We’re Teaching Consent All Wrong - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"In the midst of the larger #MeToo movement, and a campus climate characterized by hookup culture, it seems universities have figured out that educating about consent — what it is, how to talk about it, how to instill it as a value and practice — is essential.

But we’re going about it all wrong. We teach the hows of consent but not the whys. The questions are more complicated, and intellectually richer, than we acknowledge. This gives us an opportunity — in fact, an obligation — to extend the conversation to the classroom, not relegate it exclusively to orientations and extracurricular workshops. The academy’s resistance to taking it there not only shortchanges our students but is also a failure of the imagination....

Consent is complicated, but typically we try to make consent education "easy" — as easy as "yes means yes" and "no means no." It usually involves a first-year orientation lecture or a series of comedic skits, with maybe an online human-resources tutorial — and not much else. Think of the clever, tongue-in-cheek cartoon video "Tea Consent," which includes lessons such as, "Unconscious people don’t want tea," and "If someone said yes to tea around your house last Saturday, that doesn’t mean they want tea all the time." ..."