The Atlantic interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, & Consent on Campus, about assault on campus and changing Title IX standards. “It’s not as simple as DeVos is portraying it,” Grigoriadis said. “I do understand that we are not a fascist country and we don’t want to punish the innocent—that we would rather 100 guilty people go free than punish one innocent person—but again, tell me what the better system is.”
In a Washington Post op-ed, Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth writes that in the face of impending changes to Title IX policies, colleges “must calibrate campus disciplinary proceedings so as to protect the innocent. But we must also resist the urge to turn back the clock to a time when those who were raped were greeted with mistrust and worse.”
In an op-ed for The Diamondback, University of Maryland sophomore Caitlin McCann writes that DeVos is right that Obama’s Title IX guidelines need revision. “At first glance, her remarks seem like an obvious rebuke to the progressive stance the Obama administration took on campus sexual assault prevention,” she writes. “However, her speech isn’t yet cause for concern, and may even improve the handling of sexual assault and misconduct cases on campuses.”
WBUR’s Radio Boston hosted a conversation between Lee Burdette Williams, former dean of students at Wheaton College and Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, about the potential changes to campus sexual assault policies.
A report by Kansas University’s Gender Equity Committee recommended several changes to school policy regarding gender, including better education on and definitions of sexual violence. It also found that female faculty leave jobs at the school more than twice as often as their male counterparts.
In a New York Times op-ed, Nicole Bedera and Miriam Gleckman-Krut, campus sexual violence researchers and Ph.D. candidates in sociology at the University of Michigan, ask the question: “who gets to define rape?” They argue that “accused men’s pain does not excuse rape, and men shouldn’t be the ones defining it.”