Campus Sex Assault Rules Show How the Pursuit of Personal Freedom Can Generate a Police State

Last week Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, announced that the Trump White House would be revising the Obama administration guidelines for how colleges and universities adjudicate accusations of sexual assault.There were protests outside her speech and spittle-flecked rants on Twitter, but overall the reaction felt relatively muted, at least by the standards of reactions to anything Trump-related or DeVos-driven.Perhaps this was because enough people read The Atlantic, which chose last week to run a three-part series by Emily Yoffe on the sexual-assault policies in question. The series demonstrated exhaustively what anyone paying close attention already knew: The legal and administrative response to campus rape over the past five years has been a kind of judicial and bureaucratic madness, a cautionary tale about how swiftly moral outrage and political pressure can lead to kangaroo courts and star chambers, in which bias and bad science create an unshakable presumption of guilt for the accused.  Continue reading...