On the other hand, he asked, isn’t that a kind of female power? “A guy is more or less dependent on the women receiving his advances so if she is not interested, then tough luck for him,” Mr. Griffin said. “I think that in a way the girls relish that power. They can pick and say, ‘I’m not interested in that guy.’ ”

Whichever way they thought the balance tipped, the students interviewed essentially believed the “he chases, she submits” paradigm was no big deal. Boys will be boys, said Nora Taranto, 20, a history of science major at Princeton, who is particularly interested in neuroscience. “It’s just the way that drunk frat guys act,” she said of the antics of pledges on her campus and others. “Well, besides the naked runs through lectures, which I guess could be offensive to some people but weren’t offensive to me, not really.”

They all get to the generational card eventually, believing that parents are too uptight; being free to flaunt your assets as you do your intellect is a new kind of empowerment, they say. “When I talked about it with my mom, she didn’t understand that there were in-betweens between friends and relationships,” said a female junior at the University of Virginia. “That you could be unofficial. So I think it’s just a generational difference. It really just depends on the girl. Some girls just really like to have sex.”

Or, as the female University of Utah junior put it, college isn’t supposed to adhere to the rules of the real world. “Personally, I think that this is the time in your life when you’re most experimental,” she said. “It’s the designated time to try new things and get stuff out of your system. If parents were still in our mindset, they would understand. I think that every person has been there, but I think when I grow up I will look back and think it’s unhealthy. Because it’s animalistic. But it’s just what happens at this stage.”

So, is this all harmless? Late last spring, Princeton hosted 1,300 alumnae for a weekend celebration of progress called “She Roars.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor was there. (Justice Elena Kagan could not attend.) So was Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, and Wendy Kopp, chief executive and founder of Teach for America, as well as two members of Congress, a few best-selling authors and heads of corporations and universities. The first night, student a-cappella groups performed, and for one song the all-male Nassoons serenaded one lone member of the all-female Tigerlilies, who pretended to have wandered, lost, onto the stage. Keeping the rhythm, the men pantomimed unzipping their flies and thrusting their pelvises.

In an essay in The Christian Science Monitor soon afterward, the singer Tina deVaron, who was in the audience, compared the performance with mimed gang rape, and told the story of her own rape by a fellow student when she was at Princeton in 1973. What the performers onstage that night saw as ribald fun, she wrote, was at the root of statistics like “one in four women will be sexually assaulted on a college campus.”