During my senior year at a Mennonite College in 1989-90, I was rarely on campus due to a student teaching assignment. Yet I frequently received phone calls whenever I was in my (single occupant) room… phone calls with no one on the other end. This continued throughout the entire fall; I thought there must be a short in my phone.

During Thanksgiving most students left campus. I went down to the men’s floor to use the kitchen and ran into a fellow student teacher in the hall. He was several years older than most other seniors on campus. I recalled an earlier conversation about student teaching in which he said he thought it was fine for kids to BA (bare ass) each other in his P.E. class. I thought it odd.

I can’t remember exactly what he did in the hall that day, but it made me feel uncomfortable, and I remember consciously thinking there aren’t very many people in this building. I went back to my room. The phone rang. No one there. I looked out the window and down at the men’s floor below (C-shaped building) and saw this guy masturbating in front of the window. I felt really bad that I’d witnessed something that surely must have been meant to be a private moment; I felt sorry for him and didn’t tell anyone, afraid that I might embarrass him. Until the next call came a couple of days later. This time I looked down as it rang and watched the same guy hang up the phone and shine a flashlight on his genitals.

I reported it to the college. They basically said it was my word against his. It was “investigated.” Nothing of any substance occurred that I was ever made aware of. By this time, the semester was ending. I wanted to move off campus. As I was packing and moving things out, the guy stopped me on the sidewalk and said (in what I considered to be a threatening overtone), “You’re sure in a hurry to move out.” I was scared.

The guy didn’t return after Christmas, so it became a moot point for me for a time. The next year, one of my favorite (adjunct) professors mentioned in passing how she was having a tough time with a guy in one of her classes at the college. He was constantly interacting with women to the disruption of the class. I immediately guessed–correctly–who it was. He was back on campus.

I called the education department head, worried that the college was about to hand this guy a degree in education. The professor refused to tell me anything–said he was aware of the situation. That it was handled. But I wasn’t allowed to know anything. I yelled at the prof on the phone for a long time, mostly about how this was on his head and the college’s if they handed this guy an education degree and he went out and did something to a kid. Somewhere in all this I received an “apology” (not really) letter from the guy saying that what happened had nothing to do with me, personally.

I believe this guy graduated soon after with his education degree.