The Return of the Sex Wars

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment. Halley had taught this area for years, and she was interested to see what the university came up with. The new rules were released amid pressure from student-led groups of rape survivors and their advocates, who demanded that schools across the country do more on behalf of victims. Harvard was also responding to years of calls for change by the Obama administration. Just eight months earlier, Valerie Jarrett, a senior presidential adviser, called for a ‘‘more victim-centered’’ campus approach to dealing with the problem of sexual assault.

But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad. She worried that Harvard’s new rules would not be fair to the accused. She thought of a case she wrote about years earlier, in which a military serviceman was discharged because another serviceman complained that the man had looked into his eyes for too long in the mailroom.'