My former French professor imparted this message to the class: college is the time to be selfish. Travel, drink, have plenty of sex. She was exceptionally cool, I thought. But, looking back, her advice couldn’t have been more misguided for young men and women. “Situationship,” “friends with benefits,” “you up babe”—these are the trendy phrases […]
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Some colleges seem so eager to find males culpable of sexual offenses that they insert a provision in campus student-discipline rules allowing a form of double jeopardy. Ron Gronberg reported yesterday in the Durham Herald-Sun that Duke University changed the wording in the Duke Community Standard in Practice (P.47). Gone is the right of the appeals […]
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In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes: “There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant.” In his sanitized future, general happiness and social stability are achieved not via threats of legal action but rather through perfect genetic and behavioral engineering, endless indoctrination, anodyne feel-good phrases and drugs, and organized […]
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On October 15, The New York Times published a balanced news story that inadvertently revealed the stupidity of “Yes Means Yes” policies. Those policies redefine a great deal of consensual sex and touching as “sexual assault,” and effectively require college students to engage in “state-mandated dirty talk” during sexual encounters (as one supporter of “Yes Means Yes” policies gloated). That potentially violates the Constitution, and such policies have […]
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However harmful the effects of the “Dear Colleague” letter to colleges and universities from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, the document is a floor, not a ceiling, to OCR’s efforts to weaken campus due process. Resolution letters between OCR and various universities have allowed the agency to go well beyond the “Dear Colleague” […]
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This article was published originally in Commentary In February 2015, Columbia University—currently ranked the fourth most distinguished academic institution in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would be obliged to take part in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the […]
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Since 2011, as part of its settlement with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Yale has published biannual reports that provide brief summaries of each sexual assault allegation at the university. (Yale is the only university in the country to have such an obligation.) I’ve analyzed each of these reports, issued by the […]
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Despite criticism from all overthe politicalspectrum, so-called “yes means yes” sex rules are on the march. After California, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law on July 7 requiring all of the state’s universities to adopt an affirmative consent policy for sexual assault cases. Similar rules are set to go into effect at the […]
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