Crikey

Many years ago, when I was a fresher (first-year) at Sydney University’s Wesley College, I went to a debating dinner at St Paul’s. After hours of dancing with a young Pauline, who, like me, had drunk far too many post-prandial ports, I went back to his room. Ten minutes later, a senior boy burst in, put me in a fireman’s lift over his shoulder and carried me back across the lawn to my room, where he removed my shoes and put me to bed.

I can’t remember his name, but I haven’t forgotten the strange feeling of hanging down someone’s back, upside-down, my head bouncing lightly against his waist. But my white knight had decided that I was too drunk to consent to whatever it was I was about to do and needed to be taken home. Later, I found out that I was not the only stupidly drunk girl to have been helped in that way; many of the senior students, in all the colleges, kept a close eye on the freshers and stepped in when we attempted to self-destruct. By second year, an older and wiser 19-year-old, I was doing the same.

The current and former students of St Paul’s, who have put up a pro-rape Facebook page, deserve to be named and shamed, and the University of Sydney is right to treat it very seriously. But it would be a mistake to blame Paul’s college for the actions of a few. As I write this, people are bursting into print to condemn the elitist, sexist, appalling university college system and its promotion of sexual assault, but I think they are missing the point. The problem is not the college system per se, it is that Paul’s is an all-male institution. And as the administrators of any all-male rugby team, army barrack or prison will tell you, if you put a whole lot of young men together in a group and add alcohol, there will be trouble.

The other colleges have managed to solve this problem the most obvious way  — by adding girls. Wesley has been co-ed for decades; St Andrew’s and St John’s added them more recently. Sancta Sophia and Women’s College have remained female-only.

I loved living at Wesley and learned many valuable lessons during my two years there; I have a low tolerance for alcohol, that it’s pointless having sex when you’re inebriated, and that a monogamous relationship based on mutual respect is better than all the alternatives. Unfortunately, no matter what your UAI, these are all lessons that have to be learned the hard way, preferably when you are young. Was my mother aware of this, and was she happy that it wasn’t happening under her roof? Probably yes.

When I was at college, the Paulines used to put on this extravagant Gilbert and Sullivanesque musical called Victoriana, involving much camping around on stage, singing falsetto. That, and their fondness for sherry parties, led us to assume they were all raging queens. Perhaps the college needs to revive Victoriana, and bring in girls, and cut its ties with the Sydney Anglican diocese, which has never had an enlightened attitude to women.

I’ve already planned to send my teenage daughter to college, where along with such elitist anachronisms as the Latin Grace, she will learn some very valuable life skills — like how to grow dope in your room. Always go to a college, I will tell her, where the windows face north.