Sex assault debate shines harsh light on universities

administrations should be obliged to do about it.

The conflict pits an array of campus activists — students who have been raped or assaulted, supported by left-wing and feminist groups — against their own deans and administrators and disciplinary committees. The activists, lately with the support of the Obama White House, have leveraged Title IX’s rules against sex discrimination to pressure colleges to expand counseling for victims and to take a much harder disciplinary line against sexual misconduct.

Colleges, for various reasons, are disinclined to push back too hard publicly against their critics. So conservative and libertarian observers — a mostly female group, it should be said — have stepped into the breach.

These writers have cast doubt on some of the statistics invoked by campus activists (particularly the White House’s claim that 1 in 5 collegiate women will be sexually assaulted), questioned whether college disciplinary committees are really equipped to adjudicate guilt and innocence in such cases and cited instances in which accused male rapists were denied a fair hearing.

Such arguments add up to a plausible case against some of the activists’ prescriptions. But they don’t inspire much sympathy for the colleges’ position. The protesting students may be overzealous, but when you’re running an essentially corrupt institution, sometimes that’s the kind of opposition you deserve.

Corruption is a strong word, but not, I think, unmerited. Over the last few generations, America’s most prominent universities — both public and private — have pursued a strategy of corporate expansion, furious status competition, and moral and pedagogical retreat.

The modern university’s primary loyalty is not really to liberalism or political correctness or any kind of ideological design: It’s to the school’s brand, status and bottom line. And when something goes badly wrong, or predators run loose, the mask of kindness and community slips.

This seems to be what the anti-rape activists — victims, friends, sympathizers — are reacting against so strongly.

That the activists’ moral outrage is justified does not mean, again, that their prescriptions are correct. Their fatal conceit in many cases is the idea that by sweeping away misogyny they can resolve the internal contradictions of social liberalism, and usher in a world where everyone can be libertines together.

This is a utopian, ahistorical vision, and its pursuit is fraught with peril.

But the regime they’re rebelling against still deserves — richly — to eventually be overthrown.