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Campus Sex, Campus Security
A clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality.
The management of sexuality has been sewn into the campus. Sex has its own administrative unit. It is a bureaucratic progression. —from Campus Sex, Campus Security
The psychic life of the university campus is ugly. The idyllic green quad is framed by paranoid cops and an anxious risk-management team. A student is beaten, another is soaked with pepper spray. A professor is thrown to the ground and arrested, charged with felony assault. As the campus is fiscally strip-mined, the country is seized by a crisis of conscience: the student makes headlines now as rape victim and rapist. An administrator writes a report. The crisis is managed.
Campus Sex, Campus Security is Jennifer Doyle's clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, in the era of campus corporatization, “less-lethal” weaponry, ubiquitous rape discourse, and litigious anxiety. Today's university administrator rides a wave of institutional insecurity, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality. One thing (a crime) flips into another (a violation) and back again. On campus, the criminal and civil converge, usually in the form of a hearing that mimics the rituals of a military court, with its secret committees and secret reports, and its sanctions and appeals.
What is the university campus in this world? Who is it for? What sort of psychic space does it simultaneously produce and police? What is it that we want, really, when we call campus security?
The management of sexuality has been sewn into the campus. Sex has its own administrative unit. It is a bureaucratic progression. —from Campus Sex, Campus Security
The psychic life of the university campus is ugly. The idyllic green quad is framed by paranoid cops and an anxious risk-management team. A student is beaten, another is soaked with pepper spray. A professor is thrown to the ground and arrested, charged with felony assault. As the campus is fiscally strip-mined, the country is seized by a crisis of conscience: the student makes headlines now as rape victim and rapist. An administrator writes a report. The crisis is managed.
Campus Sex, Campus Security is Jennifer Doyle's clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, in the era of campus corporatization, “less-lethal” weaponry, ubiquitous rape discourse, and litigious anxiety. Today's university administrator rides a wave of institutional insecurity, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality. One thing (a crime) flips into another (a violation) and back again. On campus, the criminal and civil converge, usually in the form of a hearing that mimics the rituals of a military court, with its secret committees and secret reports, and its sanctions and appeals.
What is the university campus in this world? Who is it for? What sort of psychic space does it simultaneously produce and police? What is it that we want, really, when we call campus security?
144 pages, Paperback
First published August 28, 2015
7 people are currently reading
270 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Doyle
24 books18 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 30, 2020
this book is so bad that i don’t even know where to start. at the beginning of the book, the author calls this work an “essay.” it is certainly not that. the ultimate takeaway from this book is that this author has an astounding ability to say absolutely nothing across 120 pages of overwritten, rambling text.
first, the book is misrepresented in its description on MIT’s website. i bought it bc it seemed to be detailing the process of title ix reports on college campuses. i also bought it because i recently finished carceral capitalism by jackie wang and that was an absolutely fantastic, well-researched book. however, this book is actually NOT about campus sexual violence. it is an incoherent collection of half-formed thoughts. i didn’t even need to look at the bibliography to know that it was not well-researched.
i am not being dramatic when i say that ZERO points were made. no argument whatsoever. i literally just finished this book and i could not tell you the point the author was trying to make.
also features problematic attitudes towards survivors of sexual violence. which really is bamboozling given that the book was written to allegedly show the inadequacies of campus responses to sexual assault.
the author attempts to engage issues of police brutality but falls short yet again. it’s clear that she made no attempt to MEANINGFULLY look into these issues. she literally just glanced over some headlines on police brutality (and campus sexual assault) and cobbled together some random words in what i assume was an attempt to make a point.
my final metric for books on topics like this is “how much would this help someone who is in a situation that the book addresses?” would a survivor be able to pick up this book and feel better informed on the reporting process? would they feel comforted knowing that they’re not alone in feeling like the system failed them? the answers to these questions is no. this book is a CLASSIC example of an academic writing solely to impress other academics, without contributing anything that is actually meaningful. and that, in my opinion, is the absolute worst reason to write a book.
there were other things wrong with this but i’ve already said enough. i don’t need to give any more reasons for you not to read this.
first, the book is misrepresented in its description on MIT’s website. i bought it bc it seemed to be detailing the process of title ix reports on college campuses. i also bought it because i recently finished carceral capitalism by jackie wang and that was an absolutely fantastic, well-researched book. however, this book is actually NOT about campus sexual violence. it is an incoherent collection of half-formed thoughts. i didn’t even need to look at the bibliography to know that it was not well-researched.
i am not being dramatic when i say that ZERO points were made. no argument whatsoever. i literally just finished this book and i could not tell you the point the author was trying to make.
also features problematic attitudes towards survivors of sexual violence. which really is bamboozling given that the book was written to allegedly show the inadequacies of campus responses to sexual assault.
the author attempts to engage issues of police brutality but falls short yet again. it’s clear that she made no attempt to MEANINGFULLY look into these issues. she literally just glanced over some headlines on police brutality (and campus sexual assault) and cobbled together some random words in what i assume was an attempt to make a point.
my final metric for books on topics like this is “how much would this help someone who is in a situation that the book addresses?” would a survivor be able to pick up this book and feel better informed on the reporting process? would they feel comforted knowing that they’re not alone in feeling like the system failed them? the answers to these questions is no. this book is a CLASSIC example of an academic writing solely to impress other academics, without contributing anything that is actually meaningful. and that, in my opinion, is the absolute worst reason to write a book.
there were other things wrong with this but i’ve already said enough. i don’t need to give any more reasons for you not to read this.
November 28, 2020
While this book begins with a very important intervention, it quickly devolves into something that I can only describe as… egregious? Doyles’ “Campus Sex, Campus Security” asks its readers to consider the ways in which institutional and personal anxieties around campus sexual violence have given way to/are similar to the increasing militarisation of campus security. The equation of safety and nonviolence is a false equivalence, etc. This makes sense, I can agree with this critique of violence, her calling out of the reproduction of punitive, carceral systems at the university, the horrific ways in which police-figures terrorise students of colour and student activists. Her chapters on such incidents at UC schools and ASU are particularly strong.
Doyle’s turn toward “campus sex” however, reads as alarmist, defensive, ungrounded, and incredibly insensitive. Her anxiety about the campus becoming a fortress where students are constantly chastised, disciplined, and afraid to question authority or move or speak does not sound anything like my experience of the university, though I acknowledge that my own privileges of course factor into this. That said, her writing in these passages reads as solipsistic, melodramatic, and in a few instances, enraging (for example, when she compares the violent pepper-spraying and beating of students at UC Davis with the removal of a football coach’s name from the Penn State library; the ending in which she weaves between the suspicion levied at plagiaristic students and the murder of Mike Brown — her final line of “hands up, don’t shoot the students” made me want to hurl the book across the room). It’s also illogical and contradictory; whereas she first laments the ways in which victims and women in particular are erased from their own narratives of sexual violence, she later does the same thing by centering her accounts of the Sandusky case and the UCSB incel attack on the male perpetrators, even arguing that the UCSB killer was more motivated by his death-drive than a hatred of women (right after mentioning his 100,000 misogynistic manifesto??) This portion of the ‘essay’ is riddled with fantastic excursions and flights of fancy that lead to wild assumptions and claims that she fails to ground, as well as misunderstandings of basic terminology (Doyle claims that ‘rape culture’ pulls focus from the mundanity of sexual coercion, which is in fact the actual thing it is designed to — and I think, does — indicate??) Again, throughout all of this, women figure only as shadows, always unnamed and portrayed pejoratively by Doyle as overly sensitive and fearful of violence against them, which she seems to believe is more an anticipatory figment of the hyper vigilant imagination (and perhaps sometimes is, but I wonder WHY might that be??!!!) Instead of suggesting that we treat the cause, Doyle is fixated on the symptom — their inconvenient, mushy feelings. Women, here, are again thrown under the bus, and made responsible for a whole system of other violences. Never does she interrogate the synapses between violence against women and police/carceral brutality, of course, nor do I believe that she quotes/draws on any abolitionist feminist thinkers or Black feminists.
The idea that some university administrators, faculty, and leaders have championed this book is disconcerting to me, and signals that they would rather not participate in the work of finding nonviolent solutions for sexual violence prevention/restitution and police brutality, and would instead prefer to, I don’t know, do whatever twisted and self-aggrandising exercise this is??
Doyle’s turn toward “campus sex” however, reads as alarmist, defensive, ungrounded, and incredibly insensitive. Her anxiety about the campus becoming a fortress where students are constantly chastised, disciplined, and afraid to question authority or move or speak does not sound anything like my experience of the university, though I acknowledge that my own privileges of course factor into this. That said, her writing in these passages reads as solipsistic, melodramatic, and in a few instances, enraging (for example, when she compares the violent pepper-spraying and beating of students at UC Davis with the removal of a football coach’s name from the Penn State library; the ending in which she weaves between the suspicion levied at plagiaristic students and the murder of Mike Brown — her final line of “hands up, don’t shoot the students” made me want to hurl the book across the room). It’s also illogical and contradictory; whereas she first laments the ways in which victims and women in particular are erased from their own narratives of sexual violence, she later does the same thing by centering her accounts of the Sandusky case and the UCSB incel attack on the male perpetrators, even arguing that the UCSB killer was more motivated by his death-drive than a hatred of women (right after mentioning his 100,000 misogynistic manifesto??) This portion of the ‘essay’ is riddled with fantastic excursions and flights of fancy that lead to wild assumptions and claims that she fails to ground, as well as misunderstandings of basic terminology (Doyle claims that ‘rape culture’ pulls focus from the mundanity of sexual coercion, which is in fact the actual thing it is designed to — and I think, does — indicate??) Again, throughout all of this, women figure only as shadows, always unnamed and portrayed pejoratively by Doyle as overly sensitive and fearful of violence against them, which she seems to believe is more an anticipatory figment of the hyper vigilant imagination (and perhaps sometimes is, but I wonder WHY might that be??!!!) Instead of suggesting that we treat the cause, Doyle is fixated on the symptom — their inconvenient, mushy feelings. Women, here, are again thrown under the bus, and made responsible for a whole system of other violences. Never does she interrogate the synapses between violence against women and police/carceral brutality, of course, nor do I believe that she quotes/draws on any abolitionist feminist thinkers or Black feminists.
The idea that some university administrators, faculty, and leaders have championed this book is disconcerting to me, and signals that they would rather not participate in the work of finding nonviolent solutions for sexual violence prevention/restitution and police brutality, and would instead prefer to, I don’t know, do whatever twisted and self-aggrandising exercise this is??
November 28, 2022
For perhaps the first half of this book I found myself arguing silently with Jennifer Doyle because I thought she overstated and generalized. The second half of the book I was amazed at how Doyle could connect the dots about the fear of sex, fear of the outsider, corporatization of public institutions.
Thought provoking, with much to discuss.
Thought provoking, with much to discuss.
August 24, 2024
Reading this in light of university administrations' response to college encampments, it's easy to see where Doyle's observations hold true and where they've rapidly aged. A lot of this held to my own experiences with college admin and Title IX offices, yes, but only described universities' responses to encampments in the broadest, most general strokes; obviously, though Doyle does incorporate discussion of some UC students sit-ins protesting tuition hikes, administrative response to the content of student protest is not her primary focus so much as the sensational aspect of admin-encouraged violence against students, so the sensational headline aspects are really the only parts that remain relevant.
Beyond contemporary applicability, the book itself is interesting, and she does great work with the concept of institutional vulnerability--how the university is always already "in violation" of Title IX, how students' vulnerability transforms into the institution's vulnerability, how students are therefore punished in the name of protecting students. However, the style is a little difficult, as Doyle often gets caught up in her own repetitive rhetorical flourishes to the point where it's hard to discern where she's making a novel point amidst the endless callbacks to previous turns of phrase, insights, news reports, etc.
The most interesting aspect of this book is its insight into sexual assault discourse in the years leading up to #MeToo--the hushed sensationalism of rape journalism, the abolitionist politics of anti-rape advocates, even a hint of the victim-survivor terminology debate. Inevitably, Doyle's approach seems a little bit dated, if only because the way we talk about sexual assault changed so quickly, but it's fascinating to see what analysis looked like before that watershed moment.
Overall, interesting and a quick--though not easy--read with some worthwhile new thoughts on why university administration goes so fucking crazy sometimes.
Beyond contemporary applicability, the book itself is interesting, and she does great work with the concept of institutional vulnerability--how the university is always already "in violation" of Title IX, how students' vulnerability transforms into the institution's vulnerability, how students are therefore punished in the name of protecting students. However, the style is a little difficult, as Doyle often gets caught up in her own repetitive rhetorical flourishes to the point where it's hard to discern where she's making a novel point amidst the endless callbacks to previous turns of phrase, insights, news reports, etc.
The most interesting aspect of this book is its insight into sexual assault discourse in the years leading up to #MeToo--the hushed sensationalism of rape journalism, the abolitionist politics of anti-rape advocates, even a hint of the victim-survivor terminology debate. Inevitably, Doyle's approach seems a little bit dated, if only because the way we talk about sexual assault changed so quickly, but it's fascinating to see what analysis looked like before that watershed moment.
Overall, interesting and a quick--though not easy--read with some worthwhile new thoughts on why university administration goes so fucking crazy sometimes.
January 29, 2024
rambling writing and useless theory. what are we supposed to do with this information and the issues she's pointed out? be sad? be afraid to protest?
her repetitive "woe is woman" approach was really annoying. if we're reading your feminist theory book, it's likely you don't need to go out of your way to convince us you are oppressed.
these professors love writing for the quotability and nothing else.
the star is for the history lesson about UC's occupy movement.
read this for class.
her repetitive "woe is woman" approach was really annoying. if we're reading your feminist theory book, it's likely you don't need to go out of your way to convince us you are oppressed.
these professors love writing for the quotability and nothing else.
the star is for the history lesson about UC's occupy movement.
read this for class.
December 5, 2022
A stunningly expansive and comprehensive interrogation of the campus, Doyle's writing reverberates with both deeply considered anger and crystal clear resolve. The attempts to manage the problem feed intensely into the problem itself - a perspective altering, incredibly convincing assertion made throughout the book
June 30, 2020
i picked this up and read it all the way through before my sister read it — read her 1 star review for the real tea. maybe i’ll write a more complete review later but yeah this shit is bonkers
January 15, 2019
reading this was such a refreshing experience-- doyle approaches the topics of sex, power, security, discipline, both within the university context and outside of it, with a degree of empathy and nuance that's been difficult to find in much of the contemporary discourse on these subjects. she is keenly attuned to the narratives, many of them fictitious, that structure our understanding of sex/power, especially within the context of bureaucratic institutions like the university, and though she is quick to critique these narratives, she sees evidence in them of a larger, more complex problem: our reliance on easily consumable narratives, tropes, and images as we attempt to process living in a "rape culture." our tendency to turn individuals' lived trauma into stories and images, she points out, turns real, often vulnerable people into metonyms for social systems, which not only can be damaging to the psyche of the victims involved, but also fails to get at the root of the problem that connects each of their stories. though the victim and the perpetrator are often the only characters foregrounded in these cultural myths, doyle adds a new character into the mix: the institutions that so often end up responsible for enacting "justice." by recognizing the culpability of these institutions in our culture's pathological relationship to sexuality, doyle presents a more complex, but more capacious framework for demanding accountability.
while the "campus sex" part of the book was my favorite, the sections that address "campus security" are equally insightful, and the two discussions come together into one of the most accurate appraisals of the problems with the contemporary university system (both public and private) that i've read in a long time.
while the "campus sex" part of the book was my favorite, the sections that address "campus security" are equally insightful, and the two discussions come together into one of the most accurate appraisals of the problems with the contemporary university system (both public and private) that i've read in a long time.
October 31, 2018
Campus Sex, Campus Security is a succinct, lucid account threading together many seemingly-disparate elements: campus sexual assault, vulnerability, police violence, security, advanced neoliberalism, tuition-hike protests and sports-legacy riots, among others. Doyle offers a much-needed critique of the framing of campus sexual assault and issues of campus safety by pointing out first, the ways in which sex and normative gender and sexuality are framed and policed through the fear of sexual assault; this, then, makes it so that vulnerability becomes the "very young girl" at risk of sexual assault, excluding men--particularly men of color, queer bodies in queer relationships, and woman-woman sexual violence outside of the realm of vulnerability. Interweaving between the issue of campus sex and campus security, Doyle notes the ways in which the securitization of the campus interplays with these notions of vulnerability and invulnerability, the racialized bodies that need to have violence enacted upon them, and the ways that bureaucracies and rights-based frameworks create insecurity while simultaneously creating the need to, themselves, be securitized.
Sex and security, security and sex, and the ways in which one is made to need the other, the ways in which one is defined by the other, and the ways in which we talk about each, especially in the context of the campus, is the focus of Doyle's work, and even upon rereading it, it still feels fresh and like a personal juncture for me. Especially in the advanced neoliberal age that we occupy, where "rape culture" is a phrase that pops up on primetime television to the extent that it has become watered down (as Doyle critiques), the radical contributions to thinking about sex and sexual violence that Doyle contributes here are very, very necessary.
Sex and security, security and sex, and the ways in which one is made to need the other, the ways in which one is defined by the other, and the ways in which we talk about each, especially in the context of the campus, is the focus of Doyle's work, and even upon rereading it, it still feels fresh and like a personal juncture for me. Especially in the advanced neoliberal age that we occupy, where "rape culture" is a phrase that pops up on primetime television to the extent that it has become watered down (as Doyle critiques), the radical contributions to thinking about sex and sexual violence that Doyle contributes here are very, very necessary.
September 30, 2020
So this is going to be a complicated review haha. This is a book length (119 page) essay that addresses the way college campuses, and more specifically, university bureaucracy, perpetuate harm on the campus and beyond. Doyle asserts that Title IX makes it mandatory for university’s to report crime data, but makes universities view crimes (most commonly sexual violence) as violations of the university rather than violations of the victim. She also uses examples of police brutality on campuses and school shootings to convey her point. Basically, it boils down to the university as an entity is only concerned with the well being of itself, and will do anything to protect its image, while the university sees students and faculty as expendable sources of money.
If this review was hard to read and comprehend, I get it. That’s what this book was like. It’s very VERY theoretical, and includes so many analogies and metaphors that it’s hard to keep up with. So while the info i was able to pull from it was good overall, it was far too hard to get at it. This is not an accessible text, which is unfortunate.
3.5/5⭐️
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September 1, 2023Ok this isn’t that bad……less a Laura Kipnis style polemic about the consequences of the sexual Revolution within the university setting and moreso a study of the campus as an organism. Interesting but kind of reminds me of Catherine Liu where the discourses she seems to be responding to feel very meta and insular….liek unfortunately I’m not a humanities academic im 22 years old.
January 11, 2017
This is an excellent essay for anyone meditating on Title IX's role in current university policies in the U.S. and the public perception around college campuses. It is worth while for anyone working in higher education today and offers good notes and references for further study.
March 27, 2017
i wish i had this book earlier in my life- so helpful. for all the overdetermined dialogue on sexual assault and cis white women's vulnerability there is not enough of doyle's kind of dialogue on how security narratives estranged from the very people who touch a campus every day hurt so many of us. i do wish there were more connections to sexual assault at the end for while i respect doyle's argument that she will let "security" and "sex" narratives claim spaces separately it seems disingenuous to spend an entire text juxtaposing the two linguistically and in examples and not to directly address these ties and overlaps in the text's conclusion.
February 8, 2023
Tia and Anna said it perfectly but I'll add that I'm a Title IX lawyer and the author misstates the law in SO many places. And calling Prop 209 "Prop 206"??? Really? A simple fact check, Jennifer!
That plus her melodramatic hyperbole completely destroyed her credibility for me.
That plus her melodramatic hyperbole completely destroyed her credibility for me.
June 2, 2025
Read for honors class. The narrative style was deliberately confusing to mimic confusion of navigating policy which was a cool rhetorical technique but I think it just made things harder to read rather than deepening my appreciation. Good deep dive into college campus dynamics though!
June 23, 2022
good read
April 23, 2024
4 class, you know the one ! this is what i dream my writing sounds like :,))
August 11, 2016
2.5** stars. It had good moments and couple compelling points written as only a rhetorical academic can. For example, points like "The image of non-violent protest means less, as the non-violent action is reframed as non-compliance." She uses examples like the student in the UCLA library who was singled out and asked by police to show his ID (in a UC library, which is actually public space not requiring any ID access), and when he walked up to leave in protest and the police officer grabbed his arm, he went limp in passive protest, which was seen as non-compliance, and they tased him 2 - 5 times. But her statements are often too vague. I agree with them ostensibly, but they usually lack clear analysis. For example, "The image [of a Davis police officer pepper spraying peaceful students] speaks of the co-existence of professionalism and incompetence. Something is wrong. Everything is normal." I read it and go Yeah! Then I go, What? Explain! Who is perceiving something is wrong, the police or us? Are the police trying to tell us this is normal or do they believe that? I also think her ties between campus rape and campus security were not clear; is her main point that, campus rape is a form of violating campus security, and campus administration and parents and professors are hyper-vigilant about enforcing campus security to the point of police abuse? In the end, she doesn't propose any solutions to the twisted system. Could this book be just a well-education and well-written rant?
January 3, 2016
This book establishes a relationship between how the university as an institution has come to think of students (as a commodity? as a liability?) its responsibility to protect students from sexual violence and harassment, and how we as a culture think about rape. The book is brilliant--she takes her time making connections between the rise in tuition, students' use of Title IX to try to get campuses to be safer for rape victims, and the status of "campus police" and their role. I'm not sure that I share the author's views on the relationship between rape and sexuality, but I think I need to reread sections of this book before I can decide. The material under consideration included many of the campus incidents that were in my mind from the news. I think I would like to mull this over and consider it in light of two other things: my own status as off-campus adjunct faculty, and my concurrent reading of Marilynne Robinson's essays on humanism.
May 1, 2016
Jaw-droppingly important reading: if you attend a university or college in North America, or (and especially) if you work at a university or college, you need to read this book. It shakes with intensity; it moves with deadly focus; it takes you into the demandingly obtuse administrative world's definitions of responsibility and violation, thinks you through the gendered implications of that world, and then, Virgil-like, shows you the side door, the exit sign, the fire escape guarded by a man holding a can of pepper spray.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
July 3, 2016
This book is terribly liberal in its concerns ("making the world a better place," as another reviewer puts it) and self-aware of the privileged sphere of its analysis ("the university"), but highly affective (granted, I'm already primed for this) at stimulating a hatred of police and judiciaries.
January 2, 2017
Interesting and concise. Literary with great pacing and emphasis. Love the many short (3-6pg) chapters as it keeps you moving. Interesting analysis of almost wholly abstract concepts with grounding in the real world. The Bibliography and footnotes could fill my bookshelf alone. Read.
April 26, 2024
probably was received better when it was written and published, revels in its imprecision as excuse from making a meaningful and evidentiary claim. there's a handful of good lines and observations, but much of its analysis seems to have made its way into the air
April 19, 2017
Just brilliant. Everyone who's a mandated Title IX reporter should read it. Certainly every administrator should read it.
July 14, 2018
A clear report of the campus, campus security, and structures in place that continually lead to student and public harm.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews