When a confession misses the point

Fascinating in a horror movie sort of way.  From ‘How Much Damage Have My Colleagues and I Done?’ A former dean of students loses faith in how colleges handle sexual assault by Lee Burdette Williams. 

Williams cannot help but overdramatize her role as a Dean of Students as well as make herself the center of the story.  She is pleading for sympathy for her moral anguish when she is the very author of that anguish.

The challenge is how universities deal with the issue of sexual assault.  Years ago, it was largely swept under the rug.  Then the norms of civil society took over.  Sexual assault is a crime and crimes should be investigated.  But that calls for equality before the law, due process, evidence, etc.

It is simply a harsh reality that sexual intimacy - consenting, emotionally coerced, or physically coerced - is difficult to document and prove.  Applying the law to sexual assault cases on campus is the right thing to do but results in few convictions.  Or fewer than many would desire.  

It is fair in the sense that it treats citizens equally, holds people accountable for their actions, and ensures due process for both the accuser and the accused.  But . . . the outcomes are asymmetric because the crime is fraught with ambiguity and emotional anguish.  It is not uncommon, and often is true, that the process is the punishment, for the accuser as much as for the accused.

So it is a real issue of how to both render impartial justice when faced with the reality that many cases cannot be prosecuted.

Under the aegis of third-wave feminism, many/most universities have jettisoned liberal values - no right to trial by jury, no representation for the accused, no due process, hear-say evidence, no right to know the charges, etc.  That increases the number of accused found guilty and punished, it increases the number of falsely accused found guilty and punished and it increases the number of financial settlements universities have to make to the accused for failing to render impartial judgments.

And Williams was one of those administrators who gave up all the constraints and checks and balances of the Classical Liberal ideal and simply facilitated mob justice.  She doesn't put it quite that way, but close.

She wants redemption for having walked away from being a Dean of Students but her self-focus and her apparent unawareness of the underlying principles she has trod underfoot makes it difficult to empathize. 

Reading this article is rather repulsive but it is an important insight into the mind of those administrators guided by the ebbs and flows of their profession, unmoored to any bedrock principles.  It destroys lives and her regret for being an enabler rare.  But the real issue is not regret but fixing the problem.  The article has nothing to say about that.  Only about her moral anguish.