It started when we were children. Our parents walked us to the bus stop, supervised our playtime, and met with our teachers to make sure they weren’t being too hard on us. Conflict between kids was mediated by adults, and tattling on playmates was encouraged.

Sports, once the domain of neighborhood kids everywhere, became organized and structured by adults, who rewarded our sweaty efforts with unfettered praise. In this process, my generation lost the ability to navigate the world without our hands being held.

Now, we are in college, the big kid’s playground. Our new mommy and daddy are college administrators, always ready to intervene, always ready to implement new rules. Today, college administrators and students enjoy a symbiotic, albeit unhealthy, relationship. You might even call us codependent. However, this wasn’t always so.

In the 1960s, students and administrators experienced some growing pains. Across the nation, college students were in rebellion. They occupied college buildings, attempting to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy,” among other goals. The student protesters rejected the notion that colleges should operate in loco parentis, “in place of a parent.”

Before the 1960s, college students were subjected to many restrictions in their private lives, from curfews to curtailed freedom of speech.

Students rebelled, demanding recognition of their autonomy and adulthood. They recognized the danger inherent in ceding too much power to authority figures. Students rejected the college bureaucracy that told them they knew what was best.

Today, however, students are all too happy to embrace the bloated college bureaucracy, which has grown at an unprecedented rate. In 1975, universities had twice as many professors as administrators.

Today, administrators outnumber faculty. Furthermore, the number of “executive, administrative, and managerial employees” rose by 85 percent. In the same time period, “professional staff” at colleges have increased by an astonishing 240 percent.

Now, with a bloated bureaucracy, when we have a complaint, we run to the increasingly large administration to fix it. This is an unsettling inversion of former student protests. It appears that students seek to return to the spirit of in loco parentis.

This shift in student-administration relations is evident at Gustavus. After campus-wide outrage over Gustavus’ alleged mishandling of sexual assault complaints, a panel of administrators convened in a forum with students.

Though it is increasingly clear that colleges are ill-equipped to adjudicate sexual assault complaints, students continue to demand that their colleges stop rape. Instead of protesting the fraternities and the individuals who support rapists and perpetuate rape, students turned their frustrations towards the administration, demanding more policies, more intervention, and more training from the college.   

A student body that demands more bureaucracy receives more bureaucracy. President Bergman ended the forum with the unveiling of a new task force, largely composed of administrators, charged with studying the problems of sexual assault and its adjudication. Coincidentally, our neighbor school St. Olaf College also recently announced their new task force for sexual assault in response to similar campus outrage. Students everywhere are looking to their administrations to protect us from ourselves.

It is unclear how students want administration to actually prevent rape. St. Olaf is a dry campus! Would they prefer administration attend house parties, ensuring that adults don’t sexually assault one another in private residences? Or should administration come to the bars and monitor our alcohol consumption? Perhaps the solution is to bring back curfews.

While supporting and recognizing efforts to reduce and eliminate rape and sexual assault on college campuses, I remain unconvinced that expanding the college bureaucracy and relying on the administration is the most efficient means of solving this issue of rape culture.

Despite the passionate anger directed at college administrations, the college is not attacking students. We, the students, are assaulting each other, and that’s a hard truth.

Students can no longer cling to the administration, as if they are an extension of our parents. It’s time to grow up. The real world doesn’t have a benevolent dictator administration looking out for us, shielding us from drug and alcohol laws and ensuring that no student is ever subjected to offense.

College administrations have proven to be completely incompetent at dealing with sexual assault. If we are upset about rape and sexual assault, and I assure you, we are, then we need to go after the rapists.

Imagine a campus where the true shame lies in being a sexual predator. This would do far more to eliminate rape on college campuses than yet another school-mandated training on consent, the effectiveness of which is in doubt.

It’s tempting to rely on the administration to resolve our social issues. After all, our whole lives have been a series of adult interventions. However, for better or for worse, we are the adults now, and no one can fix us but ourselves.

It’s time to revive the original student protester, who knew that the college administration is not your friend, and is definitely not your mom or dad. It’s time to revive student responsibility and individual autonomy.