Inthe picture posted by the Yale Daily News, DKE brothers stand next to a flag crudely woven from women’s underwear. The year is 1985, and Brett Kavanaugh, though not in the picture, has joined DKE, just like George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush did in their time. He has graduated prep school, is attending Yale, and would go on to Yale Law School. Before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Kavanaugh seemed to insist that this educational path in and of itself testified to the integrity of his character.

As an alumnae of Phillips Academy Andover and Yale College, I find such an insinuation not only laughable but a deliberate distraction from the fact that the opposite is often true. In Kavanaugh, I recognize a prototype of a kind of man I’ve seen in action throughout high school and college. Under the auspices of fraternal organizations, old-boy networks, and sometimes sheer wealth and privilege, beliefs and behaviors ranging from mundane attitudes of misogyny to grave sexual assault are sheltered on elite campuses. In another time or place, these type of men may end up with careers outside the public eye. At elite prep schools and Yale, these were the kind of men who could wind up as lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, and even presidents.

When I first got to Andover at age 16, I had little idea of how to interact with a particular category of boys: the prepsters in khaki pants, the athletes wearing varsity jackets, and, in general, anyone who seemed to speak the social language of East Coast elitism. Having grown up abroad, it took me some time to realize I stood in the midst of a very historic and very established pipeline of elites and that a sizable contingent of them relished in a specific culture of sexual conquest.

While I mostly steered clear of these men romantically at Andover, I saw them grind on girls at our awkward, chaperoned school dances. I heard disturbing rumors that they fetishized girls with eating disorders. As a proctor, I knew of underclassmen girls who were taken to the ironically named Sanctuary, a forest at the edge of campus and a popular place to engage in sexual encounters. The boys most active in this realm often held highly visible positions on campus, vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard and Jackson Hole, and were expected to go on to a top college and one day become a prominent figure in, among other fields, the American political and financial landscape.

At Yale, much like Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez and many other young women, I partook in the drinking and partying scene. My first year, I often found myself in the basements or on the porches of fraternities. There and elsewhere on campus, I was part of an atmosphere of open sexual predation. Many sexual encounters my friends and I experienced, while not always sexual harassment and assault — though a large number of my female friends and I have experienced situations that escalated into that — were based on a dynamic of objectification and predation of women, often by young men with considerable education and social privilege.

During my time at Yale, I was, among other unpleasant encounters, unknowingly filmed by members of an athletic team while I was leaning over a billiard table and my strapless dress hung down, revealing my breasts (the video was circulated on social media, which came to my attention only when the person who filmed me excitedly recognized me at a party); I was led, heavily inebriated, to a spare room of a fraternity house where an alumni brother tried to coax me into sexual intercourse; I drank a beverage in a frat basement that led me to instantly lose consciousness.

Most notably, I engaged in an extended romantic relationship with a fellow undergraduate who, at knifepoint, threatened to kill me. In case I doubted his resolve to do so, he explicitly told me that he would suffer no repercussion for murder because of his father’s powerful reach. Twice, I had nonconsensual sex — once pressured by the same man after repeated verbal refusals, another time by a different man while too inebriated to consent. When I texted or met these men the day after the incidents, they did not pursue communications as soon as it was clear I did not plan, at the moment, on reporting the encounters.

Many of these same men are now off to lucrative and high-profile careers. In the public eye, they now call themselves feminists. After Dr. Ford’s testimony, a few female friends forwarded me screenshots of the same man who had proclaimed impunity from potential murder posting a message in support of Dr. Ford on Facebook. Rather than believe in this man’s sudden enlightenment, I’m more inclined to think that it is precisely this type of man who has much to gain from cheap posturing.

But a convenient cover photo update to an image of Blasey Ford doesn’t make these men less like Kavanaugh. They may grow up to be partners and fathers and occupy positions of great social importance, but they were manufactured in environments where they could spend the most formative years of their lives honing skills of socially sanctioned, consequence-free misogyny, predation, and abuse. The same old-boy networks that protected these men, in turn, have propelled their new recruits toward success.

Such men need to stop assuming their actions can be consequence-free. Watching Ford testify before the nation, I am one of many who felt even more convinced that speaking up is, ultimately, the best way to disillusion men who think their elite ties can shield them from accountability. Speaking up should never be an obligation for one not ready to do so, but, as Dr. Ford demonstrated, it can be a public service of utmost importance for generating a culture shift.

Until her testimony, I resisted revisiting bad memories from college because I didn’t want them to “matter” in my life. Now, I realize that such memories will always matter because they are testaments to the behavior elite men are so sure will go unpunished.

I am deeply grateful to Andover and Yale as bastions of intellectual learning. But if one day I have a son, and I have to decide whether to send him off to elite prep schools and colleges where old-boy networks still run deep, then what I will be concerned about is not the literal price tag of attendance but the cost that perceived privilege can wreak on a person’s character.

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Originally published on Medium’s “Equality” Featured Stories