Commitment to Campus Culture

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Commitment to Campus Culture

Now that you have written your response to the “Commitment to Campus Culture” assignment, you will upload your response and answer a few follow-up questions about your commitment to campus culture.  The data from the questions will become a part of our data visualisation.  With your permission we will your responses to the Campus Culture Project website alongside the data visualizaiton.

Note: Uploading your “Commitment to Campus Culture” response here does not mean it will be published to the website.  You are just submitting your assignment.  If you would like us to publish your response, complete the release form below.  

Here is the link to upload your project.

Here is the link to the release form.

Completing the Picture of Campus

Your commitments to change campus culture are the final piece we want to add to our picture of the community here at the University of Iowa.  Now that we have data on the problems, we want to have data on the possible solutions.  Though this assignment is not anonymous, we will be submitting your responses through Qualtrics.  Follow the link that I will email you, copy and paste your written response into the text box, then fill out the remaining questions.

All of the Rhetoric classes talking about sexual assault awareness this semester are also creating these written responses.  With your permission, we will publish these responses to the Campus Culture website alongside our data visualization.  The new visualization will reflect all the various college experiences that University of Iowa students want to have, the ways they want to change campus culture, and the ways they plan to do that.  The goal is that this visualization will serve as a model for other students, help raise awareness about problems students face, and give people ways to make the changes they want.

Your response should be 300 – 350 words (about one page) and should be posted to the course blog by October 29.

_________

Due: October 15

  1. Find an Example

At the beginning of the semester, we talked a little bit about the rhetoric that surrounds us.  Now that we have our class guidelines written, we need to see whether the rhetoric on campus matches our guidelines.  Do we have a culture here that will keep people safe and make sure all sexual interactions are respectful and consensual? Hopefully most of you won’t see an example of sexual assault (though some of you might), but the way people talk about sex and hooking up or even the media people consume on campus will tell us which messages are shaping behaviors and attitudes on our campus.  Remember that every action is rhetorical: every time someone treats their sexual partner fairly or unfairly, that is a message to other people about what is normal or not normal.  When a new student comes to campus, they often look to the behaviors and attitudes of other students as a model for how things work.  What rhetoric does our campus have about sex and sexual assault?

I have given you some examples below, but you are not required to use one of these.  The goal of this assignment is not for you to find the best example of someone following or not following our guidelines (whatever “best” means).  The goal is for you to be paying attention to the rhetoric of the people and media around you.  How do people talk and think about sex?  Does that way of talking value consent and respect of one’s partner?

  1. When people talk about wanting to hook up when they go out, what sorts of things do they say? Are they purposefully going to a place where people are likely to be very drunk?  How does that relate to the guidelines we have set?
  2. Did you hear about or see an incident on campus that did or did not reflect our guidelines? (For example, one time I was walking outside the Summit and saw a young man reach up the skirt of a woman walking by.  She hadn’t even seen him sitting there.  It certainly wasn’t something she was okay with, and he certainly hadn’t asked beforehand).
  3. Maybe a friend talks to you about his/her sex life, or a sexual encounter that s/he had. How did that encounter reflect or not reflect our guidelines? How did the person feel about it afterwards?
  4. Did you watch a movie or TV show with a sex scene? Did the people in the scene talk to each other at all?  Does one person in the scene take a more dominant role while they other is more passive?  How do you think the media impacts how we think about consent?
  5. Have you heard someone make a joke about sexual assault? For example, “Oh my gosh, I got totally raped by that calculus exam.”  What does it mean when someone makes a joke about something like that?  In your opinion is it in line with our guidelines?  How do you think a survivor might feel if s/he had overheard?
  6. Did you hear someone talking about a person that “plays hard to get”? What does that phrase mean?  What if someone says they are not interested in sexual activity with another person and someone says s/he is “playing hard to get”?  How does that relate to consent?

Some students come to me before this assignment is due and tell me they didn’t see anything that related to our attitudes about sex and consent.  I promise that you did.  Try spending one day paying attention.  For that day treat our guidelines as a lens you are seeing the world through. If you are still stuck or having trouble finding an example, come talk to me.

  1. Written Response

Once you have your example, write two or three paragraphs (approx. 250 words) that describe your example and discussing how it reflects or doesn’t reflect our guidelines.  Rhetorically analyze it the way we analyzed the meme at the beginning of the semester. What argument is this example making about how sex should happen between people?  What assumptions does it make about gender, sex, power and consent?   How do you feel about it?  How do you think this example influenced the people around you?

Please protect people’s privacy by not giving any details in your written response that might identify the people involved.  If you have any questions about that, please ask me.

  1. Help Build our Picture of Campus

Once you’ve created your written response, you will complete a survey to help us build a picture of campus culture here at the University of Iowa.  Like the survey we used for your “Expectations of Your College Experience” assignment, this survey will allow you to submit your document anonymously and also give us some data that we can use to analyze all the responses.  I will send you a link to the survey; you will copy and paste your response into the text box, answer the remaining questions and submit the survey.  Once you have submitted the survey, you will see a link to another survey where you can fill in your name and section number.

This is something that all the sections learning about sexual assault are participating in and it will help give us a better idea about the rhetoric surrounding sexual assault and consent on our campus.  It will also give us an idea of what we need to do to make our campus into the one we want it to be.  Answer the questions in the survey and your answers will become part of our campus data set.

Category : Campus Culture Project