Mr. Hennessy,

When I was in my senior year of high school, I really wanted to get into Stanford. It was my dream school. It was at the very top of my list. I wrote my application essay on an event that changed my life. The event was a relationship I had entered into in junior high that rapidly became sexually abusive. I wrote about how I continued to attend my school with him as a classmate because I was too scared to come forward. I wrote about wanting to change things for women, wanting to help other people in similar situations get the help they needed. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really discussed what happened in any sort of detail before and so I completely underestimated the emotional toll that came with doing so.

At the time of the early application deadline, I was in a psychiatric facility. Writing an essay about my rape had forced me to examine both it and myself with a good deal more rigor than I was prepared for. I had to confront my feelings about the abuse, instead of just acknowledging that it happened and shoving it from my mind. I had opened floodgates and was swept out to sea. I discovered that I had, in fact, been sexually abused before, at a very young age, but had repressed all memory of the event. I discovered that what I had thought were anxious quirks were actually symptoms of something much darker. I discovered that I didn’t want to live with what had happened.

With several unsuccessful short-term hospital stays under my belt and head spinning with suicidal plans, I was transferred to a long-term care facility where I stayed for seven months. That was where I was when April rolled around. My mom brought me all the responses from the schools I had applied to. I got into every single one, with a cumulative amount of 340,000 dollars worth of scholarship money from five different schools. Perhaps, had this information come at another time in my life I would have been proud but it didn’t. It arrived at a time where the only thing that mattered to me was ending the pain, shame, and disgust that I was feeling.

Finally, after months of intensive therapy with round the clock staff present, I got to a place where I could stand to exist. I moved back in with my parents and started trying to rebuild. While it took so little time to go from the honor roll to the hospital, it took a lot of time to get better. Nearly two years later, my ambition is back and I’m dreaming about the future again. I’m still by no means the person I was before and I doubt that I ever will be. When I lie awake at night I can feel him touching me and I have days where it feels like I’m drowning in my anger, grief, and shame. But I’m moving forwards. I’ll be easing into college this coming year, while still doing therapy on the side. While I no longer think of Stanford as being the right fit for me, I still think of sitting in the memorial auditorium with the same excitement that I had years ago.

So though I wasn’t actively seeking out information about Stanford, I certainly listened up whenever I heard the name. When I first caught wind of your new alcohol policy I completely agreed with it. Dozens of students die on campuses every year due to alcohol poisoning, yet many colleges leave this issue unaddressed. It seemed as though you’d taken the great initiative. Then I heard that the ban was in response to the sexual assault of Leah Francis.

True, there’s a strong association between alcohol and rape. Alcohol is the most common date rape drug in the world. Rapists often spike drinks with alcohol the same way they would ketamine, yet if the victim is drunk, instead of drugged, our society puts the blame on her. This is even more so is the case if the victim ingested the alcohol themselves. However, In instances where alcohol and rape go hand in hand, the issue isn’t alcohol. Your ban is only addressing liquor.

Telling women to be aware of our tolerance for alcohol, effectively says that if we watch our intake and don’t get sloppy, we won’t get raped. This is absolutely wrong. Were it not, no woman would ever drink! Yet sober women get raped. Women in habits or burkas get raped. Women get raped in offices, libraries, shops, places of worship, cars, subways, public bathrooms. We know the issue here cannot possibly be parties with hard liquor. No one will deny that alcohol has a correlation with rape, but with some of the world’s best studies coming from this university, should not you, of all people, know that correlation is not causation?

Telling women to watch how they are perceived is instructing women to try and control what other people think of them. This is not only impossible but also shifts the responsibility for a man’s behavior onto a woman. I wasn’t interested in going to one of the world's most elite school so that I could spend my time babysitting grown men, I certainly doubt your female students would disagree. A woman, studying at Stanford, is there to learn. To meet friends. To go out into the world and shape and change it. Any person who got into a school with a 4.7% acceptance rate is perfectly capable refraining from committing felonies while under the influence of alcohol. The idea of women adapting their behavior so that men are free to do whatever it is they choose to do has been tested and failed time and time again. While working to end alcohol abuse on campus is commendable, in response to rape it is both redundant and shaming. Needless to say, it will “fail to engineer sufficient change” if the change you are looking for is a decrease in sexual assault on your campus.

Obviously, I had heard Brock Turner’s name before. I knew he was a convicted rapist and I knew that the way the presiding judge was under fire because of. I’ll admit I hadn’t done any homework on the case until recently. As I filled in the blanks of what I knew, the thing that surprised me most was the fact that Brock Turner still has not been expelled. Brock Turner is, at least in writing, welcome back to your campus. Beyond just being a huge miscarriage of justice, I’m shocked that you would let someone who you know be a repeat offender back into his hunting grounds.

Rape is an oppressive tool. Pimps all over the world use gang rape as a way to break in new girls and make them compliant. Rape is used in wars and genocides all throughout history. It isn’t about someone being aroused, or about party culture or about a misunderstanding. Rape is about power and degradation. A history of not holding rapists responsible for their actions and allowing them to continue to prey on your female students sends the message that you approve of what happened. The fact that only one person has ever been expelled from your school for rape means that you are permitting this on your campus. Sending out the message to your student population that anything goes, so long as you’re a man. Creating an unsafe campus for women is saying that you do not want women on your campus. This absolutely has to change! It is no longer 1885 and we as a society have moved beyond the idea that women aren’t just as capable, necessary and human as men are.

While this system of letting predators go unpunished is poor form at any school, the consequences in your case are higher than they may be for other institutions. With an acceptance rate even lower than Harvard’s, a household name and so many outstanding alumni, you set a precedent. Countless schools try to model themselves after you. Permitting a campus to be a hostile environment for women, particularly in such a public case, is going to have dangerous ripples. The reverse, however, is also true. If you take action, other schools will follow suit.

Meeting Leah’s requests for better enforcement of title IX, improvement of survivors resources, expansion of SARA, expansion of education on consent and expulsion of all persons found guilty of sexual assault seems to be a good place to start. In addition to Leah's requests, it may be beneficial and healing for you to openly and explicitly acknowledge that alcohol is not the problem and publicly decry both Brock Turner's actions and people trying to justify his them. Stanford has always been an institution that is at the forefront. Perhaps it is time to reflect on what it is that you want to be leading.

I didn’t spend the past two years at a school, but I certainly spent them learning. One of the most difficult lessons was understanding that you cannot undo anything that has happened in the past. You cannot take back the mistakes you’ve made or the time you’ve wasted, or anything that you’ve said or done. The only thing that you can do is get up again. With effort and good intent, you can turn any terrible thing into something that you can learn and grow from. Doing this, you can not just change yourself but you can change the world. After all, isn’t that what higher learning is all about?