Another good reason not to let kids back on campus!
This was a complicated story. But the real issue is a third-party can bring up an issue that happened years ago--even if the primary person involved was ok with it--just because you did or said something they didn't like. This retaliatory complaining should never be allowed or encouraged. If you don't report something immediately, you shouldn't be able to bring it up years later.
Not really. Somebody may be discouraged from reporting an abuse because the abuser has power over them. They might wait until after they leave that job.
Neither do they protect against witch hunts apparently, nor require so much as an accuser, let alone a non-kangaroo court process to terminate your career.
Consensual sex is not a crime, and there are no circumstances in this case that would warrant maximum available punishment for the lowest possible violation of this policy according to the university's own range of possible punishments. This is a witch hunt that never cared about any facts, in all likelihood they just wanted to fire the guy for his political opinions.
It doesn't require a crime to be fired. And even then:
We don't know that he would have gotten the maximum penalty under the policy, as he didn't exhaust the appeal that his contract gave him a right to. He resigned and wasn't fired.
People working at-will can be fired without any reason. 14 months PTO would be a godsend to them.
Again, people working at will are irrelevant, as his situation is different. You keep bringing it up for some reason, almost sounds like you're just jealous of tenure.
He resigned because the process was consistently of a kangaroo court variety. He did get the "sentence" to be fired so there is no need to speculate what would have happened if he didn't resign. There was no point to continue to the one last step because there was no reason to believe that it would be any more fair than the numerous previous steps.
You're just finding excuses for his unfair treatment because you don't like the guy or what he did. If a similarly unfair process was applied to a professor you like and respect, you'd be screaming in disbelief at how it's unfair. "Prominent civil rights activist loses tenure", instant 5000 points on HN. And so if you don't care about an unlikeable guy getting a fair process, then I guess you only care that people you don't like are punished by whatever means gets the job done, and that's not something to be proud of. Our society strives to be better than petty tribalism even if the legal protections against that aren't always there.
The tenure agreement doesn't give a right to a trial with due process, just like at will employeement doesn't. You are saying he negotiated something more than at-will, so therefore he deserves something even beyond what he negotiated? And we should consider this a significant problem when the majority of workers who have nothing close to 14 months paid time off and a trial of some sort with an appeals process when they get fired?
This reads like someone in his department targeted him with the conclusion in mind: termination. Someone wanted him fired. They tried every option available, and they eventually succeeded.
And that’s why Obama’s threat to universities leading them to abolish normal evidentiary requirements did so much damage. When there is nothing like due process, you can use the arbitrary process to do anything to anyone. Rolling back Obama’s abuse and restoring some sanity to Title IX was one of the few good things to come out of the Trump administration.
Due process is important even in private organizations but a public university is not a private organization so, at least in that context, I think there is a Constitutional argument that due process and respect for other Constitutional rights is required.
Do we know which university it was? Specifically do we know that it was a public university? It’s abhorrent either way, but I’m curious about the identity of the guilty university.
In this case (although he doesn’t mention what university it was), it is a “private” university. But the removal of due process from Title IX procedures was due to the threat from Obama to withold federal grant money from schools that continued to insist on fairness. Universities can not survive without this funding, so the government is directly involved in this abuse.
It’s still morally wrong, and those of us whose taxes pay these corrupt administrators’ salaries and whose elected officials gave them a weapon in the form of Title IX have every right to be insensed.
Why should a decision about firing someone (a civil penalty) require criminal standard of evidence (reasonable doubt) instead of civil (preponderance)?
If anything, the Obama change made things more consistent. Civil hearings use preponderance, and criminal use a higher standard.
Due process does not mean criminal standards of evidence. It means due process and there are established standards for civil as well as criminal cases.
This guys not wrong about Title IX being kangaroo courtish. But he also had a sexual relationship with a graduate student that he advised. The fact that it happened after he de facto stopped advising her doesn't help his case much. She's still very dependent on him for recommendations and his connections for her career growth. The potential for abuse there is very high and it's not a relationship he should have engaged in.
Was he railroaded? Hard to tell when it's just one side of the story. But he's not innocent.
So he did wrong because of the “potential” for abuse, even though the woman involved had no complaints, and even stated that there was nothing abusive in the relationship?
Just because the relationship wasn't coerced (one form of abuse) doesn't make it appropriate. As noted, its a very bad idea to 'go there' because of the confusion of further favors (recommendations/appointments) with sexual favors. Its reasonable for an institution to discourage this kind of relationship. Just like many private corporations do.
But a Professor's recommendation is very valuable - in some industries, the only path to employment. The temptation to forego recusal is large, especially for a valued graduate student. Unequal relationships (mentor/student etc) are so full of pitfalls, they've been forbidden by many, many institutions.
What industry relies on a recommendation from a Masters degree advisor of someone who has a PhD from a different University? And even if that's true, the problem is the discrimination practiced by the employer, not the advisor. In corporations, supervisors are banned from giving recommendations for former employees, due to conflict of interest concerns.
I don’t understand these remarks. Is the idea that the victim wasn’t perfectly professional and therefore deserved this clear and overt overreach? We rightly mock “her skirt was too short” justifications for sexual assault—I don’t see how this line of argumentation differs.
Yes. You can have a professional relationship, or a sexual one. The former precludes the possibility of the latter, and the responsibility is squarely on the person with more authority to behave properly with respect to this distinction.
Does this mean that people who get married and later decide to run a business together should get divorced? Does this mean for example that the sqlite.org creators wife is evil because she is (technically) his superior, being the CEO and owner of the company he works for?
I really do not like such generalizations. Yeah, when there is a direct supervisor/underlying professional relationship and a romantic relationship develops, then things can get murky. And yeah, there is potential for supervisors to abuse their status to attempt coercing the other person, sure. And this has to be carefully considered and recognized so such abuses can be detected early and stopped. That still doesn't make any and every professional relationship that turns into a romantic one "wrong". The number of romantic relationships that originate from workplaces is 15-25% depending on survey and locale; I wouldn't call all those people "wrong" (or at least half of those people).
Moreover, this guy from the article didn't even have a professional and romantic relationship at the same time. He had one then the other.
> Does this mean that people who get married and later decide to run a business together should get divorced? Does this mean for example that the sqlite.org creators wife is evil because she is (technically) his superior, being the CEO and owner of the company he works for?
Definitely not, but the rules are sometimes written in a byzantine manner. This example is from Canada:
Dental hygienist loses licence for treating wife, ruled as ‘sexual abuser’
This is somehow worse than your synopsis makes it out to be. The same standard was selectively applied to this person when compared to another dental hygienist that did the same thing. And apparently somehow it is not against the rules when dentists do it, but it is when dental hygienists do it. Sounds like a case of regulatory capture, really.
> Does this mean that people who get married and later decide to run a business together should get divorced? Does this mean for example that the sqlite.org creators wife is evil because she is (technically) his superior, being the CEO and owner of the company he works for?
Obviously not, and this is such a strawman I won't reply further.
It is not a strawman in practice. I have provided a link to a professional organization taking such a stance and the court agreeing with them in the sibling comment, which for reasons I cannot comprehend is now heavily downvoted.
Once you re-read your own comment that denies romantic and professional relationships could/should coexist, care to explain how exactly you conclude I was attacking a strawman? I gave an example that directly contradicts your generalized assertion that I pretty much disagree with ("you can either have a professional or romantic relationship") - call it proof by contradiction - as well as mentioning further survey data that contradicts you further.
I don't need to reread my own comment. I wrote it. You have to decide: is this relationship professional or not. There are certain conditions that preclude the former. The second biggest mistake I've made professionally was not understanding this (note: I was not the person with power) and it cost me deep into 6 figures. So kindly take your trivializing nonsense of what I'm saying elsewhere.
You can have a professional relationship, or you can have a romantic one. One often starts before the other, and that's ok so long as consent and power are balanced through that progression. But blending of the two under ambiguous circumstances enables horrific abuse, and I won't pretend otherwise just because people fantasize themselves as the boss that gets to date everyone attractive in their office.
You had a bad experience, and I am sorry you did, honestly. I had my fair share of "bad dating" but never directly in the workplace so I can only relate to a degree. As I preemptively agreed, yes, power imbalances can lead to problems and abuse, and people need to be mindful of that and prevent or at least stop it.
But still, that doesn't mean you get to run around trivializing the meaningful and loving relationships many many other people have as "wrong". Or get into the personal attack space by implying people who disagree with you such as myself just fantasize about abusing subordinates. wtf
I said my anecdote was my personal mistake, not that is the sole basis of my opinion here.
I've seen enough both personally and in the data to know what's real here. It's not some sort of injust crusade against otherwise healthy workplace relationships.
Spoken like an American. Most of Europe begs to differ.
Granted, this took place in the US, with use mores, but surely we can recognize that this is a value judgement rather than a clear rule with no room for reasonable disagreement.
Everyone has influence over their romantic partners lives. Anyone can trash talk an ex
And what do you say to all the people who are happily married to (or happily divorced from) to supervisors at work?
People like Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Bezos? Saying that people can only date people of the same social status is dangerous classism. (And no, Bezos isn't going to go out an meet an assistant at some other company to marry.)
Agreed, but there are many other documented Title IX cases where the victims’ careers are ruined and we should also suspect a long tail of incidents we don’t hear about. It would be equally illogical to hear Susan Fowler’s case of sexual harassment and conclude that because she was on the cover of Time magazine and otherwise widely published that there isn’t an invisible minority whose careers are ruined. Further, TFA documents the Title IX inquiry as a kangaroo court, consistent with every other documented complaint of Title IX excesses; it’s not much of a consolation that it outperformed the Provost’s own kangaroo court.
Remember that the literal text of Title IX just bans sex discrimination. When people discuss "Title IX" as a concept, they're generally referring to the general attitudes towards sex and romance in American universities, where authorities are instructed and acculturated to view all but the most squeaky-clean things as extreme misconduct which justifies booting out the accused.
Title IX is a specific law. Recent trends in Left wing / feminist thought and behavior have some interaction with that, but only in the sense that they interact with everything in the University.
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
When people refer to Title IX offices, investigations, or practices, they're not referring to a part of this sentence, but to the administrative structures that have been set up around it.
Title IX is not simply an attitude though. There was a “Dear Colleague” letter from the DOJ sent to all colleges some years ago setting out guidelines for colleges to follow in enforcing Title IX.
The implicit threat was they would be sued by the DOJ if they didn’t put those procedures in place. Yes, the law as passed by Congress is a single sentence, but the law as enforced by courts includes not only that sentence but also rules and regulations put forth by unelected government agencies. https://www2.ed.gov/print/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/col...
Those rules in the “Dear Colleague” letter have just been replaced by the DOJ with a new regulation promulgated under the Administrative Procedure Act, which also has the force of law despite greatly expanding on the single sentence of law passed by congress in Title IX.
Yeah, I think we’re saying the thing. Administrators didn’t arrive at this attitude by chance; the DOJ’s positioning in combination with related activism sent a strong message that they were supposed to.
> In my case, not only was I not permitted to cross-examine my accuser, I was eventually informed that there was no accuser, a nonsensical claim eventually disproved by the documentation I received when my ordeal was over. My anonymous accusers did not even include the person I was supposed to have harassed. And when she was interviewed during the course of the investigation she denied that I had ever harassed her.
Perhaps he is lying, but this is not the first criticism I have read of Title IX along these lines.
I agree that his biggest fault was the way he handled that relationship.
1. Starting it so soon after he was officially off the hook looks really suspicious. This shouldn’t matter in a legal sense, but it does in a professional sense. He should have waited at least a year, or better yet just not do it. It was inviting trouble.
2. Regarding recommendations, imo he has to tell her that he can no longer vouch for her professionally if they get involved (professional recusal). Anything else would appear unethical if not actually be unethical. If the (former) student was not ok with that, then no relationship. I think that this holds true in non-academic situations as well.
3. I think that there is no doubt he was railroaded. He was put in a situation in which he could not be professionally responsible —- he couldn’t talk to anyone at the school for over a year. He ultimately had to leave a job over something that should have at worst been an official warning. The only way that this outcome was possibly reasonable is if he had been warned before and conveniently forgot to mention that fact. If someone follows the letter of the rules and then ends up jobless because of it (from a tenured position no less), then the issue is with the rules rather than the faculty member. If they want to prevent imbalanced professional power relationships, then they can simply ban relationships with current or former students. If that type of ban is not legal, then he should not be able to have his tenure rescinded.
The changes to Title IX had good intentions, but the implementation has had way too much collateral damage for it to be considered an unconditional win.
I remember the guidelines at one school specifically stating that relationships between undergraduates and professors are forbidden but leaving out graduate students. I imagine because your grad students are more like coworkers and it’s more likely a mutual relationship will blossom.
Oh well, more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.
> Oh well, more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.
Although online dating is growing, around 1/3rd of workplace relationships result in marriage.[1] It seems like forbidding such relationships would make people worse off in general.
There's an important distinction between relationships that originate in the workplace vs relationships that originate in the workplace among people who are connected in the supervision hierarchy.
If you read the article I linked, you'll see that 22% of workers have dated their bosses and that 41% of people in workplace romances had to keep it secret (usually due to policies forbidding such relationships).
This behavior is extremely common and –dare I say it– usually quite healthy. Banning it doesn't stop it. It just turns everyone into hypocrites.
Yeah, I don't buy those figures in the slightest, and further, none of that is a normative argument that it should continue. All it describes is that it's common for those in power, generally men, to abuse their status to create relationships under conflicting intentions.
> more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.
Unfortunately for academics, there seems to be no line between work and life - professional acquaintances are often social ones and vice versa. How do you meet a mate outside of academics when all of your time is spent there?
As a non-academic who knows a lot of academics, I do not envy this arrangement in the least.
Women that come forward with iron proof are still branded problematic or difficult to work with, ending their careers and launching direct personal targeted harassment of the sort you clearly have never experienced. The idea that women have nothing to lose by making allegations is entirely at odds with what happens in reality.
I’m familiar with Susan Fowler, and I’m sure she represents many other such victims; however, I’ve also read a number of stories like TFA, and presumably they equally represent a contingency of victims. Moreover, I don’t understand why these things need to be pitted against each other as though we have to choose one horrendous injustice or another. Victimizing innocent men doesn’t help victimized women, and contrary arguments are abhorrently sexist.
Our best data on the subject suggests that very few innocent men are being victimized, to use your falsely equivalent language. An overwhelming preponderance of evidence makes clear that a non trivial fraction of men in power are serial abusers who get away with these behaviors habitually. Your argument boils down to "people pointing out the sexism are the REAL sexists" which as you might expect, is not convincing to the rest of us.
What are “our best data”? The #metoo era only began in the last couple of years, and I’m unaware of a rigorous academic effort to investigate its victims to the degree that we have investigated female sexual victimization over the last several decades. And this makes sense given the portrait of fear on university campuses—no one wants to look like they’re not “part of the team” lest they be subject to their own Ordeal. We do have a number of very convincing cases of excesses which certainly persuade me about the need for further investigation.
> Your argument boils down to "people pointing out the sexism are the REAL sexists" which as you might expect, is not convincing to the rest of us.
Innocent men by definition aren’t sexists, and my point was that arguments to treat them as such (based on the idea that innocent men are responsible for the violations of guilty men by virtue of their common gender) is patently sexism. Maybe that’s not the point you were making; I just wanted to head that off in advance because frankly I’m sick of these disgusting lines of argumentation.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be incendiary, but there's exactly zero supporting evidence to back your assertion beyond wishful thinking. And there's innumerable counterexamples where women have had their careers ruined by men who have had an unfair power dynamic over them, after making claims of sexual harassment or unprofessional behavior, and more. The suggestion that only HIS career is vulnerable ignores the actual claims of tens of thousands of women coming forward in the last few years as part of the #metoo movement.
The relationship happened more than a decade prior and the student’s own testimony exonerated the professor. Unless the article is lying about the details, I don’t see how he could have been anything but railroaded, especially given that, after the Title IX inquisition (let’s call a spade a spade) failed, the university launched an internal investigation in which the provost took it upon herself to prosecute the case (unprecedented) putting her employees who would judge the case in a clear conflict of interest, and the provost herself flouted the requirements to provide arguments in advance. These are among the enormous laundry-list of verifiable claims the author makes against the university. Either he is lying and should be sued for defamation or the university is abhorrent in its corruption.
Look, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to date your former students, but the student in question verified that nothing inappropriate happened. They weren’t dating when she was a student barring some technicalities which would never (neither under Title IX nor the university’s own rules) constitute a fireable offense (per the article). It’s one thing to disagree with the prudence of dating one’s former student, but that doesn’t remotely validate the university’s behavior.
Maybe, but this is different than quid pro quo harassment or other kinds of sexual harassment which is what Title IX is concerned with. Fugrther, your scenario is implausible because she would have stood to gain very little from their relationship—her grades were locked-in at that point and her future PhD program was secure. Her employers would care very little about her masters advisor’s opinion compared to her PhD advisor. Further still, none of this justifies railroading someone out of their position.
Title IX guidance is horrendous and it leaves a trail of victims in its wake. I don’t understand the desire to impugn these victims and distract from the pressing problem. I guess I strongly disagree with the idea that we should punish someone because they might have done something wrong in the utter absence of evidence. Which is to say, I’m opposed to injustice.
Misguided politics like this is one of the reasons I left the academic world.
Universities may have crossed the Rubicon in terms of becoming farcical entities. Bloated bureaucracies, commodification of faculty and students, financial structures based on questionable lending practices, focus of form over function (like in this story), and a big bag of other misaligned incentives make me think that universities don’t have a bright future (at least in their current form).
The author of this story is no angel — he certainly should have been more careful with that relationship with his former student in several ways. That said, I can’t really see that he did anything worthy of destroying his career. This was just another case of modern-day witch-hunting.
Absolutely awful process, very unconstitutional. The guy doesn't even know what the charges are, who the accuser is, can't face the accuser, and has to prove his innocence, instead of them proving his guilt.
Whilst Quilette is a trashfire of snide insinuation and right-wing batloonery, there does seem to be a non-trivial amount of support for their kind of politics on HN (as evidenced by the links and supportive comments). I'd not want them blocked, per se, but I don't know how best to combat the false narratives they tend to spin.
I don’t follow Quillette avidly by any means, but when they crop up here the articles tend to be well argued and well-supported. In this case, the author presents a truckload of verifiable facts—if he’s lying, it would be easy to demonstrate, and it would rightly destroy his (and Quillette’s) credibility. I have no doubt that he’s “spinning” the story a bit, but provided he’s not overtly lying about the verifiable evidence then it’s already damning of the university.
Further, there are lots of publications which have egregiously lied about verifiable events and which we still welcome on HN, but I won’t get into that since it would probably only lead to comments which would run afoul of the guidelines.
Why? My initial impression of Quillette has been quite positive. It gives a voice to people who are otherwise tending to be unheard. Whether or not you believe them is up to you. But at least the website is letting me make that decision for myself.
Indeed, and would therefore be up to each reader to decide how that reputation factors into their evaluation of what they're reading and the subsequent conversation.
One would hope that the level of discourse on HN is sufficient to deal with incorrect, false, or poorly written stories on its own terms, rather than blanket bans because one disagrees with their politics (or even if only because the publication is considered political, which would call for bans of lots of other sources regardless of political affiliation). It brings the division and toxicity of Twitter here to HN, which it has thusfar avoided, because then the two "sides" would battle it out on which "news" sources to accept.
One might equally say "HN should not allow linking to Huffington Post" which I don't honestly know if that is linked to with any frequency but I wouldn't be opposed if it did. It is valuable to know what people are thinking and to see what people are discussing.
So he started a relationship with a student after she had mostly finished, but hadn't walked to get her diploma yet, and he issued her grades during that time that were considered perfunctory. Every professor knows tenure protects from almost everything except sleeping with a student, especially if you are their advisor or involved in their committee.
Before revealing he had a relationship with his student, he gives a bunch of innuendo that he was only fired because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
The vast majority of people in this country are hired at will and don't get anything like a long trial to stay on and are subject arbitrary firing with no real due process. It is the norm in employment rather than a new trend (unless you are unionized), but professors have just been protected from it by tenure. But it isn't a new trend that tenure doesn't protect you if you sleep with or have a relationship with a student. It's the one thing everyone with tenure knows isn't covered by tenure.
Title IX is some weird shit though, and I doubt that any US company holds itself to the same crazy standard.
For example, under Title IX if your colleague shows up with a black eye one day and says they got it from their roommate then you are required to report it to the university.
Many (if not most?) companies will fire over a relationship between a boss and a subordinate, or order them to work at separate locations and not be in either's chain of command. He resigned so we don't know how it would have even played out.
The process sounds kafkaesque in his telling, but most people subject to at-will barely get any process at all when they are fired.
> Many (if not most?) companies will fire over a relationship between a boss and a subordinate, or order them to work at separate locations and not be in either's chain of command.
This may be the rule at a lot of places, but it is very rarely implemented, and these relationships are typically just overlooked.
I don't know if I agree (just from personally knowing a case where two people in a relationship formed at work were sent to different stores, not any exhaustive data), but an official rule that is rarely and or selectively enforced doesn't exactly sound like due process in the at-will workplace as a counter argument to the level of due process in a university to a tenured employee.
My anecdata is dozens of these relationships with nothing done, and one with the manager being officially warned and moved to a different department.
The scandalous thing about the case in which something was done was that he was supervising both his wife and his lover. He ended up divorcing his wife and marrying his lover. That was the level it took to get an official warning. He retired a few years later, with no negative impact on his career (he was promoted after the incident).
Do firings happen over these types of relationships? Sure. Is that the modal response? Very much no in my experience.
How many companies have you worked at that would start an investigation based on an employee arriving on Monday with a bruise resulting from an extracurricular activity over the weekend?
"It's even worse elsewhere" is no justification for injustice. That's horrific. There's no "subordinate" here. The person he dated 12 years ago isn't a member of the institution and wasn't during the relationship.
This sort of makes sense. The organization-as-organization can't address things via the defined processes if the input data doesn't flow up into the command center from the satellite nerves (in this case, the individual staff members).
This closes the loophole where someone could report something casually to a faculty member, and nothing happens, which is a tragically common problem.
If everything reported casually gets reported formally, then people can no longer have casual conversations.
What strikes me as overreach about the black eye scenario (which is used in orientation/training for University staff as an example of something that needs to be reported under Title IX) is that a) the black eye is the result of some type of abuse and b) a non-University relationship suddenly falls under the purview of Title IX just by being mentioned to a University employee.
> The vast majority of people in this country are hired at will and don't get anything like a long trial to stay on and are subject arbitrary firing with no real due process.
> So he started a relationship with a student after she had mostly finished, but hadn't walked to get her diploma yet, and he issued her grades during that time that were considered perfunctory. Every professor knows tenure protects from almost everything except sleeping with a student, especially if you are their advisor or involved in their committee.
I have a few teachers and professors in my family, and get to hear stories about tenured professors and the antics they get into. According to them, there's one thing that tenured professors know they can't do and that is sleeping with their students.
> A bunch of innuendo that he was only fired over it because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
The author ran to a rag that would publish his story without doing any investigative journalism behind it. He knew the audience would take what he claims at face value, and low and behold, that is what's happening.
It really is the one, universal rule that is repeatedly pointed out to career academics, from when you start TAing onward: do not sleep with your students. This rule has existed for an enormous length of time, and exists at essentially all universities. It so continually repeated that its repetition, even to the exclusion of pretty much anything else that might be useful, like training about actual teaching, is a common joke.
This isn't even just to protect the student, and I expect that the rule was originally developed when universities didn't care about the potential for the student being abused: it also causes a potential for unfairness to everyone else, especially when the relationship is clandestine.
Academia is somewhat unusual in that relationships within research communities and universities need to be allowed, are rather common and accepted, and often even need to be accommodated by universities. Strict restrictions on them at some universities in the past actually caused serious problems at times. Many situations are accepted, so long as they are appropriately handled, even when there are close professional connections involved, and even, sometimes, between faculty and graduate students, when the student isn't their student.
But sleeping with your students has always been a deadly sin in academia. And this appears to be a case of someone trying to argue that, while he slept with his student, she wasn't really his student at the time. That's a difficult argument to make.
She was, officially, his student at the time of the relationship. He admits this. He is trying to argue that, while he was officially her advisor at the time, she had already completed all of the requirements of the degree, and he was only nominally her advisor as a result of academic technicalities.
He presents a long list of verifiable facts. If he’s wrong, it would be trivial for the university (or anyone else with access to the evidence) to prove it and probably even sue for defamation.
> Before revealing he had a relationship with his student, he gives a bunch of innuendo that he was only fired because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure not speculating about someone’s motives (and indeed not even identifying them) in some piece of Internet criticism is different than sentencing them without due process...
He resigned before exhausting appeal, he wasn't sentenced. And losing your job isn't criminal sentencing. Most people in the US work at will and can be fired for almost any reason or even no reason at all.
In contrast he got paid to do nothing for 14 months. He painted things as Kafka-esque, but for a typical worker it would be a huge improvement over arbitrary firing for any reason.
Maybe we should have more due process for losing your job, but his situation is so much better than what the vast majority are at risk of, in terms of protections, that it should be near the lowest priority to worry about.
I’m not arguing that he was sentenced criminally or otherwise, and poor negotiating conditions for other workers doesn’t excuse what is by all appearances abhorrent behavior by the provost and others. I hate that any time someone identifies a problem, some people come out of the woodwork to suggest that we shouldn’t do anything about it because someone somewhere has it worse. We can strengthen worker’s rights and abhor this gross abuse of power.
It isn't that someone somewhere has it worse. It is the norm in America. We should be more concerned about getting fairer policies in place for people much farther down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, who can be fired arbitrarily rather than having to do something like sleep with a student and argue a technicality and in the end be able to resign and not actually be fired. They don't get 14 months paid time off or a trial of any kind.
By that same token, we should never discuss your pet issue (legally guaranteed job protections) nor other issues (racial inequality, political polarization, etc) and every conversation about it should immediately digress to the worst problems: genocide, disease, starvation, mass poverty, child soldiers, sexual slavery, etc etc. Of course, this is nonsense and it violates HN guidelines about staying on topic. Further, it prevents us from making any progress on issues that are relatively easily remedied (repealing the problematic Title IX guidance) until these huge issues are resolved. So please, let's stay on topic and recognize that there is no inherent conflict between staying on topic and prioritizing problems appropriately.
> Even though they were all dismissed, these three cases implied a pattern of harassment on my part. The other possible interpretation—that this was an organized campaign to damage my reputation for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual harassment—was not considered.
He's missing the obvious "systems" answer -- the current culture is to investigate every suspicion, and human nature is to suspect that where is smoke there is fire. The drastically lower bar for investigation -- fine on its own, but then combined with the assumption that accusations likely have some merit (even if they are merely notifications, not accusations!), leads to "guilt by slippery slope".
It's the same thing that happens with "mandatory reporting" for child abuse, and the same thing that BLM and similar complain about with overstrict policing.
It is interesting that quillette chose to publish this piece.
The private machinations of rationally acting rational actors acting in accordance with the terms of their voluntary associations seems to be something that quillette would support.
For example, they wouldn't support the assertion that a manager at McDonalds conduct a trial where evidence, chain of custody, jurisprudence, and counsel for the defendant be guaranteed before firing an employee.
In fact I bet they have published numerous pieces asserting the exact opposite, consistently, in the past.
But here we are, criticizing a university for firing an employee.
I guess their internal logic is not consistent and freedom only apply to job creators, and not "THE LEFTIST ACADEMIC ELITE".
I don’t see how it’s in the university’s interest to malign and railroad a professor, presumably because he challenged the orthodoxy a bit with respect to its sexist policies. Especially when the cost is him more-or-less idle for the better part of the year (but still paid) as well as the cost for all of these administrators and lawyers fabricating nonsense for over a year. Further, the employee in this case had tenure protection; the university abuses Title IX and other policies to railroad him out of his position.
If there is an inconsistency, it’s that the folks who love reducing everything to power dynamics are somehow not analyzing this as a clear-cut case of powerful university administrators abusing their considerable power over an employee. I mean, the provost made the unprecedented move of prosecuting a case that her underlings were adjudicating and flouted the requirement that she present her argument a week in advance. The author provided lots and lots of verifiable supporting evidence.
The majority of people in the market the university cares about think that professors who bang their subordinates should be railroaded out the institution.
The power dynamics bit is the best part. The voluntary collective of rational actors known as "the university" can choose to ignore violations of unjust policies (the absolute authority given the assent of the managed) the same way jurors can choose to ignore violations of the law though jury nullification.
Freedom includes the freedom to bend the rules and have an arbitrary and subjective number of people nod in agreement, thus making it "Okay", no?
If the above statement is not true, then literally, in the literal dictionary definition of the the word "literal" every single aspect of society will have to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up.
Should parents who take tax deductions (PuBLiC FuNdInG) for children perform an Oxford-style debate to discuss the merits whenever they tell their kids to brush their teeth and go to bed?
If the government gives you money, it is yours. No strings attached that you didn't agree to before receiving the money.
I’m going to go against the rules of the internet and feed the troll.
The government has two options, give money with no strings attached to consumers and let the market work, or give money to institutions with conditions.
Clearly universities are not consumers, but institutions, so your silly analogy breaks very quickly.
It seems that these investigations are a huge revenue source for the firms conducting them for the university. If it cost the author $27k to defend, it must be far higher for the investigating firm. Since they have multiple attorneys on the case, and spend more time.
So this seems like a situation where there is a vested interest in conducting lots of these investigations.
All of the author's complaints come down to issues of "due process".
Due process doesn't mean running a trial or decision-making process in the particular way that US courts do, rather it means running such a process in some fashion that is consistent and reasonable. Personally, I believe that it is extremely important to maintain due process in our trials and procedures.
In this case the author fundamentally has two complaints. The first complaint is that when he was accused of a Title IX violation, the procedure was so unreasonable and so biased against the defendant that winning cost him $27,000 and an entire year of no contact with his university and no response to the charges (thus destroying his reputation). The second complaint is that he was slated to receive an extremely harsh punishment (loss of tenure and being fired) for what he considers a rather minor violation (having a consensual relationship with a former student who was technically still associated with the university). All told, I agree: the ultimate outcome (him resigning) may be reasonable, but the process for reaching it clearly was not.
What's reasonable about firing someone for doing nothing wrong where no one got hurt exceptthr feelings of a puritanical busybody invading people's private affairs ?
Why colleges need their own court system is beyond me. We have a perfectly usable one that actually has reasonable protections for the accused.
It's sad that officials in the Dept of Education can put in place such an egregious system, which is literally designed to infringe on people's rights, and not face any consequences. Like so many things at that level, there are expectations for officials to act properly and protect our rights, but when they don't, there is no specified punishment.
Title IX / DOE is a misdirection. This was driven completely internally by Uni administration, with Title IX only mentioned as the excuse. There was never a Federal complaint.
It’s not “puritanism;” it’s about conflict of interest. If you’re sleeping with, say, a student, you’d be more likely to give them a better grade than Jane/John Doe.
Of course, that’s not the case here since the relationship took place after the student left the university. Further, many Title IX cases aren’t related to conflict of interest at all.
Here is a list, mostly of such stories: https://reason.com/tag/title-ix/. A common theme is consensual drunken sex in which one party expresses regret at some later time and reports the other party. Title IX defines “consent” such that drunken sex cannot be “consensual”—drunken sex is rape per Title IX guidelines. If this sounds dramatic, please give that link a read; this is the most charitable interpretation.
The interesting thing about this “drunken sex is rape” interpretation is that logically it would imply that if both parties were drunk, then they’ve raped each other. Of course this is ridiculous, so universities either decide that the man is guilty (presumably in a “Believe all women” sort of way) which is ironic in that Title IX ostensibly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Another way in which universities resolve this dilemma is by assuming the first to report is the victim and the other party is the rapist. There are probably other universities who elect not to address the dilemma at all and are happy with the mutual rape interpretation.
In all cases, this seems per puritanical to me.
EDIT: I forgot my favorite example—the Northwestern University feminist professor whose Title IX criticism was deemed to be a Title IX violation. Criticizing Title IX is a violation of Title IX, but you still have a swath of people arguing that Title IX is a Very Fine Law (indeed the law is fine; the guidelines are problematic).
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadThis was a complicated story. But the real issue is a third-party can bring up an issue that happened years ago--even if the primary person involved was ok with it--just because you did or said something they didn't like. This retaliatory complaining should never be allowed or encouraged. If you don't report something immediately, you shouldn't be able to bring it up years later.
Consensual sex is not a crime, and there are no circumstances in this case that would warrant maximum available punishment for the lowest possible violation of this policy according to the university's own range of possible punishments. This is a witch hunt that never cared about any facts, in all likelihood they just wanted to fire the guy for his political opinions.
We don't know that he would have gotten the maximum penalty under the policy, as he didn't exhaust the appeal that his contract gave him a right to. He resigned and wasn't fired.
People working at-will can be fired without any reason. 14 months PTO would be a godsend to them.
He resigned because the process was consistently of a kangaroo court variety. He did get the "sentence" to be fired so there is no need to speculate what would have happened if he didn't resign. There was no point to continue to the one last step because there was no reason to believe that it would be any more fair than the numerous previous steps.
You're just finding excuses for his unfair treatment because you don't like the guy or what he did. If a similarly unfair process was applied to a professor you like and respect, you'd be screaming in disbelief at how it's unfair. "Prominent civil rights activist loses tenure", instant 5000 points on HN. And so if you don't care about an unlikeable guy getting a fair process, then I guess you only care that people you don't like are punished by whatever means gets the job done, and that's not something to be proud of. Our society strives to be better than petty tribalism even if the legal protections against that aren't always there.
Still, there's much that's public about it. Surely some rules are desirable.
If anything, the Obama change made things more consistent. Civil hearings use preponderance, and criminal use a higher standard.
You’re pretending that means “require criminal standard of evidence”.
See the problem?
Was he railroaded? Hard to tell when it's just one side of the story. But he's not innocent.
I really do not like such generalizations. Yeah, when there is a direct supervisor/underlying professional relationship and a romantic relationship develops, then things can get murky. And yeah, there is potential for supervisors to abuse their status to attempt coercing the other person, sure. And this has to be carefully considered and recognized so such abuses can be detected early and stopped. That still doesn't make any and every professional relationship that turns into a romantic one "wrong". The number of romantic relationships that originate from workplaces is 15-25% depending on survey and locale; I wouldn't call all those people "wrong" (or at least half of those people).
Moreover, this guy from the article didn't even have a professional and romantic relationship at the same time. He had one then the other.
Definitely not, but the rules are sometimes written in a byzantine manner. This example is from Canada:
Dental hygienist loses licence for treating wife, ruled as ‘sexual abuser’
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2019/09/13/dental-hygien...
Obviously not, and this is such a strawman I won't reply further.
You can have a professional relationship, or you can have a romantic one. One often starts before the other, and that's ok so long as consent and power are balanced through that progression. But blending of the two under ambiguous circumstances enables horrific abuse, and I won't pretend otherwise just because people fantasize themselves as the boss that gets to date everyone attractive in their office.
You had a bad experience, and I am sorry you did, honestly. I had my fair share of "bad dating" but never directly in the workplace so I can only relate to a degree. As I preemptively agreed, yes, power imbalances can lead to problems and abuse, and people need to be mindful of that and prevent or at least stop it.
But still, that doesn't mean you get to run around trivializing the meaningful and loving relationships many many other people have as "wrong". Or get into the personal attack space by implying people who disagree with you such as myself just fantasize about abusing subordinates. wtf
I've seen enough both personally and in the data to know what's real here. It's not some sort of injust crusade against otherwise healthy workplace relationships.
Granted, this took place in the US, with use mores, but surely we can recognize that this is a value judgement rather than a clear rule with no room for reasonable disagreement.
And what do you say to all the people who are happily married to (or happily divorced from) to supervisors at work? People like Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Bezos? Saying that people can only date people of the same social status is dangerous classism. (And no, Bezos isn't going to go out an meet an assistant at some other company to marry.)
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
When people refer to Title IX offices, investigations, or practices, they're not referring to a part of this sentence, but to the administrative structures that have been set up around it.
The implicit threat was they would be sued by the DOJ if they didn’t put those procedures in place. Yes, the law as passed by Congress is a single sentence, but the law as enforced by courts includes not only that sentence but also rules and regulations put forth by unelected government agencies. https://www2.ed.gov/print/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/col...
Those rules in the “Dear Colleague” letter have just been replaced by the DOJ with a new regulation promulgated under the Administrative Procedure Act, which also has the force of law despite greatly expanding on the single sentence of law passed by congress in Title IX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
> In my case, not only was I not permitted to cross-examine my accuser, I was eventually informed that there was no accuser, a nonsensical claim eventually disproved by the documentation I received when my ordeal was over. My anonymous accusers did not even include the person I was supposed to have harassed. And when she was interviewed during the course of the investigation she denied that I had ever harassed her.
Perhaps he is lying, but this is not the first criticism I have read of Title IX along these lines.
1. Starting it so soon after he was officially off the hook looks really suspicious. This shouldn’t matter in a legal sense, but it does in a professional sense. He should have waited at least a year, or better yet just not do it. It was inviting trouble.
2. Regarding recommendations, imo he has to tell her that he can no longer vouch for her professionally if they get involved (professional recusal). Anything else would appear unethical if not actually be unethical. If the (former) student was not ok with that, then no relationship. I think that this holds true in non-academic situations as well.
3. I think that there is no doubt he was railroaded. He was put in a situation in which he could not be professionally responsible —- he couldn’t talk to anyone at the school for over a year. He ultimately had to leave a job over something that should have at worst been an official warning. The only way that this outcome was possibly reasonable is if he had been warned before and conveniently forgot to mention that fact. If someone follows the letter of the rules and then ends up jobless because of it (from a tenured position no less), then the issue is with the rules rather than the faculty member. If they want to prevent imbalanced professional power relationships, then they can simply ban relationships with current or former students. If that type of ban is not legal, then he should not be able to have his tenure rescinded.
The changes to Title IX had good intentions, but the implementation has had way too much collateral damage for it to be considered an unconditional win.
Oh well, more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.
Although online dating is growing, around 1/3rd of workplace relationships result in marriage.[1] It seems like forbidding such relationships would make people worse off in general.
1. http://press.careerbuilder.com/2018-02-01-Office-Romance-Hit...
This behavior is extremely common and –dare I say it– usually quite healthy. Banning it doesn't stop it. It just turns everyone into hypocrites.
Unfortunately for academics, there seems to be no line between work and life - professional acquaintances are often social ones and vice versa. How do you meet a mate outside of academics when all of your time is spent there?
As a non-academic who knows a lot of academics, I do not envy this arrangement in the least.
> Your argument boils down to "people pointing out the sexism are the REAL sexists" which as you might expect, is not convincing to the rest of us.
Innocent men by definition aren’t sexists, and my point was that arguments to treat them as such (based on the idea that innocent men are responsible for the violations of guilty men by virtue of their common gender) is patently sexism. Maybe that’s not the point you were making; I just wanted to head that off in advance because frankly I’m sick of these disgusting lines of argumentation.
"It's only happening to a few people so that's ok"? You sure that's the argument you want to make?
The problem is that's not possible. Her testimony would be the same if:
(1) Their relationship was consensual.
(2) She didn't want to have one but feared retaliation for saying no.
(3) She didn't want one but thought it would help her career if she slept with him.
That's the problem with these types of relationships. Until we get a truth detector we can't ever really know.
Had (2) been a factor at the time it wouldn't have been now, and (3) doesn't sound likely given that they'd already left the campus.
It's not like she's gonna say:
"Of course I just banged him to help my career. Have you seen him? Dude's hideous."
So again, she can't verify that nothing inappropriate happened because we can't trust that her testimony is honest.
Title IX guidance is horrendous and it leaves a trail of victims in its wake. I don’t understand the desire to impugn these victims and distract from the pressing problem. I guess I strongly disagree with the idea that we should punish someone because they might have done something wrong in the utter absence of evidence. Which is to say, I’m opposed to injustice.
Maybe our personal biases play a bigger role in how much we care about about due process in a particular case, hm?
Universities may have crossed the Rubicon in terms of becoming farcical entities. Bloated bureaucracies, commodification of faculty and students, financial structures based on questionable lending practices, focus of form over function (like in this story), and a big bag of other misaligned incentives make me think that universities don’t have a bright future (at least in their current form).
The author of this story is no angel — he certainly should have been more careful with that relationship with his former student in several ways. That said, I can’t really see that he did anything worthy of destroying his career. This was just another case of modern-day witch-hunting.
Further, there are lots of publications which have egregiously lied about verifiable events and which we still welcome on HN, but I won’t get into that since it would probably only lead to comments which would run afoul of the guidelines.
One might equally say "HN should not allow linking to Huffington Post" which I don't honestly know if that is linked to with any frequency but I wouldn't be opposed if it did. It is valuable to know what people are thinking and to see what people are discussing.
Before revealing he had a relationship with his student, he gives a bunch of innuendo that he was only fired because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
The vast majority of people in this country are hired at will and don't get anything like a long trial to stay on and are subject arbitrary firing with no real due process. It is the norm in employment rather than a new trend (unless you are unionized), but professors have just been protected from it by tenure. But it isn't a new trend that tenure doesn't protect you if you sleep with or have a relationship with a student. It's the one thing everyone with tenure knows isn't covered by tenure.
For example, under Title IX if your colleague shows up with a black eye one day and says they got it from their roommate then you are required to report it to the university.
The process sounds kafkaesque in his telling, but most people subject to at-will barely get any process at all when they are fired.
This may be the rule at a lot of places, but it is very rarely implemented, and these relationships are typically just overlooked.
The scandalous thing about the case in which something was done was that he was supervising both his wife and his lover. He ended up divorcing his wife and marrying his lover. That was the level it took to get an official warning. He retired a few years later, with no negative impact on his career (he was promoted after the incident).
Do firings happen over these types of relationships? Sure. Is that the modal response? Very much no in my experience.
This closes the loophole where someone could report something casually to a faculty member, and nothing happens, which is a tragically common problem.
What strikes me as overreach about the black eye scenario (which is used in orientation/training for University staff as an example of something that needs to be reported under Title IX) is that a) the black eye is the result of some type of abuse and b) a non-University relationship suddenly falls under the purview of Title IX just by being mentioned to a University employee.
Is that good?
I have a few teachers and professors in my family, and get to hear stories about tenured professors and the antics they get into. According to them, there's one thing that tenured professors know they can't do and that is sleeping with their students.
> A bunch of innuendo that he was only fired over it because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
The author ran to a rag that would publish his story without doing any investigative journalism behind it. He knew the audience would take what he claims at face value, and low and behold, that is what's happening.
This isn't even just to protect the student, and I expect that the rule was originally developed when universities didn't care about the potential for the student being abused: it also causes a potential for unfairness to everyone else, especially when the relationship is clandestine.
Academia is somewhat unusual in that relationships within research communities and universities need to be allowed, are rather common and accepted, and often even need to be accommodated by universities. Strict restrictions on them at some universities in the past actually caused serious problems at times. Many situations are accepted, so long as they are appropriately handled, even when there are close professional connections involved, and even, sometimes, between faculty and graduate students, when the student isn't their student.
But sleeping with your students has always been a deadly sin in academia. And this appears to be a case of someone trying to argue that, while he slept with his student, she wasn't really his student at the time. That's a difficult argument to make.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure not speculating about someone’s motives (and indeed not even identifying them) in some piece of Internet criticism is different than sentencing them without due process...
In contrast he got paid to do nothing for 14 months. He painted things as Kafka-esque, but for a typical worker it would be a huge improvement over arbitrary firing for any reason.
Maybe we should have more due process for losing your job, but his situation is so much better than what the vast majority are at risk of, in terms of protections, that it should be near the lowest priority to worry about.
He's missing the obvious "systems" answer -- the current culture is to investigate every suspicion, and human nature is to suspect that where is smoke there is fire. The drastically lower bar for investigation -- fine on its own, but then combined with the assumption that accusations likely have some merit (even if they are merely notifications, not accusations!), leads to "guilt by slippery slope".
It's the same thing that happens with "mandatory reporting" for child abuse, and the same thing that BLM and similar complain about with overstrict policing.
The private machinations of rationally acting rational actors acting in accordance with the terms of their voluntary associations seems to be something that quillette would support.
For example, they wouldn't support the assertion that a manager at McDonalds conduct a trial where evidence, chain of custody, jurisprudence, and counsel for the defendant be guaranteed before firing an employee.
In fact I bet they have published numerous pieces asserting the exact opposite, consistently, in the past.
But here we are, criticizing a university for firing an employee.
I guess their internal logic is not consistent and freedom only apply to job creators, and not "THE LEFTIST ACADEMIC ELITE".
If there is an inconsistency, it’s that the folks who love reducing everything to power dynamics are somehow not analyzing this as a clear-cut case of powerful university administrators abusing their considerable power over an employee. I mean, the provost made the unprecedented move of prosecuting a case that her underlings were adjudicating and flouted the requirement that she present her argument a week in advance. The author provided lots and lots of verifiable supporting evidence.
The majority of people in the market the university cares about think that professors who bang their subordinates should be railroaded out the institution.
The power dynamics bit is the best part. The voluntary collective of rational actors known as "the university" can choose to ignore violations of unjust policies (the absolute authority given the assent of the managed) the same way jurors can choose to ignore violations of the law though jury nullification.
Freedom includes the freedom to bend the rules and have an arbitrary and subjective number of people nod in agreement, thus making it "Okay", no?
If the above statement is not true, then literally, in the literal dictionary definition of the the word "literal" every single aspect of society will have to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up.
Should parents who take tax deductions (PuBLiC FuNdInG) for children perform an Oxford-style debate to discuss the merits whenever they tell their kids to brush their teeth and go to bed?
If the government gives you money, it is yours. No strings attached that you didn't agree to before receiving the money.
The government has two options, give money with no strings attached to consumers and let the market work, or give money to institutions with conditions.
Clearly universities are not consumers, but institutions, so your silly analogy breaks very quickly.
So this seems like a situation where there is a vested interest in conducting lots of these investigations.
Due process doesn't mean running a trial or decision-making process in the particular way that US courts do, rather it means running such a process in some fashion that is consistent and reasonable. Personally, I believe that it is extremely important to maintain due process in our trials and procedures.
In this case the author fundamentally has two complaints. The first complaint is that when he was accused of a Title IX violation, the procedure was so unreasonable and so biased against the defendant that winning cost him $27,000 and an entire year of no contact with his university and no response to the charges (thus destroying his reputation). The second complaint is that he was slated to receive an extremely harsh punishment (loss of tenure and being fired) for what he considers a rather minor violation (having a consensual relationship with a former student who was technically still associated with the university). All told, I agree: the ultimate outcome (him resigning) may be reasonable, but the process for reaching it clearly was not.
It's sad that officials in the Dept of Education can put in place such an egregious system, which is literally designed to infringe on people's rights, and not face any consequences. Like so many things at that level, there are expectations for officials to act properly and protect our rights, but when they don't, there is no specified punishment.
The idea of a bureaucracy like university administration controlling the love life of the professors is ridiculous IMO.
The so-called sex-negative feminism that forms the ideological bed for most of it, is in it’s heart very puritanical
Here is a list, mostly of such stories: https://reason.com/tag/title-ix/. A common theme is consensual drunken sex in which one party expresses regret at some later time and reports the other party. Title IX defines “consent” such that drunken sex cannot be “consensual”—drunken sex is rape per Title IX guidelines. If this sounds dramatic, please give that link a read; this is the most charitable interpretation.
The interesting thing about this “drunken sex is rape” interpretation is that logically it would imply that if both parties were drunk, then they’ve raped each other. Of course this is ridiculous, so universities either decide that the man is guilty (presumably in a “Believe all women” sort of way) which is ironic in that Title IX ostensibly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Another way in which universities resolve this dilemma is by assuming the first to report is the victim and the other party is the rapist. There are probably other universities who elect not to address the dilemma at all and are happy with the mutual rape interpretation.
In all cases, this seems per puritanical to me.
EDIT: I forgot my favorite example—the Northwestern University feminist professor whose Title IX criticism was deemed to be a Title IX violation. Criticizing Title IX is a violation of Title IX, but you still have a swath of people arguing that Title IX is a Very Fine Law (indeed the law is fine; the guidelines are problematic).