After nearly a dozen sexual assault cases on the Eckerd College campus during the past three years, the school's president is issuing a message to students.

Eckerd College President Donald Eastman is telling students via email it is time for them to do their part to avoid these situation. But the message is only making some students more upset.

Despite it's intentions, the message is striking a nerve on campus, some students even going as far as to call it disgusting.

According to partner newspaper the Tampa Bay Times, Eastman's efforts are part of a nationwide attempt to lower the number of rape cases at colleges and universities.

Eastman's email to students read it part:

"You can do your part in helping this College and this culture address this nexus of problems by doing two relatively simple things:

1.  By limiting your own consumption of alcohol, and encouraging your friends to do the same. Socrates included wine at his Symposium, but he did not get drunk.

2.  You can be thoughtful about the dramatic and often negative psychological effects that sexual activity without commitment can have. Virtue in the area of sexuality is its own reward, and has been held in high esteem in Western Culture for millennia because those who are virtuous are happier as well as healthier.  No one’s culture or character or understanding is improved by casual sex, and the physical and psychological risks to both genders are profound."

It did not take long for students to form a rebuttal.

"That's a pretty insensitive thing to say," 19-year-old sophomore Marlene Heyning told the Times. "Instead of teaching people that it's wrong to have casual sex and drink alcohol, how about teaching them that having sex with someone who says 'no' is not OK?"

Senior Adrien Krajnik, 22, said Eastman's email may have been well intentioned but misguided.

"... It's also very clear he doesn't understand the problem," Krajnik said. "Nor does he understand his students very well, which is a little scary."

Eastman has responded by saying it was not his intent to blame victims.

And of the dozen or so responses to Eastman, he said not one student has offered an idea of where the blame lies for sexual assaults.

Instead, one Eckerd alumni group has filed an online petition against the president's email, demanding a broader conversation about the root causes of the sexual assault problem on college campuses.

Eckerd College is a small liberal arts college at the southernmost point of St. Petersburg. It has an enrollment of about 1,800 undergraduate students.