CHENNAI : When a parent says “Nalla college” it rarely means an institution that feeds curiosity in students and encourages critical thinking. More often than not, a good college is seen as one that is safe and takes strict measures to ‘protect’ students, especially girls. It seems to me that for as long as women have been on campuses, many institutions have taken on the role of a third and intermediary protector who promises to keep a rather revolving eye on women before they are passed on as pretty products from the father to the husband.
I went to two all-girls colleges. The make-up of each was vastly different, but as institutions, they were pretty much the same. The dress code in three phrases would be ‘sleeves compulsory’, ‘front zip covered’, ‘butt covered’. More than anything else, the colleges insisted that the girls don’t bring disrepute to the brand name (meaning: It is a college for girls from good families who will go into good families, and start good families of their own). There was no campus life — students came and went by a certain time, and where hostels existed, students would be kept from seeing the outside by being buried under a mountain of permission slips.
Some co-ed colleges in the state, and outside that friends were at, might as well have been separate for a gender binary. We would hear of not just enforcement of dress codes, but severe action upon continued interaction. There were separate corridors, stairwells and sections of the bus. Students believed that the walls had eyes and ears, and that anyone could be a ‘spy’.
Students being students always found a way to subvert the rules. There would always be a loophole, a way out, and methods to meet and date and fall in love. But the fear that students could never shake off was that of being watched, of being pulled up for unwritten rules based solely on a person’s subjective moral compass, and then having to face the consequences of that person’s judgement.
The recent case of the college in Nagapattinam district that expelled four of its female students reminded me that these things still happen, and that colleges take on an unnecessary paternal role that unfairly targets women students. If as a society we were trying to shy away from the fact that women drink, this case throws an additional shock value to the foray: the girls are not from the big bad city. This element points us to two things — there comes an age when young people develop curiosities, and in today’s world that is a global village people will be experimenting, limited by means but still definitely trying to expand their realities. If women are being unfairly punished and shown their place for wanting to take their life in their own hands, in this case, the women are being branded and punished more severely by expulsion for ‘trying to be modern women’ and for teaching everyone else a lesson.
We should perhaps take a closer look at the patriarchy that demands institutions to take on the role of protector and pry into the private lives of students, or to be the parent that infantilises students well into adulthood. We should be talking about the double standards here — the man who took and uploaded the video without consent and whose expulsion we are still to hear about, the moralities and the weight of the ‘bad name’ that men are excused from, and by way of things that happen off-campus, there far worse that does than a bottle of alcohol.
What about institutions refusing to be cognisant of sexual violence that happens outside the walls? Think about these girls, think about where their lives would go from here, and think — all this over alcohol? Because institutions could be doing a lot more important things — holding them accountable is not a leftie comrade demand.