Liberals Get Illiberal on Campus Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'Obviously, universities aren’t trampling due process because they hate due process. They’re doing it because they hate campus rape, of which there is (unlike terrorism, it should be said) an awful lot. For various reasons, including the long stalemate in Washington, the movement to confront campus rape has shot up the list of liberal priorities. One can detect in this movement an impatience with balancing risk against liberty that, in other contexts, would be readily recognizable as a tone of creeping illiberalism.
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"To work, "Yes Means Yes" needs to create a world where men are afraid. ...

Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that's necessary for the law's success. 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."

Read that passage again. He is not merely arguing that, to make an omelette, one must break some eggs. He is arguing for false convictions as a conscious strategy in order to strike fear into the innocent. This is a conception of justice totally removed from the liberal tradition.

Ezra Klein is not a nut; he is the polar opposite of one, which is what makes it so important that he is arguing in such expressly illiberal terms. Of course, campus justice need not contain all the safeguards of a criminal proceeding. But since they are a quasi-judicial procedure, and often held explicitly in lieu of formal police charges, we might expect them to at least broadly reflect our expectations of justice.'

Also: An Appalling Case for Affirmative-Consent Laws