So the students created not just a policy but an educational curriculum of lectures, discussion groups, presentations from Planned Parenthood and skits in which actors would work through different scenarios where consent should be taught. “It was so owned by students, it was created by students, and students created education around it,” Ms. Wolford said. The school administration adopted the policy with enthusiasm in the winter of 1991.

When Louise Smith, a professor of performance who graduated in the class of 1977, first came back to Yellow Springs to join the faculty, the S.O.P.P. was newly in place but already “a prominent part of the zeitgeist,” she said. Ms. Smith had come back to Antioch from New York City, where she was entrenched in the downtown performance scene. She thought the policy was too based in political correctness. “I was an eye roller,” she said.

But over the years — including a stint as dean of community life in 2011, during which she worked with students to remove S.O.P.P. language about “rape culture” in favor of “sexual violence,” which she hoped would be less alienating and accusatory toward men — she has changed her mind.

“I have very little patience with the notion that something like this isn’t needed,” she said. “I don’t feel the policy was meant to stop us from shaking hands without consent. What it does do is sort of say, ‘Your body is your body and if you don’t want something to happen to it or with it, it shouldn’t.’ And then that can be applied into every social interaction.”

Andy Janecko, 19 and a second-year student, wants to create another policy. “I’m really wanting to write a separate policy, that brings consciousness about consent a little bit further,” said Mx. Janecko, who uses they/them/their pronouns. “We’re missing this whole component of consent in general, teaching people not to touch people at all if you don’t have their verbal consent,” they said, suggesting that it could be called the Nonconsensual Contact Prevention Policy.

One reason for the policy, they said, is to protect against people casually touching people who don’t like to be touched or who have disabilities that make unexpected touch painful or unsettling.

“I’m also looking for it to help people get justice or get acknowledgments at least for microaggression,” said Mx. Janecko, currently on co-op in San Francisco, working at a mime theater. They hope to get to work on this next evolution when they return to campus this spring.