<p>I do not have any connection to Amherst. I looked at this thread only because of the articles about the female rape victim I read online and in the NYT. One person (a local high school girl) who commented on an online article (I think it might have been the article in the Amherst student newspaper) said she said she could not walk through the town of Amherst without being sexually harassed by male Amherst College students.
I am old enough to remember the days (1970s, in my case) in NYC when teenage girls had to cross the street to avoid the catcalls of construction workers at a construction site. My sense is that this is not the huge problem today it once was. I suspect this is not a problem in most college towns. Yet, if post written by a high school girl in Amherst, MA is “for real”, it would suggest to me that the culture at Amherst College is still deeply anti-women and that they never “got over” going coeducational. The current students at Amherst were all born decades after Amherst College went coeducational, but it sounds as though institutional memory at Amherst runs deep.
If this is all true, the new president has her work cut out for her, and her job is much bigger than most of us appreciate.</p>