See the World Like a Title IX Bureaucrat
This month at Princeton University, hundreds of student protesters participated in a campaign to change how their institution handles cases of sexual misconduct, using a days-long sit-in to wrangle future meetings with administrators. At their invitation, I studied their 11 proposed reforms.
“We ask that the University engage in dialogue regarding the systemic issues of sexual and interpersonal violence on its campus,” they write. “We need a conversation.”
Their suggestions merit one. Constructive throughout, they combine reform proposals that could attract support from people on all sides of the Title IX debate with ideas that will divide observers depending on their views about due process. And they illustrate an underappreciated tension in the approach of today’s student activists, who simultaneously express outrage at the bad behavior of administrative bureaucracies and fight to expand their size and power.
In a reported Washington Post dispatch with a Princeton dateline, Paula Span once observed that “someone who has not spent much time on a campus lately may be startled to see the way the definition of a liberal college has changed. A generation ago, it was a school withdrawing from its students’ sexual lives, dismantling curfews and rules about who could be in whose dorm when. Now it’s a school that, often at students’ insistence, is firmly stepping back in.”
Those words were published on October 22, 1993.
As her article went on to note, the subject of sexual assault was “virtually part of the curriculum at U.S. colleges.” At Princeton, orientation included a student-performed play about date rape. The institution had just “adopted a sexual assault policy establishing disciplinary proceedings and services for victims.” Counselors were available 24 hours a day. And then the 25-year-old Princeton graduate student Katie Roiphe had recently
