Feminists Criticizing Campus Sexual Assault Rules

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last week, 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors signed a letter protesting the lack of due process in the school’s sexual assault adjudication procedures. This follows a similar letter, signed by 28 Harvard Law faculty. It comes, as well, on the heels of a series of important articles by prominent feminists that individually, and even more so in combination, mount a powerful critique from a liberal feminist perspective.
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But note also the steep asymmetry between the consequences of drinking and drug use for the complainant and for the respondent: for the former, intoxication is, to one degree or another, the basis for a per se finding of unwantedness even when assent — even when consent — has been given; but for the latter, it has no mitigating effect on his conduct. And now let us say that two Harvard students — one male, one female — have sex after drinking, using drugs, or both, that each of them feels intense remorse and moral horror about it afterward, and that they both rush the next morning to the Title IX Office with complaints. Let’s say they drop their complaints on the receptionist’s desk simultaneously. Which of them gets the benefit of the per se imputation of unwelcomeness, and which of them carries the heavy handicap of no mitigation? The woman and not the man? Both of them? Neither?
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There’s no agreement in these essays as to exactly what sorts of policies should be put in place of what currently exists. But it is hard to read them all and maintain the belief that the miscarriages of justice remain a rare or marginal problem in campus sexual assault adjudication. It is likewise hard to believe that these kinds of abuses can persist indefinitely without doing real damage to the systems they represent.

Klein has argued that even higher levels of stringency are necessary, because “It's those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.” I think it’s hard for that view to survive close contact with the actual workings of the system.'