War on sex or just colleges gone crazy?

Story here. Another story on lowered college standards for finding male students guilty of sexual harassment. Excerpt:

'What allowed Adler to extract herself from this absurd charge of sexual harassment was her status as a faculty member with the shields of tenure and academic freedom to protect her. Ponder for a moment, though, that, without those formidable defenses, she might have ended up like many college students today who find themselves thrown under the bus by their University's Offices of Sexual Harassment with no due process and no chance for redress.

Take for example Joshua Strange at Auburn University who in 2011 was accused by a girlfriend of forcing himself upon her. However, the alleged incident had occurred after they had been dating for several months and she didn't make a formal accusation until after their acrimonious breakup months later. Strange was fully cleared through the legal system -- the accuser never even showed up in court. Even so, Auburn kicked him out of the university and will arrest him for setting foot on campus again.

How did that happen? Like CU, Auburn conducts "trials" of sexual harassment in secret without rules, procedures, nor accountability. However, in an audio recording of the Strange trial obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the lack of fair treatment and due process was frighteningly apparent. Standards of proof were arbitrarily changed and then summarily ignored. Strange's lawyers were forbidden to speak, much less question the accuser. No qualified legal experts were involved -- the committee was chaired by a librarian and included students, a staffer from the College of Liberal Arts and a fisheries professor. Strange got crushed.

There's a reason for this absurd level of paranoia about sexual harassment at American colleges. In April 2011, the Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights in the Obama administration, Russlynn Ali, threatened to withhold federal money from educational institutions that failed to take a hard line against sexual misconduct so that "all students feel safe in their school." Losing federal money is a death sentence to most universities, so they can't let that happen. Instead, it's much safer, not to mention easier, to find a student or faculty member guilty of sexual harassment regardless of the truth. Welcome to this new reality, Adler and Strange.

Make no mistake, sexual harassment happens and, when it does, people should be held accountable for their bad behavior. But, setting the bar so low that "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" gets people kicked out of college is a formula for unfairly ruining peoples' lives. And, that is exactly what is happening in American higher education today.'