How Sexual Harassment Codes Threaten Academic Freedom

Article here. Excerpt:

'In its zeal to spread "gender justice," the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) threatens to stifle academic freedom and infantilize women, says feminist legal expert and New York Law School Professor Nadine Strossen. At a recent talk at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the former American Civil Liberties Union head warned that current campus policies to curb sexual harassment are overbroad and dangerous. And while "safety"-mongering students deserve some of the blame, bureaucrats are the biggest progenitors of this paranoid style in American academia.

"By threatening to pull federal funds, the OCR has forced schools, even well-endowed schools like Harvard, to adopt sexual misconduct policies that violate many civil liberties," Strossen said.

Sexual misconduct is an umbrella term under which fall school rules against sexual assault, sexual harassment, intimate-partner violence, voyeurism, and stalking. While much of the recent focus in this realm has been on sexual violence, school sexual harassment policies also deserve some scrutiny. 

"Over the years, there have been many types of overly broad sexual harassment policies," explains Samantha Harris, director of policy research for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). "FIRE has actually had some success in getting schools to roll these back over the years."'