 What surfaced first in my brain was the word anxiety as in anxiety about what I would want to talk about And then I don't know why exactly but I started ruminating over the phrase separation anxiety that familiar concept I think to all of us and And then I was ruminating about really more like freaking out about Brexit More generally over time Donald Trump And realizing that what seems to be going on is is the opposite of separation anxiety, but it's more like closeness anxiety or maybe integration But the idea that we're so uncomfortable with people who are different from us Being close to us that we have to do something to push them away And that that just needs to be surfacing everywhere Right now, so I'll talk a bit about the campus context And so what I was just saying about the intersections, you know that this is happening across all kinds of intergroup relations gender identity and sexuality race religion nationality a Positions of power professor versus student all of these kinds of power dynamics Seem to come back to this tremendous anxiety that that we have in our cultures around closest and And so what that leads to is Instead of separation anxiety, I reversed it in my To anxiety separation so in response to closeness anxiety we anxiously Separate from people, right? It's an anxiety driven pushing away of people and so on That translates primarily into two Fixes the one the lesser one is the Barely ubiquitous no contact order, which means that if you have a problem with somebody else Or they've harmed you in some way will set up a no contact order so that even though you're in the same Community and often in very same spaces like the same dining hall or gym or even class You're not allowed to talk to each other or communicate in any way And then of course there's suspension and expulsion and other pushing away So that's what we do and what I want to talk about is By way of example is a kind of before and after experience that I had Way back when when we started our sort of justice program at Skidmore College in fact I'm in this is like 15 years ago, so I can't I I don't have time to tell you the full stories And I can't tell you the full story because they're so long ago. I don't really remember all the At that time I was Working pretty closely and learning from the good people of Vermont. Many of them are here in this room studying there restored newly rolled out restorative justice program and And while I was doing that there was a bit of an uproar on our campus about our judicial process disciplinary process Disatisfaction students had with it. So I got enlisted into a committee to look at our process and consider alternatives So the timing was fortuitous because I could say Let's do what Vermont does and people said what's that? I said here it is and they said okay So we started our program Just on an essentially on that basis And so what I had a chance to experience at that time was a case Right before we started our restorative justice process and then a case just after And they were nearly identical So the contrast is Is pronounced in in both of these cases they began with Drunk male student as often campus misconduct begins and both of these cases that male student had lost their key to get back into their dorm residence hall and And both chose the same solution which was to climb in through a first floor window of somebody else's room So they could get back in Not necessarily knowing whose room that was and in both of those cases. This is two in the morning or so was a single female student In the first case asleep in her bed woken up by this intruder who's just climbed male intruders Just climbed into her window So in this first case We went through a disciplinary hearing to address this kind of breaking and entering situation And and the armed party had no real role to play except that like in a criminal justice process of being a witness to the crime And giving only testimony for a short portion of what happened and leaving and never hearing The guy's perspective or understanding of what what was behind his decision to do that And then he was Justly punished found in violation The policy and given a set of sanctions like again, I can't remember all of them the one that Stands out in my memory was this no contact order. He's not allowed to get in touch with her in any way they can't communicate and And then the fallout from that that the one major lasting impact of that was that she remained Fearful, so that's that closeness anxiety perpetuated and he Remained or experienced became resentful a particularly resentful of her for getting him into trouble In other words, hey, this was no big deal. I was just trying to get to my room I didn't have any mountain Why is everybody making a big deal about this? So she her anxiety goes up because she knows he's meant it through the grapevine And he's mad at her right, so just an all-around Technically successful case with very very Unsuccessful outcomes. We have nearly the same case a year later when we start our restorative justice program and And in this case guy comes through the window justice the young woman has come back into a room after taking a shower So she has a towel wrapped around her. He's coming in one way. She's coming in the other the impact kind of barrels over her to get out the door And when she screams he's he screams he goes through so there's physical contact in this one So it's in some ways even worse And So we did the thing that we do in sort of justice and I love the line of her Lauren Aaronson repeating She's I think she's out of the room at this particular moment, but you can have her on the back for this good line She says in sort of justice we do a radical thing. We let people talk to each other And that's what we did We let them talk to each other and we created a space in which this young woman could talk about how frightened she was and He could talk about what was behind his decision-making in the moment. There was some mutual reinsurance around safety and so forth and And there were three in 22nd intervals Key moments that came out of this before I closed three discussions that happened that I think were important one was An exploration of why her fear was not an overreaction, which was the starting place for both of these guys And and that by having this conversation rather than suspending him from residential living or something like that We were able to explore that topic Which meant the larger topic around rape culture I had the sexual assault and out of that the two of them actually wanted to collaborate on a residence hall Education program around the prevalence of campus sexual assault So they wanted to work together on that the second was the question why Why do we have to be so drunk Why is it that students feel like they must get so drunk to have fun? And so we posed the challenge to him Could you organize a so an alcohol-free social event on campus that you and your friends would actually want to go to? And that was a really creative challenge Which he wanted to take up because it was intriguing it was almost inconceivable So so we could we could have a conversation about campus drinking and simplifications And then the third discussion that we had was Why is it so easy to climb into first floor? And that raised the question of institutional or community responsibility that goes beyond the individual responsibility that particular And that there is more involved in us when we start to talk about this systemic or structural implications of our systems within which students mothers operate and And so then there was a plan that was made to actually make it harder to climb into first floor windows So there was some structural literally structural change that came out of this so what all this is to say is that Changing campus climate and culture it doesn't happen through one individual case But what happens is you start to engage in questions and discussions and activities that Over time start to really address the larger issues instead of just driving people apart