Indeed. The part that jumped out at me (I wanted to Fisk the article, but I thought it less confrontational to see what others said) was the same claim GC points to: I went to see a tutor. He had heard four or five accounts of students being sexually assaulted a week. This is one tutor, in one department, at one university.
Given the SSRs at Warwick, and the way tutor groups are usually set up, the clear implication is that the author contends that the typical student is reporting about eight sexual assaults a year (30 academic weeks, say 15 tutees, so 120 reports per year over 15 tutees). Given it’s an article about misogyny and therefore the unstated implication is that this is reports by women, then more like sixteen reported sexual assaults per student per year.
It seems unlikely.
In my department, at a comparable but larger university, reported (in the sense of “spoke to a tutor or welfare”, not “made a formal complaint and started a formal process”) assaults are as GC suggests something that doesn’t happen in most years. It’s at most one report per thousand student-years, and I suspect less than that. I don’t dispute that reporting rates are probably very low, but it defies belief that Warwick has something like ten thousand times the rate of reporting we see, or alternatively ten thousand times the rate of assault.
I’m not sanguine about, for example, rugby clubs and I suspect that Warwick has that problem on a larger scale than some other places. But they’re a relatively contained problem, and the idea that rugby clubs prowl campuses assaulting people at random is ludicrous: the behaviour within the clubs is appalling and it does sometimes spill out into the wider campus community, but they are not Genghis Khan’s hordes, which would be required to sit with the claimed numbers.
The rest of her complaints are a laundry list of stuff that, to be blunt, would happen (and probably at a higher rate) in any randomly selected community of fifty thousand people. A large university has a population of a small market town, and - shockingly! - a small market town will have crime, and racism, and misogyny. Universities don’t reflect society around them as well as they should, but are usually safer and better behaved than a similarly sized group of randoms.
No-one is saying that what happened at Warwick is sui generis and I suspect most universities are this week thinking “There but for the grace of God go us”. I think their discipline process was either defective or misapplied, and for that they deserve criticism: in particular, they were entirely blind to the optics, never mind the propriety, of putting the Press Director in as Investigating Officer for what they must have known had the potential to be an explosive case. Exeter had happened by the time this case broke, so they can’t claim to be totally adrift in new waters.
But Warwick is just another large, significantly privately educated, significantly Chinese, significantly STEM university. There’s no reason to believe that the behaviour of its students is four orders of magnitude worse than peer institutions which I, and I suspect GC, know well. And you are far, far safer in a university community than you are outside it, and to imply otherwise is just mad.