designer drugs. Legally, yes does not always mean yes…so banging the drunk chick (or boi) can still be rape, and morally reprehensible behavior besides.

    This does not mean there is not a subculture in both the gay and straight communities that fuel their sexual desire through the overuse of drugs and alcohol, it just means someone has to exercise judgment in choosing a sex partner…and the legal ground is sufficiently murky that anyone having sex with a drunk stranger is asking for trouble. I know I am asking for people to be careful out there, but gosh, I have been doing that in my community for years. Don’t go have sex with the meth queen, the odds are something really bad will happen to you alongside the meth addled boy, who has no idea what he is doing and doesn’t care besides. I will leave it to your imagination the consequences of having a partner who does crystal meth, but I will give you a hint, I left my second partner because he did meth…the least of his sins was to NOT practice safe sex. I finally recontacted him about five years ago, he was clean and sober and still couldn’t remember whole periods in his life and utterly horrified by what his friends told him about those blackout periods.

    No means no, and yes from a person who is sufficiently impaired is not always legally yes.

    Better to wait until that person you want to have sex with is sober and to see if they still want to go to bed with you.

    ~J

  • jcisneros

    Once again, the source of your statistics please? Preferably from someplace legitimate like the US Justice Department…oh, I forgot, they are the ones who are talking about this problem on college campuses…and they are the source of the statistics you malign the author for using.

    I agree that police need to handle rape allegations, but universities have a legal burden they must meet in the process, and that means (at a minimum) educating young girls and guys about the issue, and reporting incidents on their campuses.

  • kweber

    I’ll add that not all victims of rape are female.

  • supertatie

    None of this should be surprising in a culture which, for the past 4 – 5 decades, has let go of virtually every social stigma associated with promiscuity, and most behaviors associated with adulthood. We now reward bad behavior (drunkenness, criminality, unwed parenthood, drug abuse, sexual perversion) with stardom, fame and lots of money (reality TV stars, rap artists, Charlie Sheen). We marginalize age and criticism wisdom. We celebrate not just youth but adolescence. We have encouraged young women to act as badly as uncultured men do (and have since time immemorial) and told them that this was “liberation.” We have encouraged them to dress and act like prostitutes, and so they do, but without even getting paid for it. We act like every consequence of sexual license can be protected by a condom, fixed by an abortion, or remedied by a lawsuit. We tout our belief in evolution, but we encourage our young people to act like savages.

    There was a time when every fraternity and sorority on a college campus had a housemother, and curfews, and rules about drinking and members of the opposite sex in the rooms after a certain hour. Colleges WERE safer places then. All that went by the wayside, remember? In the name of what? “They’re grown-ups.” “They’re adults.” “They need their freedom.”

    Some will say, “rape still happened then.” No doubt. But it – and the orgiastic behavior that Prof. Essig describes – was rare, indeed. The behavior that she writes about, depicted on some of the sites she references, is already deplorable and shameful, even when rape doesn’t occur. (And I mean deplorable for the men AND the women.) Why can’t we just admit that, instead of trying to stay “cool,” “edgy” and “relevant” by wink-winking at the dissolute sexuality, and then drumming up misplaced indignation when dissolute sexuality’s sibling – sexual violence – tags along for the ride?

    For centuries – no, probably millennia – humans have known that men need to be civilized, that women (who are generally physically weaker) need to be protected, that the sexual impulse is powerful (and there is plenty of evolutionary proof of that), that intoxicating substances remove inhibitions, and that youth needs supervision. Societal structures were in place in recognition of those realities. But as a country, we decided that we were smarter than all of our ancestors, and that our culture was distinct from all the other human cultures that ever existed. So we removed most of the societal underpinnings, castigated them as “vestigial,” or “patriarchal” or “old-fashioned” or (God help us) “square,” certain that, freed from the shackles of oppressive societal mores, we would all flourish and thrive in a society of “free love.” Wahoo! How’s that working out for you?

    It’s ironic to me that Professor Essig characterizes the mayhem she has observed as “patriarchal.” What nonsense. In a TRUE “patriarchal” society, no boy would dare to do to a girl what happened in that bar, as her father would castrate him. A bit primitive, perhaps, but even after those actual practices slipped into the mists of memory, the image of a protective father or brothers loomed large in a young man’s mind.

    Not any more. Because we’ve also done away with the idea of fathers as necessary components of children’s lives. Now a single mom will do just as well – or a boyfriend – or an unmarried sperm donor. After all, that’s what Hollywood does, right? So it must be OK.

    As is the case with the suicide of the Rutgers student, Tyler Clementi, we condone and celebrate and promote and giggle at bad, raucous, boorish behavior like that displayed by Mr. Clementi’s roommate (doesn’t everyone want to be the star of their own reality TV show? Don’t we “sext” now? Don’t we put our lives on YouTube? Don’t we Tweet when we use the bathroom?). Our language is coarse, our entertainment is coarse, our culture is coarse. We have let our country become completely dominated by the whims, the desires, the caprices, and the idiocy of teenagers, even to the point of wanting to remain teens ourselves. But then, when some arbitrary line is crossed, we call not for some return to civil and polite society with its attendant rules and strictures – because that might require that we GROW UP – but for lawyers.

    There is a reason why John Adams said that our Constitution (and, more broadly speaking, our entire system of government and our way of life) was only suited to a moral and virtuous people. The country was founded on the principle of individual liberty, which, unconstrained by individual responsibility, descends quickly into chaos. In a free (and enlightened) society, law is supposed to govern people’s behaviors at the margins. But we are no longer willing to restrain ourselves, and so the law must do it.

    We decided that we chafed at cultural mores, but now, somehow, criminal prosecutions are less onerous. I do not understand that logic at all.

    We are reaping – or rather, our children and grandchildren are reaping – what we have sown. A favorite saying of the 1960s “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Like much of what was passed around in that era, that’s garbage. So here’s one perhaps we can adopt, if we have the courage to:

    Adulthood means being able to say, “We were wrong.”

  • goxewu

    Just curious: Who’s more wrong, the lefties who advocated all this relativism, or the free-marketers who make the bucks off reality TV, rap, and Charlie Sheen? Not much profit in piety and restraint, you know. (Who publishes the color pictures of near-naked D-list celebs, the liberally biased The New York Times, or Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post?)

    The society that supertatie longs for shouldn’t be 1950s America (Ozzie was an abuser, Harriet a drunk, the kids dysfunctional) but China during The Great Cultural Revolution. You want somebody castrated (OK, just executed) for sexual misbehavior, you got it. And sexless fashions, too.

  • supertatie

    Ugh. No one wants anyone castrated for real, gox. I don’t long for China’s Cultural Revolution or any other top-down piety. A little SELF-restraint would go a long way.

  • goxewu

    “No one wants anyone castrated for real”

    * So, “In a TRUE “patriarchal” society, no boy would dare to do to a girl what happened in that bar, as her father would castrate him,” is just Michael-Savage-esque empty barroom tough talk. OK.

    “A little SELF-restraint would go a long way.”

    Whose? The horny teenagers who watch the gross-out comedies the movie industry produces, or the movie industry that produces them for horny teenagers? The readers of the New York Post who like the titillation of the celebrity skin pix, or The News Corporation, publisher of the New York Post?

  • cwm4c

    This helps campus stores and hurts campus consumers.  Chase and Bank of America nearly simultaneously announced a “trial” $3/month fee for the priveledge of using your debit card.  Anyone think that won’t become permanent, normalized across every bank, or increase above $3?

  • quacker

    Shame on the CHE for misleading unwary readers about the nature of this rule, which only applies to DEBIT card transactions (not “Charge-Card Transactions”) or credit cards.  The fees associated with credit card transactions remain somewhat usurious.  

  • gstanski

    The latest version of the Fed’s final debit interchange rule has not changed much. It is still good news for retailers and bad one for issuers. It is also still bad news for consumers who are already feeling the rule’s side effects, even before it has taken effect. Anticipating lower revenues, banks have begun creating new or expanding existing revenue sources. As a result, free checking accounts are going away, new bank fees are being introduced and old ones increased, interest rates are being hiked, rewards are being slashed, etc.

    So the damage to consumers is already done and it will not be reversed, even if the Fed eventually decided not to change the interchange status quo after all. What we have here is a government-mandated redistribution of revenues from one industry to another, something it has no business doing. http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/debit-card-fee-limit-lifted-to-24-cents-consumers-will-still-pay-for-it

  • rich_hershman

    Based on the other comments, lets get some facts straight about debit card swipe fee reform. 
     
    1.) The recent action by Congress and the Federal Reserve provides very modest, but necessary reforms to runaway bank swipe fees that have no market restraint or competition.  Students and parents are paying for these costs whether they pay by cash or card.   Each individual consumer pays several hundreds of dollars each year in these swipe fees; however they have been hidden to most consumers. 
     
    2)  The law and new regulations provide market stimulus that will create more competition among banks to drive costs lower as opposed to the current situation where Visa and MasterCard compete by raising fees for the benefit of large banks. 
     
    3.)  US Consumers and colleges and universities and others who accept plastic pay the highest swipe fees in the developed world.  In Canada, there are no swipe fees on debit cards which are essentially electronic lower cost versions of paper checks.  In the US paper checks clear at the amount you write, but debit cards have cleared minus a flat fee and as a percentage of the card -just like credit cards and these fees have been increasing significantly so they are reaching the same level as credit cards.  Pay that tuition and fee bill of $3,000 with a debit card and the banks may keep $50 or more for simply moving your money from your checking account to your school’s.  Pay by credit card and the banks could pocket $90 or more if you use a rewards card.
     
    3.) Students and parents will benefit from these reforms. It will reduce tens of thousands of dollars that students and parents pay to schools that are misdirected to the banking industry.  That means potentially lower costs, better services, and more grant aid.  In some cases it may mean reducing or eliminating convenience fees some government entities require.
     
    4.) Nearly every respected consumer organization has supported these reforms including the Consumer Federation of America, USPIRG and others.  They recognize that consumers, particularly middle and lower income consumers are already being hurt by these swipe fees and lack of competition in the banking industry.  Even with the Fed slashing the current average fees in half, banks will continue to generate significant revenue as the Fed discovered it only costs a few pennies to transfer such money between accounts.  Credit unions and other small banks are exempted from these lower fees.  While banks will attempt to camouflage checking account fee increases by blaming swipe fee reform (these multiple fees have been increasing for years without government regulation), not all banks will follow this approach and many have announced they will not increase fees. If you do not like your bank’s fees and practices, move to another bank.
     
    Bottom line is these modest reforms are long overdue and will help provide some relief for one area of unrestrained inflation in costs for colleges and universities and their customers.

  • amcsween

    I would like to know in the school year 2010-2011, how many schools were found in violation of Title IX compliance? I really need to know for my senior paper.

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