I really appreciate that question. I think universities have two choices. One is to be reactive, and that is what most universities do now. Most of you are familiar with what happened on Carleton's campus a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear in this room or not—okay, no. I will just say that frosh facilitators were seen walking adjacent to campus wearing T-shirts that said, “Eff safe space” or “Eff me”. This created a debacle on campus. It took a long time for university administration to condemn these acts, but those students were never actually punished, even though their actions clearly were infractions against the student code of conduct.
I don't think that kind of a reactive approach is particularly useful. We saw the same thing at Saint Mary's. We saw it at U of O. We saw it at Brock. If we just keep responding, then we're not actually getting ahead of the problem. To my mind, we need to have ongoing education that begins with frosh week but then continues, so that those people who are educating the frosh about what consent means have had four years of education about what consent means and are in a position to model for them what consent means and what healthy sexual relationships mean.
What we see now at universities is that the frosh facilitators do an online course that takes them half an hour, and that's their consent training, which they then bring down to the frosh. It's not sufficient, and it's not sufficient for that to only happen once in your university career. It should be an ongoing project of universities to be continuously educating people, and not just students. Everybody on the university campus needs to be engaged with continuous education around safe, healthy, consensual sexuality.