America’s New Sex Bureaucracy

Yes, and TFA also quotes this from her:

> "Lots of people disagree about where to draw the line. But most people would want to draw a line so there is such a thing as consensual sex."

Also this amazing quote from some activist:

> As Catharine Mackinnon, the progenitor of the school of feminism from which this movement proceeds, once put it, "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated."

So basically, there is no sex (no matter how consensual it seems) that might not, at some indefinite future time, become rape.

So damn, if I were a college student, I wouldn't be having any sex. Maybe just with other guys. Or maybe just porn.

Leaving aside the hot-button topic of sexual assault, there are plenty of sub-criminal or borderline actions that can occur that the college needs to deal with. Not all violations of a code of conduct are criminal violations. They'd much rather "sentence" an underage drinker to an alcohol education session than have all such students arrested. A lot of this is mission-driven: Schools honestly believe their role is to turn some of these types of things into a learning experience.

Now, you might disagree with this approach to any/all of the above, but this is the reason that answers your question.

Source: I work in higher ed technology, at times very closely with some of the disciplinary groups.

This is much less irrelevant to HN's core purpose than the plethora of other random articles that can be found at any given time.

Personally, I fail to see how the article was inflammatory. The author clearly took pains to avoid demonizing either side of the discussion that was being highlighted, something which is markedly rarer in the current day and age.

I think it's pretty clear that Title IX courts could do a much better job of protecting the due process rights of the accused. I think it's possible to take a nuanced position that advocates for better due process rights while still fundamentally respecting the advances we've made in protecting the interests of women and other underrepresented groups.

...but without that last part, the position I just outlined sounds very much like that of conservatives opposed to the whole program of social reform. The author of this article gives the game away in his concluding paragraphs where he throws the term "social justice" into scare quotes. He has a bigger agenda than just protecting the due process rights of college students. And (even assuming the facts are exactly as he portrays them) I'm not surprised that the professors described in the article got such a frosty reception to their position - it's a difficult one to describe without coming off as another stealth reactionary.

How would bias toward gay people fit in with that? A lot of people don't know (or at least aren't aware that they know) anyone gay, but bias toward gay people has dramatically fallen over the last couple of decades.

There was a recent episode of "Hidden Brain" on NPR that talked about this [1].

This part is particularly interesting:

> In a thought experiment, Mahzarin and her colleagues have extended the trend lines of the data to see how long it would take for bias to be entirely eliminated. To be clear, this isn't a prediction about what is going to happen. It just shows you the speed at which different biases are changing.

What they found is that this would have anti-gay bias all but eliminated in 9 more years. By contrast, it's about 60 more years for anti-black biases to be eliminated, 140 years for skin tone biases against darker skin to go away. Biases against the elderly and the disabled and the overweight do not go away within the next 150 years.

Most families include the elderly and the overweight, so the idea that familiarity breeds acceptance would predict that those biases should be going away quicker than biases against gays.

(To reiterate, the timeframes aren't predictions of what will happen. They are just comparisons of the rates that those biases are changing right now).

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709567750/radically-normal-ho...