Time For Another Links Post

• The case of Katie Hill bothers me at multiple levels, not least because I largely think whatever people decide to do with their genitals in their private lives is their own affair. Yes, it was gross that her vengeful ex-husband leaked photos. Yes, it violated House ethics rules for her to sleep with an underling — but is that reasonable? Is the presumption now that all consensual sex between subordinates and supervisors is intrinsically unfair and coercive? I find myself agreeing, in part, with Jessica Valenti’s assessment of the situation (she was taken down by “revenge porn”), but this is the #MeToo world Valenti and her compatriots designed. Arguably, Hill created a #MeToo victim in the staffer, and those are the stakes here. For Valenti, women can only ever be victims, which says a great deal about her thought processes.
• Remember when Wired didn’t suck? It has to have been 20 years ago or more. The only reason I can think of for them to write this disingenuous, lazy piece, “Trans Athletes Are Posting Victories and Shaking Up Sports“ is to garner hate-clicks:

  Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.
  
  These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort. But as more transgender athletes rise to the top of their fields, some vocal opponents are also expressing outrage at what they see as transgender athletes ruining sports for cisgendered girls and women.

  “Training”, I suppose, which equals “going through male puberty and then simply declaring yourself to be female”. The question of motive inevitably arises, and while, yes, it’s easy to impute the urge for easy podium places and trophies as the primary draw of this cheating approach, it also is irrelevant. (CeCe Telfer particularly strikes me as mercenary enough to be in this class.) Biological males are stronger than women, on average and especially at the right side of the bell curve. This is not hard. Bending over backwards to cater to the delusional, narcissistic, and even sociopathic is absolute nonsense.
• Deadspin was at its best when pursuing stories other sports media wouldn’t touch. I seem to recall they were unafraid of the Joe Paterno fall to earth caused by his covering for Jerry Sandusky and the latter’s buggering of young boys, and they likewise went after Ray Rice (though that story broke on TMZ Sports). Now comes the news that editor Barry Petchesky has been fired amid a “stick to sports” edict from new owners G/O Media (the second rebranding since they were spun off the old Gawker Media in bankruptcy court). I have a hard time mustering much concern for him and those who quit in sympathy, mainly because a site that feels it meet to give airtime to a grown-ass woman rape-shaming her pre-sexual son has not only lost its way, it has gone insane.
• A free press is only interesting to people who work in it if they can get paid, apparently, so former Time editor Richard Stengel is penning stupid op-eds in the Washington Post claiming we need to gut the First Amendment, because, reasons.
• Emma Sulkowicz is now fun at parties because, libertarian, or something. Protip: apologize to Paul Nungesser, then I might believe some of this stuff is anything other than a stunt to get your name back in the news.
• First Circuit Court of Appeals to John Doe in Doe v. Boston College, scheduled for argument next week: sorry, Jeanne Suk Gearson, your attorney whom you have paid for many weeks if not months of preparation, may not defend you in court, because, reasons. This is the court putting its finger on the scales of justice, and if I were a betting man, I would put money that this is a politicized punishment.

Conor Friedersdorf's Intersectional Blind Spot

Is there some reason Conor Friedersdorf keeps fumbling the snap? His memory lapses, even when the subject stares him in the face, as to how much power the intersectional left has already acquired (while thirsting for more) are disturbing. I first noticed it with his essay on the Scott Aaronson kerfuffle, in which he kept backfilling for the broken concept of "privilege" (though in the end he confessed it had no practical value in solving societal problems), and for his burying the comments of one of Aaronson's more vile detractors in a footnote. He pulled the same lame stunt with his essay responding to Susan Danuta Walters' two-minutes'-hate in the Washington Post, claiming such views were "unrepresentative" of modern feminism.

Well, here we go again, this time regarding Democrats complaining about the alleged racism of white women:

Some conservatives insist that performative, hyperbolic white-woman bashing is broadly representative of the Democratic Party and the political left. It is not. This rhetorical mode is widely seen as wrongheaded. In my experience, it elicits eye-rolling from most residents of deep-blue neighborhoods and from most Democrats in all racial groups. It is the work of a tiny, largely white, mostly privileged vanguard.

Widely seen by whom? Again and again, we see intersectional bashing of people because of their race, and especially, sex, and by people in very high positions of power. As for instance, a piece by Friedersdorf appearing days later in The Atlantic condemning the ACLU's craven and partisan rejection of Betsy DeVos's new Title IX rules. What is the construction of kangaroo courts with their "believe the victim" conclusion-assuming but presumptive male-bashing? As Scott Greenfield recently wrote, the ACLU under Anthony Romero has become just another social justice organization with only its name to reflect its origin story. How is it he dismisses Russlyn Ali's monster as somehow unrepresentative of widespread male bashing? How of legislative success in California adopting a bogus, unknowable "affirmative consent" rule for sexual encounters where consent can be revoked ex post facto by the woman with no knowledge by the man? It's like he doesn't even read his own copy.

Update 2018-11-26: Useful and interesting exchange between Friedersdorf and Scott Greenfield here, with additional response from Greenfield at Simple Justice; if I wanted to summarize my problem with Friedersdorf, I could scarcely do better than this graf from the latter: “Conor Friedersdorf is a name often mentioned here, both because I think he’s exceptionally smart and occasionally too kind, generous to a fault to people who might not be worthy of his largesse”. That's a good explanation of the problem I have with Friedersdorf: he routinely overlooks examples of bad faith.

Betsy DeVos Announces New Title IX Rules, And The ACLU Hates Them

Reason's Robby Soave has a good look at the new Title IX rules Betsy DeVos released today. A quick synopsis:

1) They define sexual misconduct more narrowly. ...
2) The new rules mandate cross-examination. Previous guidance did not explicitly forbid cross-examination, but it heavily discouraged the practice due to concern that questioning an alleged sexual assault survivor would be re-traumatizing. The new rules state that neither the accuser nor the accused need to be physically present in the same room, but their attorneys—or support persons provided by the university—must be allowed to submit questions on their behalf for the other party to answer.
...
3) The new rules let colleges set their own evidentiary standards but require similar standards for non–Title IX adjudication.

That last one has already set off the laughably misnamed ACLU, who ran a tweetstorm denouncing the revisions:

We advocate for fair school disciplinary processes that uphold the rights of both parties in campus sexual assault and harassment cases.

Today Secretary DeVos proposed a rule that would tip the scales against those who raise their voices.

We strongly oppose it.

— ACLU (@ACLU) November 16, 2018

 Of course, FIRE came out in favor of the new regulations, but eliminating Federal policing of dating squabbles would have been better. Too bad we didn't get that, because somebody has to pay for these busybodies on campus.

Conor Friedersdorf Clanks Again: The Anti-Male Agenda Of Modern Academic Feminism

Conor Friedersdorf and his milquetoast attacks on feminist extremists (viz., his response to the Scott Aaronson fracas) continue with a review of Suzanna Danuta Walters’ two-minutes’-hate against men in the pages of the Washington Post, of all places. (Imagining that paper publish a screed against women — can anyone do it?) Friedersdorf argues that her

argument is actually a perversion of “Team Feminism”—that is, the web is awash with feminists earnestly dismissing the notion that “Team Feminism” hates men, and the view is so unrepresentative of the various strands of “in real life” feminism that it is encountered more commonly among ideological enemies trying to parody or undermine feminism than among earnest advocates like Walters.

The problem with such gabble is that none of it is true. Pen poison pieces like this, and it gets you multiple tenured professorships — including as the founder of Indiana University's Women's Studies program. Presume men are always guilty of sex crimes, and you get to head the Title IX bureaucracy in a perverse redefinition of "civil rights". Vote for anybody other than Hillary Clinton as a Democrat, and you're slandered as a sexist ("Bernie bro"). Go off the ideological reservation, and get canned by a corporate feminist political officer. Offer criticism of a beloved comedy franchise's clumsy, unfunny, political reboot, and get waylaid as misogynist. "Team feminism", in reality, is the majority in the trade, if not the only kind on tap.

Perhaps my assessment of causality is wrong; perhaps Walters wasn't extreme enough in her prior writing, perhaps she is doing this as a plea for help, or attention. The only way men can win this game is not to play. Friedersdorf fails to even survey the landscape.

"Is There A Smarter Way To Deal With Sexual Assault On Campus?" Asks The New Yorker

A steaming heap of dogma from Jia Tolentino, who had the incredible gall necessary to write that

Seven years ago, the Office of Civil Rights, under President Obama, issued a “Dear Colleague” letter, reasserting that sexual violence on campus was a violation of Title IX, and pushing universities to handle sexual-assault cases in a timely, transparent, accuser-friendly manner.

Two out of three ain't bad? Then there's the friendly interview with serial liar Emma Sulkowicz that conveniently omits the fact that Sulkowicz filed her report months after the alleged incident, or Cathy Young's embarrassing revelations of Sulkowicz's friendly text messages in the wake of the purported "assault". The two principles of the study at the center of the piece, Jennifer Hirsch and Suzanne Goldberg, meet at a conference and resolve to conduct an "enthnography". It sounds really important! Except, of course, what they mean is, "unverified stories".

They call the ensuing project SHIFT, whose clumsy retronym stands for "Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation". Already we know we are among advocates who know what they want to find and do. They're smarter! They've got Ideas!

... Hirsch and Mellins think about sexual assault socio-ecologically: as a matter of how people act within a particular environment. They are doggedly optimistic that there is, if not a single fix, a series of new solutions.

But, rape is hard to prove! Can we expand it?

Today, the D.O.J. defines sexual assault as unwanted sexual contact, which means that groping counts, as does attempted assault. The crime hinges on intention, and there are often no witnesses, which makes it uniquely difficult to adjudicate in any legal system, let alone one made up of college administrators. Campus judiciary systems don’t have a criminal court’s investigative powers or evidentiary procedures, but they do have many of a criminal court’s responsibilities. To complicate matters further, everyone involved in the process—accuser, accused, administrator—essentially works under the same roof. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, has called the current approach a “failed system,” and said that she would seek to replace it.

"It might seem simpler to let the criminal-justice system handle things," Tolentino intones, "but universities have a responsibility to insure that women have equal access to education." Pesky due process! (But wait, aren't women already a majority of students enrolled in college?) And then there's all those juicy staff positions:

Columbia now has twenty-three staffers with Title IX responsibilities, including case managers, investigators, and administrators, and provides free legal services to accusers and accused. The school’s gender-based misconduct policy is thirty-one pages long.

Somebody has to hire all those Womyn's Studies majors, not to mention attorneys who skipped class on the day they taught rape in crim law. It's a good thing, because in the end, Hirsh likens the situation to that with drunk driving; included in the "solutions" for that problem are

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.

 What possible analog exists for these among sexual assault? Chastity belts? Whatever it might be, there's no doubt that some idiot will propose it, and it will rush through the legislatures in California, Illinois, and New York with hosannas. At last! Sexual assault has been cured! Meanwhile, young men will find themselves spied upon and spat upon for no reason other than owning a penis. Misbehavior or even missed communications on a date will result in unpardonable ejection. That is, the answer to the title question is "no".

Scott Greenfield On The Lowest Common Dominatrix

Home run:

There is a key detail here, one that eludes reason and pervades belief: that true or false, it’s true.

Perhaps what made Lindin’s twit different is that she openly said what many knew but denied. This has been the case for years with Title IX. This was the case when women, after Jackie in the Rolling Stone/UVA story, after the Mattress Girl melodrama, still argued in support of their victims. That these claims were false was of no consequence. They were true as long as women chose to believe they were true.

We are at a crossroads. Soon enough, this will become apparent, but it will take some more time before the cowed and fearful come to the only conclusion possible. There is no tenable way to allow this game to be played, whether in work, in school, on the streets or in the home, without committing yourself, you family, your future to potential doom.

You did nothing wrong? Great. You lose anyway. Explain to your friends, your spouse, your children that you aren’t a rapist, but they still won’t have food on their plate, shoes on their feet, because your job, your reputation, the future you spent your life building, was wrongfully taken from you because women are victims and should be entitled to their “truth” despite your innocence.

Sunday Bullets

• From the increasingly indispensable Quillette: Marta Iglesias on "Why Feminists Must Understand Evolution". Excerpt:
  

  The fact that men and women are different ... does not preclude feminists from striving for completely equal rights between the sexes. However, it is important to understand how things really are if we are to try to modify them ...

  But some feminists would prefer to doubt the applicability of evolutionary biology to the human species. They believe that equality of behaviour in the sexes would exist in nature, but culture generates our inter-sexual differences (for examples see Chapter 1 in A Mind of Her Own).^{19 20} Apparently, contradicting this line of thought means that one is adopting a ‘biological determinist’ position....

• Also from Quillette: Lexa Frankl on "Why I'm Uneasy With The #metoo Movement". Frankl opens with a discussion of a one-night-stand gone bad; the sex wax consensual, but after a night of heavy drinking, and ended with her contracting herpes simplex type 2.

  Then she asked if the intercourse had been consensual. Had I verbally consented to sex, I wondered? The answer was a resounding no. Perhaps I had been too drunk to give meaningful consent, and what had seemed consensual at the time was in fact something more sinister – predatory opportunism or even assault. For a moment, I found myself tempted by an escape into victimhood. Certainly, the emotional burden would be easier to bear if the fault could be projected elsewhere.
  
  But, try as I might, I could not persuade myself that this was a good faith account of what had actually happened. Self-examination forced me to acknowledge that both my partner and I shared responsibility for the events of that night, and that martyrdom would be a cowardly and dishonest excuse for my own poor judgment.

  She goes from there to the kinds of trite and pointless advice handed out by so many sexual assault victim agencies:

  Feminist and activist sites set up to counsel and advise victims of sexual assault seemed perversely determined to convince me that I had in fact been assaulted, and sternly warned against any assumption of personal responsibility which they invariably describe as “victim-blaming.” Instead, they offered trite slogans such as “Drinking is not a crime – rape is” and “Don’t tell your daughter not to go out, tell your son to behave properly” and “Teach men to respect women.”

  It's significant that there are no countries free of rape anywhere on the globe. If the right culture were all it took to end the crime, it has long ago failed, and in all places. Moving on, she notes the problems with feminist objections to self-responsibility:

  I might refuse to wear a seatbelt on the basis that I am particularly fastidious about road safety. But if another less cautious driver were to drive his vehicle into mine, most reasonable people would accept that I bear responsibility for any injuries I would not have sustained had I taken the sensible precaution of wearing a safety belt.
  
  ...
  
  In neither circumstance does “Don’t tell me to wear a safety belt, tell others to drive carefully” or “Don’t tell children not to talk to strangers, tell strangers not to abduct children” sound remotely like sensible or wise advice. We recognise that, as adults and moral agents, we have a duty to look after own well-being and the well-being of dependents who cannot look out for themselves.

  This ultimately is the problem with all demands to "teach men not to rape": it is a demand for a utopia. It is not terribly satisfying to those who actually have suffered such attacks, but that will not change the likelihood of its existing. Male sexual impulses are the residue of millennia of evolution; they will not (lightly) yield to exhortation.
  
  She has other salient points:
  • "[R]evealing attire will attract the attention of the opposite sex, and that it is designed and (usually) worn for precisely this purpose."
  • "To notice that certain behaviors predictably increase a person’s vulnerability is so obvious as to be banal. But any attempt to ask women to acknowledge the associated risks is routinely described as ‘rape apologism.’"
  • "[I]t is precisely because the behaviour of others lies beyond my control that I must remain responsible for taking precautions in the interest of self-protection."
• Campus rape tribunals hand down so many guilty verdicts because they are trained to do so.
• Conor Friedersdorf thinks more Christian dialogue about sex needs to start with the Golden Rule.
• Interesting chapter about academic sociology political bias. About a third of those involved in a survey (n=335) reject the idea that evolution has left any fingerprints on the human brain and behavior. (Von Hippel, W., and Buss, D.M., 2017, "Do Ideologically Driven Scientific Agendas Impede The Understanding And Acceptance Of Evolutionary Principles In Social Psychology?", The Politics Of Social Psychology, New York: Psychology Press.)
• Pretty good essay from a female Silicon Valley startup founder about sex in that place. Excerpt:

  I knew being hot got me in the door and that after that I had to make that work for me. Culturally, we are taught as women that our main power is our looks and sexuality. Then it's a matter of what you do with it. Personally, I used the s--- out of it, and I was more successful than my male colleagues because of it.
  
  However, I had a hard line of not crossing a physical line with men I was actively doing deals with, and I kept that boundary well. And then, as I got more established, men didn't meet with me for my voice or for what I might be wearing. They met with me because they knew my name and because I knew things that they wanted to know.
  
  The meetings became more professional, and I didn't have to play the woman card anymore.

Betsy DeVos Rescinds "Dear Colleague" Letter Title IX Guidance

As you've probably heard by now, Betsy DeVos has rescinded the infamous "Dear Colleague" letter charging universities to investigate sexual assault cases. Unsurprisingly, California has passed a law retaining the old standard (SB 169 text),  and a number of universities will either defend the old standard or even adhere to it. The show ain't over, but it's a serious step in the right direction.

Friday Links

• In reaction to Betsy DeVos rescinding the "Dear Colleague" letter, 29 US Senators have signed a letter condemning this action. The Constitution still isn't popular.
• Ross Douthat has a decent reaction to Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay about race's role in the 2016 Presidential election, accusing Coates of attacking a straw man (emboldening mine):
  

  Certainly there are many Americans whose beliefs fit Coates’ description, who regard Trump’s racial vision as basically benign if occasionally insensitive, who think he’s an unjust victim of the liberal media’s race card, and so forth. These Americans are Trump supporters, for the most part, plus a smattering of left-wing gadflies and other contrarians. But Coates is very clearly not arguing with Fox-watching Trump supporters in his essay: His piece quotes and critiques anti-Trump conservatives and Democrats and liberals, not Sean Hannity or his epigones, and his examples of the supposed “race is incidental” consensus are figures like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, Mark Lilla and my colleague Nick Kristof, Charles Murray and Anthony Bourdain. His great complaint is not that Trump backers deny their own racist impulses, in other words, but that the “collective” of Trump opponents barely acknowledge the role of race and racism in his rise.

  Douthat repeats the same error that marred Coates' essay, namely, its refusal to look at anything resembling polling data, but it still represents a step up from that "caricature" in that it seeks to understand individuals who might have voted for Trump for reasons wholly (or even mostly) divided from racism or sexism.
• One potentially underreported cause of anti-Clinton sentiment: military voters (or people with family members in the military). Glenn Greenwald sets out a case (not as strong as he thinks) for a significant stream of such people making a difference in November:
  

  A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.
  

  
  

  Titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?,” the paper rests on the premise that these wars have exclusively burdened a small but politically important group of voters — military families — and that “in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America.” Particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states that Clinton lost — “there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” Examining the data, the paper concludes that “inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election.”

• Why does Hillary Clinton think comparisons to Cersei Lannister is a good idea?
• Anita Sarkeesian's censorious tendencies perhaps have a limit.  
• Amber Tamblyn apparently has a long-ago beef with actor James Woods, who tried to pick her up as a teenager. She writes an open letter to Woods (who disputed the charges on Twitter) in the pages of Teen Vogue, and wishes for a world in which women's charges would just stick regardless of corroborating evidence or testimony:
  

  The saddest part of this story doesn't even concern me but concerns the universal woman's story. The nation's harmful narrative of disbelieving women first, above all else. Asking them to first corroborate or first give proof or first make sure we're not misremembering or first consider the consequences of speaking out or first let men give their side or first just let your sanity come last.

  Because false accusations never happen? Because memory is selective and frequently faulty? This coming from a political magazine in heels is par for the course, but it points at a dystopia.
• Update 2017-09-16: Okay, so no longer Friday, but too lazy to open a new post. Here's Jason D. Hill in Commentary responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent essay:

  In the 32 years I have lived in this great country, I have never once actively fought racism. I have simply used my own example as evidence of its utter stupidity and moved forward with absolute metaphysical confidence, knowing that the ability of other people to name or label me has no power over my self-esteem, my mind, my judgment, and—above all—my capacity to liberate myself through my own efforts.
  
  On this matter, you have done your son—to whom you address your book—an injustice. You write: “The fact of history is that black people have not—probably no people ever have—liberated themselves strictly by their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hands of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods.”
  
  I do not believe you intended to mislead your son, but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it. In your misreading of America, you’ve communicated precisely why many blacks in this country have been alienated from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities. The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. ...

Betsy DeVos Declares An End to Weaponized Title IX Persecutions

The show isn't over,  and you get the distinct sense that political haymakers like Kirstin Gillibrand will fight this in the courts and elsewhere. The New York Times' story on the announcement contained a passage that is positively Orwellian in its revision of history (as ever, emboldening mine):

How to enforce Title IX, the 1972 law requiring schools to protect students from rape and sexual assault, is one of Ms. DeVos’s most difficult policy tasks, and her department has been under fire for comments made this week by Candice Jackson, who leads its Office for Civil Rights.

This is of course a fiction manufactured for public consumption that simply did not exist prior to the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter. As the Reason story points out,

The problems with the Obama-era Title IX guidance are essentially threefold. First, it isn't obvious that Title IX—a one-sentence statute—could or should be read as having anything to do with violent crimes.

Secondly, the guidance raises constitutional questions, since it appears to many civil libertarians that a federal agency was instructing public institutions to violate the due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment. ...

Finally, since the guidance is legally dicey, it led to lawsuits left and right. Many students who were found responsible for sexual misconduct under the new guidelines have filed suit against their universities, and a nontrivial number of them have prevailed in court.

Emily Yoffe in The Atlantic has a well-timed story on the state of Title IX which hints at the problems to come: "Many college administrators have said they will not alter the adjudication policies now enshrined on their campus even if recent federal guidelines are rescinded; capacious campus bureaucracies that were created at the behest of Obama’s OCR are likely to resist change." The bureaucracy is its own constituency. People for whom "justice" is merely a matter of collecting sufficient scalps are unlikely to stop the head-carving just because they were told to. Defunding needs to happen, and soon.

Update 8:44 PM CDT: I had forgotten this exceptional tweetstorm from Walter Olson:

With @BetsyDeVosED today unveiling plans to revamp Obama rules on sexual assault and college discipline, here's a long tweetstorm... /1

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) September 8, 2017

Rolling Stone Loses The Nicole Eramo Defamation Lawsuit

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone, and its publisher are all liable for defamation, which is not surprising because

Rolling Stone edited out information favorable to Eramo. The dean had tried to get Jackie to go to the police, but the final draft of the story made it seem as if Eramo was no more in favor of that then, say, an informal resolution.

It takes a certain amount of navel-gazing power to say this:

When Wenner testified, he said he wished the magazine hadn't issued a full retraction to the article, apologized to Eramo, but said that he had "suffered as much as" she had.

Molly Hemingway in The Federalist:

Erdely smeared someone and failed to do obvious due diligence with her sources. At every step of the fact-checking process, the magazine failed. The publication didn’t just fail to do its job, its staff didn’t seem to want to, putting a blockbuster story over basic journalism practices.

One key factor in the verdict, according to the jury, was the magazine’s delayed retraction and its decision to keep the article online with an editor’s note.

Further, this was not some one-off mistake but part of a pattern of the politically driven narrative journalism genre the magazine has paid Erdely and countless other reporters to do for decades.

I remain skeptical that anyone there has learned anything.

Self-Parodist Attacks U. Chicago "Safe Spaces" Letter, Pratfalls

Vox has a new essay by Kevin Gannon about that mean old letter from the University of Chicago from Dean of Students Jay Ellison rejecting outright "safe spaces" and other shibboleths adopted elsewhere in the country by other universities. "Safe spaces" and no-platforming being the opposite of free inquiry and free speech, they comprise a prima facie antithesis of what the university stands for. Gannon comes to tell us they are all wrong. This is really a power trip, you see:

I’ve been teaching on the college level for 18 years, and I also direct my university’s Teaching and Learning Center, so I’ve been following the debate over "trigger warnings," "safe spaces," and the purported scourge of "political correctness" for quite a while. Despite the apocalyptic tone that often accompanies screeds against supposedly coddled students and their trigger-free safe spaces, the issues involved strike me as far more complicated than the overheated rhetoric suggests.

As with any conversation about teaching and learning, context and nuance matter greatly — but they’re not present in most of the critics’ attempted takedowns of trigger warnings (better called "content advisories," in my estimation) or safe spaces.

"Nuance", of course, has nothing to do with shouting down or outright censoring dissenting views, thanks to Title IX rules engineered to suppress anything that stresses students. The man pays lip service to academic freedom (emboldening mine)...

Academic freedom is the sine qua non of higher education. Students ought to be challenged, even made uncomfortable, in order to learn in deep and meaningful ways. And, of course, collegiate education is where students must encounter perspectives different from their own. No one who genuinely believes in higher education is going to dispute any of that. And that’s what this dean and the anti-trigger-warnings, no-safe-spaces crowd are counting on — that the surface veneer of reasonableness in these admonitions to the class of 2020 will obscure the rotten pedagogy and logical fallacies that infest this entire screed.

... but then proceeds to show he lacks even the slightest grasp of what logical fallacies might actually look like — because his essay is shot through with them. Indeed, it's a stew of politically-minded cant, name-calling in service of academic intellectual rigor mortis. Stealing from Facebook friend Pat Kambhampati, a few particulars, with additional editing and annotations of my own:

1. Question the messenger instead of the message.

   Even the timing of this missive raises questions. Why go full blast against this purported scourge of wimpy, touchy-feely educational malpractice right up front? Is there a safe-spaces petition percolating in the ranks of the first-years? Are the dean and the university worried that people will lose respect for the almighty maroon if they didn’t stake out the tough-guy intellectual turf from the beginning? Did they sit around and ask themselves what Milton Friedman would have done?

2. Dismiss the arguments because the other person lacks the correct Lived Experience.

   The greatest threat to genuine academic freedom comes from within. Coddled students who are used to getting trophies for everything don’t want to engage with stuff they don’t like, so they wrap themselves in entitlement and demand trigger warnings to protect their feelz. Or they want safe spaces to hide from the big, bad world. Or they want the university to cancel a lecture because the speaker is from the wrong demographic. And if universities don’t make a stand against this foolishness, Western Civilization itself will collapse.
   
   That’s a comforting narrative to the academic elite who feel like they’re faced with an existential crisis. Rather than seeing themselves as clinging to the last vestiges of the 1950s, they get to paint themselves as staunch advocates of all that is good and worthy. And there’s an audience for this fiction — people still read Allan Bloom. But as critiques of inequality have shown time and again, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

   What this really amounts to is a total failure to address the arguments raised by the U. Chicago letter. Gannon here claims that so long as you're the right aggrieved group, it's perfectly acceptable to demand protection from foreign or even hostile ideas. Is the point of the university to teach critical thinking skills, or orthodoxy? Gannon knows which side he falls on.
3. Claim empathy for one group of people. Then any attacks are attacks upon a special group of people.

   If I’m teaching historical material that describes war crimes like mass rape, shouldn’t I disclose to my students what awaits them in these texts? If I have a student suffering from trauma due to a prior sexual assault, isn’t a timely caution the empathetic and humane thing for me to do?

   Sure, if the point is to infantilize them.
4. Donald Trump is the reason we can't have nice things:

   Sure, Charles Murray has a right to his views. But is it okay for us to use student fees paid in part by African-American students to bring him to campus, fête him, and give him a rostrum to tell those students they’re doomed by genetics to be inferior to whites? Well, he makes a strong argument and isn’t bound by conventional "niceties." Yes, that’s true. But that’s also the reason people claim to like Donald Trump, and I don’t see universities lining up to bring him in as a guest lecturer.

5. Because, virtue signaling:

   As a faculty member, I would be enormously dismayed if my dean sent this letter to my incoming students. Because now they’ll come into my class already having received a clear message about what my institution seems to value — and it isn’t them.
   
   The Chicago letter reeks of arrogance, of a sense of entitlement, of an exclusionary mindset — in other words, the very things it seeks to inveigh against. It’s not about academic freedom; it’s about power. Know your place, and acknowledge ours, it tells the students. We’ll be the judge of what you need to know and how you need to know it. And professors and students are thus handcuffed to a high-stakes ideological creed. Do it this way, in the name of all that is holy and true in the academy. There is no room here for empathy, for student agency, or for faculty discretion.

   Yes, the "entitlement" is, demanding faculty and students have or develop some grownup resilience instead of acting like spoiled children. What Gannon risibly mocks as "Do it this way" means, be willing to consider and even adopt new ideas, or even those you may find repulsive for whatever reason.
6. You misspelled "enraged":

   Ableism, misogyny, racism, elitism, and intellectual sloppiness deserve to be called out. That’s not a threat, that’s our students doing what they’re supposed to as engaged citizens of an academic community.

   Again, so long as you're one of the right complainers, censorship and ideological blinders are just dandy.

Summarizing, it strikes me likely that someone like Gannon hasn't gone through the full Laura Kipnis treatment, which is why he's so strident. He appears to me to be pretty young; give it time.

The Bureaucracy Is Its Own Constituency

A friend recently pointed me at Conor Friedersdorf's late essay in The Atlantic entitled "How Americans Became So Sensitive To Harm". The world of microaggressions, we are to understand, is the consequence of "concept creep", according to University of Melbourne, Australia's Nick Haslam. "Writing in 1993, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senior senator for New York, alliterated that his country was 'defining deviancy down.' Moynihan argued that in response to rising crime and social disorder in the 1970s and 1980s, the public increasingly normalized behavior that would once have been seen as pathological. ... To Moynihan (1993), the social and political implications of these developments were troubling. By coming to accept crime and family breakdown, he argued, people were “getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us” (p. 30)."

There is nothing inevitable about the progressive expansion of normality that Moynihan documented. Indeed, I argue that in recent decades the opposite process has unfolded: The definition of some forms of deviance has enlarged and normality has contracted. Psychology has played a significant role in this process, as many of the concepts it employs to make sense of undesirable forms of experience and behavior have extended their meanings, encroaching on phenomena that would once have been seen as unremarkable. Moreover, although Moynihan argued that liberals resist attempts to pathologize deviance, psychology's expansionary redefinition of negative phenomena arguably reflects a liberal social agenda. Instead of defining deviancy down, psychology has ubiquitized it up.

(Emboldening mine, as usual.) Clumsy neologisms notwithstanding, he has a point; everything's a problem nowadays. Unfortunately, Friedersdorf has seized on the wrong question and emitted one of his rare clanks. The nonsense writers behind the scientistic Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders have power to sway members of their own cult, but not the broad public so much. More general acceptance must come from other streams. Here, I confess to having no solid evidence, but it seems to me several factors act in concert: the rise of what Thomas Szasz called the "therapeutic state", the dramatic increase in single-child families (and much smaller families more generally), and maybe most importantly, the need for bureaucracies to find something to do.

Friedersdorf comes pretty close to acknowledging this latter with an extended quote of Jonathan Haidt:

“If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,” he writes. “We can expect academic concepts to ‘creep’ in ways that increase the number of victims and the damages those victims suffer, and in ways that make it ever harder for anyone to defend themselves against ugly moral charges. Such politically motivated scholarship may sometimes originate in humanities departments rather than in psychology, but it draws heavily on psychological concepts and research, and it feeds back into the six streams of creeping psychological research that Haslam reviewed.”

All of which is to say, the bureaucracy is its own constituency. Arbitrating ever more picayune matters means there will be no shortage of jobs, of new powers, of money, and subordinates. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights inquisition into Laura Kipnis' essay about instructors dating students illustrates exactly how this works:

1. Write a euphemism-laden memo to underlings about the New Hurt one wishes to prosecute as a crime.
2. Since butthurt is in infinite supply, find a "victim", preferably one willing to make anonymous accusations. This should not be hard.
3. Profit!

 People decry the profit motive in the marketplace, but have a remarkable blind spot to it in the bureaucracy. Title IX enforcement in this sense is just another form of policing for profit, albeit one with an indirect shakedown.

Freddie deBoer Shows Us Why The Passive Voice Sucks

Fredrik deBoer writes in the NYT about the supposed "corporate taming of the American college" thanks to a "corporatism" he claims is responsible for the pussification of the modern university, the enormous expansion of its administrative staff, i.e. many of its current ills. I want to take on one of the specific claims here regarding Title IX. Discussing the Laura Kipnis case, he writes

The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries. In this way, it becomes an instrument of power, not of the powerless. And because the law compels the self-protective, legalistic wings of universities to grind into gear, for fear of liability and bad publicity, invocations of Title IX frequently wrest control of the process and the narrative from student activists themselves, handing it to bureaucrats, whether governmental or institutional.

"[I]t can be misused"! Really, Freddie? And who do you think instigated that in Laura Kipnis' instance? From his own description earlier,

...[S]tudents held a protest, some of them carrying mattresses, calling for formal censure of Kipnis. Worse, multiple Title IX complaints were filed against Kipnis, claiming that her essay had created a ‘‘chilling effect’’ that prevented students from feeling safe to pursue claims of sexual harassment or abuse.

So, yes, Freddie, that would be students, not some feckless administrators, who made a stink, and the administration reacting to specious claims of harm, thanks to an insane diktat that Title IX means no one should ever feel "threatened". These students — and their demands — didn't arise ex nihilo, and used a weapon derived from the same political process that feeds administrative bloat. Big government becomes its own constituency, and its prime agenda is expanding its own authority and resources, and suppressing opposition.

Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.

This inverts causality and sidesteps volition and agency. If you give someone a tool, it will get used. Title IX, like all bureaucratic bludgeons, has undergone epic mission creep, to the point now that it encompasses censorship as a means to supposedly promote "equality". deBoer can't quite bring himself to observe that the administration's behavior is both predictable and bureaucratic; instead, he reaches for the worst epithet he can think of, "corporate". Considerations of how we got to this point bear no examination, apparently.

The Rise Of "Commercial Feminism"

I've written damned near nothing about #GamerGate, with the justification that it's one of those culture war thingies that makes you always wrong no matter what side you take:

(Cathy Young's short course at Reason, the best there is on the subject, is worth reading, but even that makes my head spin.) But I read something today that came across my transom on Twitter via Ms. Young by one Chihiro Onitsuka at VGChartz entitled "Journalism Is Dead" providing an unusual perspective on the matter. Armored as she is against the charge of owning a penis, her interactions with various media outlets is telling:

As I am myself a woman in the games industry - one that has worked on a number of major blockbuster titles - I have been approached a number of times from news outlets such as the BBC and several US news stations requesting an interview, and each and every time this has happened I have been asked various questions about my experiences in the industry and "what I think about how Anita has been treated", and each and every time when I have made my opinions clear, the desire to interview me moves swiftly from wanting to nail down a specific day and time to conduct it to "thanks for your time, we'll be in touch", which is seemingly journalist lingo for "you don't have the right opinions we want to share, bye".

Onitsuka has a sharp take on the cultural reasons for the hostility of so-called "gaming journalism" sites covering that beat (Kotaku, TechCrunch, Polygon, even to some degree Ars Technica, etc.) to their purported audience versus that of the actual game publishers: it all comes down to dollars.

To developers and publishers, gamers are potential customers and something they need in order to stay in business, The gaming media, on the other hand, sees gamers as a commodity; a page impression and potential advertising click, and thus a revenue stream. By acting as the aggressor the resulting argument draws in both gamers and social warriors for a grand battle, all the while they stand back and watch with glee as their views and ad revenue both increase.

It's a cynical approach, but expanding the audience to taking the side of people who are in fact hostile to your nominal audience makes good business sense. I just can't think of a single place elsewhere this has been tried; imagine Daily Kos running essays favoring Donald Trump or Jeb Bush while decrying the state of the Democratic Party.  Onitsuka then turns her guns to Anita Sarkeesian and the gaming press that plays along with her; she claims (without linking to) Polygon's 5/10 rating for Mad Max was entirely due to political considerations, i.e. it contained scantily clad women, one of Sarkeesian's perpetual bugaboos. (In fairness, Philip Kollar does cite that consideration ["The closest thing Mad Max has to a female lead... is a concubine for the villain and a love interest for Max"], but other reviewers have been similarly harsh on the game and for reasons of tedious game play, e.g. Chris Suellentrop in Kotaku.)

To her credit, Onitsuka waded into the residual Twitter wars still lingering, and found label-based argumentation is bullshit, per usual, and on both sides, but then she dropped a phrase I hope will have real staying power:

All of this, combined with the lust for being in the news, on the news, and at the center of news reports themselves, has led me to coin this approach to "feminism" as "Commercial feminism", where the plight of feminism and equality is exploited for commercial gain.

She's on to something. Whether Title IX "rape" adjudication (which seeks ever more picayune dating fiascoes to police) or Anita Sarkeesian and her shrill, ceaseless criticisms of others' efforts that has remarkable staying power as a business model — both are parasitic attempts to garner sinecures atop or adjacent to others' work. Both are best thought of as jobs programs for their advocates, fueled by a shift to a victimhood culture that can only end badly. Predictably with both, the size of the offenses diminish over time; as Jonathan Haidt observes,

... [A]s progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.

This ability to turn even the tiniest of faults into epic screechfests means Sarkeesian will be in the green for a good long while; patriarchy means never having to examine your first principles.

"De Minimus Non Curat Lex, Bro": Scott Greenfield On Campus Rape Tribunals

A great piece from Scott Greenfield on the subject of rape court grand inquisitors:

In a twit, K.C. Johnson pulled out a bit from lawprof Paul Gowder’s comment to Tamara Lave’s post at PrawfsBlawg that looks, well, just horribly bad.

Honestly, I’m not even sure why we need an adversary process at all. In light of the fact that the fundamental purpose of such process is to exclude individuals who prey on these closed communities, it seems reasonable as a first-pass to me to have an inquisitorial process in which accusations are investigated by neutral trained professional staff, and then action is taken based on an overall conclusion as to the impact that that student’s presence would have on the learning environment.

Posted by: Paul Gowder | Sep 3, 2015 12:49:05 PM

The notion of an “inquisitor” has a bad rap, harkening back to the Spanish Inquisition, though in other countries, the inquisitorial system is the norm and, if done properly, isn’t such a terrible thing. By “done properly,” I mean that the inquisitor is truly a “neutral trained” person.

Gowder’s idea sounds horrible for two reasons, the first being that he contorts the purpose by saying “[I]n light of the fact that the fundamental purpose of such process is to exclude individuals who prey on these closed communities.” That’s one of those “begging the question” assertions, since no one knows whether the accused “preys” on anyone until after it has been determined that a wrong has occurred and the accused is the person who committed the wrong.

But worse, Gowder conflates the harm envisioned by our imaginings of dangerous rapists with the reality of what colleges call sexual assault. Assuming Gowder’s right, then most of the accused shouldn’t be subject to inquisition because their conduct has nothing to do with preying on anyone.  Claims of consensual sex with, say, post-hoc regret, or a beer and a claim of intoxication, don’t fit his “preying” fact, so nothing to see here, everybody go home.

The other part of his inquisitorial notion is that, as a “first pass,” with the next pass inclusive of appropriate due process protections, it should vet the bad claims out if the inquisitor was, indeed, neutral and trained. The problem is that they are trained, but trained to condemn, rationalize common excuses for evidentiary lapses, see rape and sexual assault in every contact, and believe the accuser no matter what. That ain’t exactly neutral.

No, it's not. The parallel manufacture of kangaroo courts for rape cases on campus is a disaster for due process and the men who suffer under such broad definitions. As Greenfield says, "You’re a survivor of an attempt to hold your hand? That’s what it’s come to, what these researchers intend to include to prove their desired outcomes?" 

Mandatory University Of Kentucky Study Finds Vastly Lower Sexual Assault Numbers

It shouldn't be surprising that a mandatory University of Kentucky survey (more than 24,000 respondents) found a mere five percent of students had been sexually assaulted over the course of the last year. Even that's probably overstating things, given the frequent, intentional conflation of "rape" (forcible penetration) and "sexual assault", which has a vastly broader (and frequently, non-criminal) definition:

Regarding sexual violence specifically, students were asked about “unwanted sexual experiences” in the past year. These experiences were defined using federal reporting criteria, and included incapacitation due to alcohol or drugs (whether voluntarily taken or slipped into a drink), threats of harm, physical force, as well as escaping from attempts to force sex. Based on these measures, 4.9 percent of UK students reported experiences of sexual assault.

But, as The College Fix observes, it does not count "unwanted kissing or sexual touching", a principle feature of other surveys, which unsurprisingly garner much higher and invariant numbers over time. This won't gain traction among those pushing the "college rape crisis" myth, but it should prove ample ammunition anywhere else.

Janet Napolitano's Corrosive Due Process Whitewash

The Los Angeles Times has an an article about sexual assault on campus that, for once, isn't a stenographic reproduction of the campus rape industry lunatics. Focusing on the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the interesting part is remarks from Janet Napolitano, University of California president:

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former prosecutor and secretary of Homeland Security, warned in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review published online this month that "a cottage industry is being created" on campuses dedicated to handling tasks that fall outside the expertise of colleges and universities

"Rather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system," she said, policymakers should ask if "more work should be done to improve that system’s handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases."

Unfortunately, Napolitano's essay at Yale Law & Policy Review (PDF) tries hard to thread the political needle of rape hysteria while at least appearing to give the accused their due. She makes the claim, which real civil rights advocates would reject, that "universities are well positioned to undertake the necessary education and research, and prevention and response actions, that leadership in this area will require." She further endorses the silly and wholly impractical "yes means yes" standard:

Critics claimed, among other arguments, that affirmative consent standards are unfair to those accused of sexual violence. But UC’S policy language negates those claims‐ -- “consent is an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each par‐ticipant to engage in mutually agreed upon sexual activity.” The standard pro‐vides greater clarity for both partners than the previous “no means no” stand‐ard by requiring lucid, affirmative statements or actions at each step of a sexual encounter in order to ensure consent. Put simply, only yes means yes.

This is magical thinking that entirely elides the real problems of discerning consent in the absence of signed releases or actual video. As Cathy Young observed last year in Time,

One of the partners could start feeling ambivalent about an encounter after the fact and reinterpret it as coerced — especially after repeatedly hearing the message that only a clear “yes” constitutes real consent. In essence, advocates of affirmative consent are admitting that they’re not sure what constitutes a violation; they are asking people to trust that the system won’t be abused. This is not how the rule of law works.

In other words, there's no means to ascertain whether consent actually occurred. This recently came up in a case at Washington & Lee University, in which a girl declared she had been raped after seeing her boyfriend kiss another girl; rape charges were filed long after their sexual encounters. If anything, this is a setup for a mammoth expansion of the bureaucracy and a micromanaging of students' personal affairs.

Viewed strictly as a bureaucratic turf battle (i.e. mission creep), this makes sense, but it's clear it serves no other end. Napolitano created a new "task force" with broad mandates and lofty mission statements, but no specifics with regards to protecting the rights of the accused. It's larded with boilerplate language from the rape crisis hysterics, with accusors dubbed "brave student survivors" with all the forthright hyperbole one expects in praise for fourth graders. If Napolitano has come out, timidly, late, and not especially forthrightly for principles of justice, whatever positives may arise there are washed away by her collusion with the OCR and its corrosive contempt for due process.

A Ray Of Light: Tennessee Federal Judge Rules Affirmative Consent Unconstitutional

I'm mildly skeptical of the PR origins of this piece, so waiting nervously for confirmation that a Tennessee Federal judge ruled affirmative consent is unconstitutional.

The Tennessee court held that it was unconstitutional for the University, under its "yes means yes" standard, to require the male student to establish his own innocence with proof that consent had been given, rather than putting the burden of proof on the accuser or the University as is always the case in both criminal and civil proceedings.

"If both students were too drunk to even remember if intercourse occurred, much less the circumstances under which it happened, it is obviously fundamentally unfair to require only one student but not the other to prove that there was consent," argued Banzhaf.

I'll keep an eye out for updates on this one, but tentatively good news.

Related: from a few days ago, another Ashe Schow piece about a Virginia judge permitting a John Doe case involving Washington & Lee University asserting gender bias to proceed.

When she returned to campus in the fall, Jane [Doe] claimed on a study abroad application that she had been sexually assaulted. She also attended a presentation by W&L's Title IX officer Lauren Kozak. Kozak claimed that "regret equals rape," and introduced the concept as a new idea people were now supporting.

 Update 8/11/2016:  Here's the entire ruling of Mock v. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (PDF). Also, Scott Greenfield has an excellent, must-read post on the case.

What distinguished the old school definition of rape was a clear line that assured that a person would know when conduct was wrongful.  This line isn’t just a reasonable basis to hold a person accountable, but constitutionally necessary to give a person fair notice that he crossed over from lawful to unlawful conduct.

Under affirmative consent, both in its written prohibition and in its practical application, there is no line that the person engaging in the conduct can discern.  The line ends up being wherever the other person feels it should be, whether at the time or at any time afterward. Even if males can read minds (they can’t, and neither can you), it wouldn’t enable them to know where the line is, as minds that change days, weeks, months later can’t be read at the initiation of sex.

The Star Chamber Jurist Resigns

I've seen this Inside Higher Ed piece by Lee Burdette Williams a couple places on Twitter (via @Instapundit, for one), and people seem to be mostly focusing on Williams' turn away from Title IX and its perversion into a sort of all-purpose stockade with which to shame and expel young men from college. Her concluding graf contains the words

When I realized I didn’t want to be Dean of Sexual Assault, I decided to step away from a profession and identity I had treasured. When it became clear to me that being Dean of All Students was no longer possible without the constant threat of litigation, media coverage and Internet trolls, I thought it best to be dean of none.

Good for her, I guess; but a few paragraphs above, she writes

...[O]ur work is the subject of bloggers and activists who are so driven by agendas that they cannot consider an alternative viewpoint. Our efforts to serve our campuses are being pushed aside by the cottage industry of “consultants” and lawyers who prey on the fear of presidents and boards, worried that their institution will be the next one featured in The New York Times.

Did we need to be challenged about sexual assault response? Yes, and we were, and we worked hard to improve.

There's several important points here that need emphasis.

1. It is not possible to use the bludgeon of the state to equitably resolve dating disputes. There used to be a principle in law, decreasingly adhered to nowadays, called de minimis non curat lex, i.e. the law does not concern itself with trifles. Yet feminist advocates consistently attempt to do so through inflation of all such matters into rape, particularly retroactively. (Emma Sulkowicz is a prime example, filing her report with the university months after the incident in which she claims she was raped.)
2. The author does not realize she has been inserted into a no-win situation. That is to say, confronted with a Hobson's choice scenario, she fails to recognize it as such and ultimately leaves the game. That's certainly a positive step, but it's also the reaction of a dull-witted bureaucrat. By defending her own role in "sexual assault response", she lays a trap for herself from which she cannot escape.
3. She objects to even the idea of public scrutiny. Read, for example, her remarks about what she conceives her job to be:

   Our work goes on behind closed doors where the hearts of students are laid bare and need to be repaired, or in campus forums where our students get to question our decisions and we can defend them, or change them. These things happen in the context of community, and that is what provides meaning and validity. That is how change, and improvement, occur.

   In other words, she and her cohorts should be able to do whatever they think their jobs are in total secrecy, or in settings in which she is shielded from consequences! (How much ability to change policy do students actually have, the "community" of which she speaks?) In this administrator-as-mommy view, is there any accountability? What value does she actually bring to the students, male and female, she supposedly works for?

State bureaucracies encourage timorousness, empire building, and, above all, secrecy. I appreciate her leaving her post because she felt demonized by the feminist mob needing a target for their pitchforks, but the reality is that same secrecy she lauds also delivered unto us the "Dear Colleague" letter. Process matters. It's clear she doesn't understand why.