Every school’s environment is different—where students drink, how they get home from parties, the geographies and the conditions of their vulnerability—and the nudges and interventions have to vary accordingly. But Hirsch and Mellins hope that their research can serve as the beginning of a network of innovative cross-campus studies. In the meantime, they’re talking to administrators about the interrelationship of mental health, substance abuse, and sexual assault, and about how different types of incidents and different types of students require different types of prevention and response. Many of these conversations have echoed long-standing conclusions in public-health research, and also what some students are already asking for: more crisis support, more consideration for specific populations, more access to spaces on campus that feel like their own. “I’m grateful the SHIFT team chose to do this,” Roskin-Frazee told me. “I hope they are persuasive to administrators who are not easily persuaded.”

One night in January, I called Emma Sulkowicz to talk about Hirsch and Mellins’s project. Sulkowicz was disarming and philosophical, despite having spent five hours in the dentist’s chair earlier that day. Sulkowicz had not heard about SHIFT before, and was politely resistant to the idea: “My view in this whole thing is that, the more that Columbia can retreat behind ‘Here’s a program, here’s a study, here’s a process,’ the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass.”

What if, I asked, the idea behind the study was tinkering with the machine, figuring out how to reorient that moral compass?

“That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, ‘I’ll try,’ ” Sulkowicz said. “I think that’s the difference between spending two million dollars to try to understand the conditions that create a community that’s conducive to sexual assault versus just doing the right thing—expelling people who sexually assault other students.”

Sulkowicz wants to change behavior, too, but thinks that punishment is more efficacious than tweaks to campus life. When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape, it put out a statement, noting that his “remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.” But Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect. “He’s been scared shitless,” they said. (The man’s lawyer called this statement “preposterous,” and said that he had done nothing wrong.)

Sulkowicz also said something that I kept hearing from Columbia students: “It’s about finding a way to make your institution, and the people who run it, more human.” Earlier that week, I’d spoken to a former SHIFT student-board member named Morgan Hughes, a laid-back twenty-three-year-old hip-hop musician. She called me from a coffee shop in Cleveland, where she’d moved after graduation. She had been a disengaged student, by her own account, mainly focussed on her music. Her friends at school, most of whom were people of color, had found it difficult to secure space and permission from Columbia to hold their own events, she told me. “Everything is so regulated, so limited, everything’s super uptight,” she said. “Columbia always says they’re listening, taking students into account, and then they turn around and make a decision that doesn’t acknowledge any of that conversation. But SHIFT did listen. They changed their agenda based on what we talked about. It didn’t feel like we were just wasting our breath.”

Would SHIFT make things different at Columbia? “Every four years, there’s a new student body, and I think Columbia is used to just waiting it out,” she said. “But this time there are professors involved. Shamus Khan is going to be there, Jennifer Hirsch is going to be there. It’s up to Columbia if they want to shoot themselves in the foot and ignore it, but people are actually paying attention to this.” She paused, and coffee-shop noises tinkled in the background. “I mean, Columbia, you should want to solve the problem, so you don’t keep having to solve the problem, you know what I mean?”

The question now is whether Columbia values SHIFT as a flagship research project or as a practical guide to institutional change. I asked Goldberg, over the phone, whether she thought Columbia would change after SHIFT. She had spoken carefully throughout our conversation, seeming to calibrate every word against the various, sometimes competing interests that she’s expected to balance. “I think,” she said, “that SHIFT’s research is profoundly important to the work we are doing here.” It will be difficult, under Title IX, for people who live or work on campus to entirely separate sex from bureaucracy. When I asked Mellins what she hopes to ultimately accomplish with SHIFT, she said, “I’m a clinician. I’ve come to feel that, if the work we do makes the lives of even a small amount of students better, that’s what we want. We want to eradicate sexual assault, but, short of that, I think we just want to make a difference.”

The SHIFT approach, for all its rigor and scope, is in some ways remarkably modest: the idea is that small structural adjustments to student life could change how students interact with one another—help them find their moral compass more easily, feel more at home on campus, have some obstacles cleared out of their path. These humble expectations can seem deflating. But SHIFT makes a powerful argument that sexual-violence prevention must embrace the ordinary and the particular. Its programming suggestions may matter less than its potential to transform how people think about the problem. At one point in my conversation with Hirsch, she brought up an optimistic analogy. Forty years ago, alcohol played a role in more than sixty per cent of traffic deaths. Since then, a comprehensive, multilevel campaign against drunk driving has cut that number in half. This required institutional change, in the form of new laws, and social change, as school and community programs taught people to designate a driver and to intervene when a wobbly friend grabbed his car keys. It also involved changes to the physical environment: cities established police checkpoints, and offenders were required to install Breathalyzer locks on their cars. Citizens lobbied for better street lights, more speed bumps.

A version of this thinking applies to life in college: there are checkpoints and speed bumps that could decrease the likelihood of harm. Picture the freshman who’s depressed but doesn’t realize it, or can’t get an appointment at the counselling office, or doesn’t trust the counsellors. It’s easier to just drink twenty beers each weekend. On one of those weekends, he goes to a party and meets a girl who hasn’t slept in two days and is subsisting on cereal; she didn’t want to come to this party, but her roommates gave her an iced-tea bottle full of Fireball and dragged her out. The boy and the girl start talking. Their friends cheer when they make out. At 2 A.M., when the party begins to clear, one of them says they should get a bite, but no place on campus is open. They go to her bedroom, but there’s nowhere comfortable to sit except the bed. What happens next is a blur of mismatched fears and assumptions. The girl panics, freezes, thinks the guy will hurt her if she yells at him, starts making horrible calculations of futility: anyone who hears this story will think it’s her fault for inviting him in. The guy, having half-deliberately drunk himself beyond conscious decision-making, ignores her stiffness and whatever she’s mumbling; he thinks he’s doing exactly what college students are supposed to do. There are at least a dozen small changes beyond their control that might have led to a different outcome. There will always be people, mostly men, who experience a power differential as license to do what they want. But SHIFT proposes that it is possible to protect potential victims and potential perpetrators simultaneously, and that we are, at this moment, less eager to hurt one another than we seem to be. ♦