Sarah Daniels stood at the front of an auditorium on the University of Michigan campus and looked out at the 120 or so students before her on an unseasonably cool day in late August.
The first day of classes was about two weeks away. But for many of these students, their education had already begun.
“We want people to have sex with people they want to have sex with,” Ms. Daniels told the students in their maize-and-blue T-shirts, Birkenstocks and backward baseball caps. “You are the front lines. You can be a role model, step in and say, ‘It’s not O.K.,’ or, ‘Be safe!’ ”
The room erupted in appreciative finger snapping (the new clapping).
The students, a near-even split of men and women and nearly a third of the university’s 400 student resident hall advisers, had come to hear Ms. Daniels, the assistant dean of students, give a talk entitled “Sexual Misconduct and Bystander Intervention: What It Is and What to Do About It.” It was one of three speeches she would give that day.
In the audience for one of those sessions was Sarah Hong, a senior. Ms. Hong, 20, who grew up in Seoul and Vancouver, British Columbia, is majoring in biopsychology, cognition and neuroscience, with a minor in community action and social change. She is an R.A. in Oxford Housing and has been charged with overseeing 26 mostly first-year students. She is also a member of student organizations that address campus leadership and sexual misconduct.
[For more of this story, written by Katherine Rosman, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...amp;WT.nav=RecEngine]
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