The elephant in the room is about this big.

IT seems too obvious to say, but the problem of campus sexual assault, so prevalent in the news this week, could be largely prevented without the intervention of the federal government or the police or campus sexual assault investigators and advisors and lawyers. The obvious solution is the elephant in the room that no one acknowledges.

Here we have a crisis — and I do believe it is a serious problem — that could be solved very simply, but won’t be because there are too many financial interests at stake in keeping campus sexual mayhem going, too many ideologues with fantasies to fulfill and too many education consumers (and that’s what they are, not students or young people in need of wisdom and formation) who believe in the inherent good of sexual liberation to care much about its more obvious victims.

If men and women were segregated in campus housing; if this segregation was strictly enforced, as it once was; and if any man caught in a woman’s room, or vice versa, was immediately expelled, there would be little chance of campus rape or political controversies about campus rape. If drunkenness affected a student’s GPA permanently, there would be less of it too. But these kinds of restrictions would change the college experience and the realities of high ed consumerism. They actually would probably lead to the closure of many institutions.

Most cases of reported sexual assault involve drunkenness and occur in college dormitories. There’s no dispute about that. Colleges are offering sexual opportunity as part of the package. There’s lots of money for fitness centers and tech labs and study abroad programs, and virtually nothing for chaperones, rules and discipline. At colleges, women were once prohibited from dressing in a provocative way, let alone having men in their rooms. The truth is, if it weren’t for sex, those tuition fees would come under greater scrutiny. Students wouldn’t put up with the preschool-to-graduate school grind. The whole education thing would be done more efficiently and quickly.

Sexual mayhem is profitable for government and universities. The intention behind Obama-style government oversight is to regulate it and manage it, not to prevent it.

One of the unfortunate things about this mayhem, as Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, is that, in addition to leading to impersonal, drunken encounters, it destroys the sense of romance and possibility that is the beautiful complement to learning.

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