The administration has drawn fire for its unsteady response to the issue and the report, published last week by Rolling Stone, most recently for a video of a dean acknowledging weeks before the article that even students who had admitted to sexual assault had invariably escaped expulsion — and that, in fact, no one had been expelled for sexual assault in at least seven years.
Professors shelved lesson plans Monday to devote classes to dissecting the problem, as protesters kept up a string of demonstrations outside the white-columned, Federal-style fraternity house where the rape was said to have taken place two years ago. On a bridge nearby, a makeshift memorial to a freshman, Hannah Graham, who was murdered in September — the university’s most recent communal trauma — had been painted over with the message “Take back the party: end rape.”
The article hit a campus already deeply unnerved by that murder, and where fresh memories remain of the 2010 murder of a female lacrosse player, Yeardley Love, by a male lacrosse player, George Huguely V. Like those killings, the Phi Kappa Psi episode belies the picture of the university and its hometown as an old-school island of scholarship, safety, honor codes and etiquette, set apart from a grittier world, just as the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, might have envisioned.
