Stanford law professor Peter Berkowitz describes where political correctness has brought our campuses in America – an unconstitutional and “illiberal fantasy world” in which policies for handling allegations of sexual assault “harms women as well as men”.
What comes across in his article is that academia is building a liberal ‘shadow government’ which takes to itself the role of investigation, prosecution and punishment, but without authorities nor constitutional checks and balances. Is College Park immune? No. All undergraduates this year are required to take and pass an on-line sexual assault training course which teaches that the first step in responding to an assault is not to call 911 or contact police, but contact the appropriate campus office to enable them to take up their extra-legal processes.
The commentary from Berkowitz is especially striking in that it posts at the same time that the debunked one-in-five statistic – the much-cited number of women sexually assault on college campuses – is called out as obviously incorrect: “The rise and fall of the distractingly false claim that “one in five women is sexually assaulted in college” is the biggest math story of the year.”
We will be waiting to see what update to campus training is issued.