Dear Dr. Gillis, Dr. Camacho, and the Rice Community,
Under the Rice University Sexual Harassment Policy (No. 830-98), the undersigned file a formal complaint about the campus climate at Rice, specifically the language of the college cheers. Violations of Rice's Sexual Harassment policy are widespread, and we petition Rice to enforce existing policy in regard to the college cheers.
College cheers are a misguided and destructive way of establishing student community. The indoctrination of students into Rice University through college cheers must be assessed and changed. Examples of cheers student Orientation-Week advisors teach freshmen and transfer students are:
We fucked your mom and she was bad!
Sid Rich is my bitch!
Will Rice sucks my dick!
Cock suck, mother fuck, eat a bag of shit!\r
Cunt hair, douche bag, suck your mother's tit!\r
We are the best college, all the others suck!\r
We are Lovett, rah rah fuck!
Pull out your privates! Slap 'em with a stick!\r
Hanszen! Hanszen! Suck our throbbing dicks.
Fuck you! We're from Brown, bitch!
Sid Rich sucks! Death from behind!
Learning these college cheers is one of entering students' first experiences at Rice University. A diverse student body is homogenized and individual voices are silenced as the cheering begins. To be part of the core group, students must join in the cheers. Many students recall being shocked or stunned when they first heard the cheers. Others recall their thoughts of "I don't think I'm going to fit in here." If a student chooses not to participate, he or she must marginalize themselves from the group of authentic Rice students. The cheers articulate normative values that supposedly stem from "tradition". Rice history reveals that the above cheers are less than ten years old.
The cheers alienate, not integrate students. The cheers do not recognize or respect diversity of students' religion, culture, upbringing, background, sexual orientation, or gender. Women must act as if we have penises as we scream in unison, "Will Rice sucks my dick!" The speaker in each cheer has a penis, which implies that women are missing something that all truly spirited Rice students should have. The message the cheers give is to dominate through sex acts (ex: Suck our throbbing dicks! or Death from behind!), and the message is, indeed, sexually violent. The cheers perpetuate relationships of domination and subordination, and community is constituted through violent confrontation with the "other". An unrestrained violently aggressive heterosexual male is set up as the subject and the norm.
The use of the cheers does not stop at Orientation Week, the Matriculation Ceremony/ Faculty Address, or Beer Bike. The cheers are used many times that colleges compete (as in intramural sports) or when groups or even individuals from different colleges meet. Cheers are used as a means of communication. Recently, moving from college to college, Weiss Pumpkin Carolers incited students to scream back many of the afore listed college cheers. Songs were interspersed with cheers in between choruses. Student aggression escalated from cheering "Cock suck, mother fuck, eat a bag of shit!" to throwing water balloons down at the carolers, and finally hurling full cartons of yogurt from the sixth story balcony.
The importance of the cheers' effects should not be underestimated. The cheers are the first collective language of each college, and they provide a format and vocabulary for students to use in future interactions. The language and attitude expressed in the cheers insidiously finds its way into college minutes, flyers, dorm hall decorations, T-shirts, and college activity themes. A recent example of T-shirts are from this year's homecoming: "Rice vs. S&M U: We'll beat you, and you'll like it." or the Willy Week shirts: "Pet my Willy." A picnic flyer advertised: "Come down and eat our big wienies, bitch" and a score report from a women's football game read: "Brown bitches beat Jones whores." An entering hall sign in a college reads: "Beware of pickpockets and loose women."
Throughout the year, college floor parties make decorations of glow-in-the-dark penises and hard-core pornography. Most recently, the Hanszen's Stripper Party (held in the commons) and Weiss's NOD party expressed up close and in person the cheers' messages. Outside their doors, students' dry-erase boards often have content that is similar to the cheers. The students who write college minutes use names of unknowing students. The authors create stories about what these unwitting students have supposedly done sexually that week or what they might do in the future. Sid Rich's minutes wrote about a student, "You are a Dumb Bitch," and that she had sex with her twin sister. In some colleges, "Hook-Up Webs" post students' names, connecting the people who have supposedly had sexual encounters.
The language represents a University-sanctioned attitude that needs fundamental change. Surely similar cheers that included racial or anti-Semitic hate speech would not be institutionally sanctioned the way the cheers with sexualized hate speech are. The public, school-sanctioned use of many of the cheers clearly violates Rice's Sexual Harassment Policy. In Policy number 830-98, Rice University Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures, under Part I section C (definition) it says: "Sexual Harassment... occurs when ...behavior constitutes...unwelcome verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature where...(part 3) such conduct has the purpose or effect of substantially interfering with an individuals welfare, academic or work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, offensive, or demeaning education or work environment."
It is not the students' responsibility to enforce Rice's policies. The students' responsibility is to abide by them. If Rice will not enforce its sexual harassment policy, it should rescind it, publicly, in writing. If the current practice of college cheers is sanctioned by the administration, either affirmatively or by their silence and failure to act, that fact should appear in Rice's promotional literature sent to prospective students, so prospects will be able to get a clearer idea of the nature of the University as they compare it to other colleges they are considering. The text of several representative cheers should appear wherever Rice describes student life on campus. If Rice claims itself to be a leader in higher education in the country and the world, it must examine every aspect of the entire institution to determine if that claim is truthful. Rice University cannot separate and ignore the degrading, unhealthy, deeply offensive, and arguably illegal practices exemplified by the cheers. Institutional integrity depends on that comprehensive assessment.
The Rice community must envision another model of community formation. Together, the administration, students, and faculty need to work to construct a community that embraces a multiplicity of identities. We can create solidarity without resorting to cheers based on exclusion and degradation through language of sexual violence and domination. We can construct a new inclusive system and mode of communication that does not obscure students' differences and diversity. In the end, we hope a more positive, diverse, and welcoming environment will be created at Rice.
We are not the first to complain about this issue, but we hope we are the last. Change must be made, and made NOW. We request you to take action, and we trust that you will remedy this issue and enforce University policy.
Sincerely,
